At work our office is in an open working environment where all the worker bees sit in  these  nice built-in cubicles which are larger than some offices I’ve had in the past.  In the cubicles besides  the web team members there are some other graphic designers,  writers, photographers, videographers from our creative services department. One downside to these cubicles is every couple of weeks I get a message from someone that the web team is being too loud and interfering with others work or that  it looks like the web team just socializes all the time and doesn’t do any work. Unfortunately, I have to explain that working with technology, working online requires collaboration among workers across disciplines to do our best work.  In fact a recent study pointed to collaboration being one of the top six attributes of high-ranking women in technology.

A collaborative work style is perceived as a critical success factor in high-technology by both technical men and women, and is consistent with a culture that values innovation, which cannot be achieved without extensive collaboration. Collaboration is both a critical source of success but also a great source of career satisfaction.

Collaboration = Socializing = Loudness = Innovation =  Satisfaction

Flash content is an important part of the overall mix of web content and has a steeper learning curve than most other kinds of web content creation. Unfortunately, Macromedia and now Adobe have changed the flash creation process/interface so often that if you once learned flash it’s like you’re starting all over again if you pick up a newer version of Adobe Flash.  I first learned flash in 1999-2000 creating some audio slideshows and calculators, but I had to learn it again 2003 for a couple of prjects and after that I just gave up because I didn’t want to go through the process of teaching myself flash again.

Mindy McAdams author of admittedly outdated textbook, Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages, now recommends learning flash using Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book. In fact she has even created a nice little guide to everything you should know to create great flash content outlining the six things she thinks you need to know (and the chapter’s they’re covered in the Adobe book) and two common misconceptions about flash.

Her six items you need to know are

1. Buttons
2. Loading external content
3. Optimizing images
4. Loading and controlling audio
5. Loading and controlling video
6. Actionscript 3 and XML
7. Bandwidth profiling

Now, I have to decide if I really want to tackle Flash again.

In the United States one out of every four pageviews is from Facebook. Amazing! Google only accounts for one in eight page views (15 percent).

The visual voicemail on my iPhone quit working about a month ago (I won’t say what caused it), but I called AT&T today to see if they could help me get it working again after missing a couple of voicemails.

Surprisingly, I didn’t have to hold for an operator at all, but the operator I got had me on hold several times as she tried to figure out my phone’s problem. After trying several different network changes on the AT&T side and several changes on my phone over the course of an hour, the support tech finally gave up and suggested I needed to reinstall the Surprisingly, I didn’t have to hold for an operator at all, but the operator I got had me on hold several times as she tried to figure out my phone’s problem. After trying several different network changes on the AT&T side and several changes on my phone over the course of an hour, the support tech finally gave up and suggested I needed to reinstall the iPhone OS and offered to connect me with an Apple support tech to help me out. I declined the Apple help and told her I could handle the reinstall myself. Before I hung up on her I she made an appointment to call me back the next morning to see if my voicemail was working correctly.

After I got off the phone, I turned to my trusty support database, google, and queried, “visual voicemail broken iphone” and on the second page, two minutes into my search, I found my solution– reset the network settings under Settings > General > Reset Network Settings. My phone restarted and I immediately got two visual voicemails– Problem fixed!

I thought I already knew this lesson, but I guess I learned it again– Google your problem before calling for support and more than likely you’ll find the answer your need. Now, I get to to explain to the AT&T tech how easy it was to solve the problem.

A fifth of American’s don’t have Internet access and the demographic profile of those without access — generally older and less educated — match up to those who are the newly unemployed according to an MSNBC article published today.

This digital divide separates not only who qualify for jobs and who does not, but also who can apply for jobs and who cannot as many company’s application systems require you to fill out an online form and submit a resume in an electronic format.  Even what many would consider a simple task such as sending an email with a resume attached confound the newly unemployed. Forget about asking someone to use a computer to manipulate a spreadsheet or create a presentation.

Did these people loose their jobs because of their lack of computer skills? Probably not outright, but being able to complete everyday computer tasks probably would have made them more valuable to their former employers. Maybe a some of these stimulus/recovery funds still floating around should be spent on computer and Internet classes for the newly unemployed.

I keep switching computers around at work and at home– just jumping from one computer to another to try something different out- and I have come up with a list of tools that I always install first thing when I take a new windows computer to use.  I’ve done this so much lately, that I’ve put all of these tools on my usb drive that I keep on my key ring (isn’t that a geeky thing to have?).

• Firefox - an extensible browser that renders appropriately
  
• Filezilla – easy to use ftp client
  
• Notepad ++ – small text file editor
  
• VLC - media player that will play almost any video or audio file
  

When I take on a new Mac or Linux machine I still use Firefox and Filezilla, but have a different text editor.

I also have a set of extensions that I always install in Firefox the first time I use it.

• Xmarks (was foxmarks) – a bookmarks synchronizer (I don’t use the password sync feature)
• Firebug – a quick html/css inspector
  
• Screengrab! – take a quick screenshot and save it or paste it.
• Measureit – answers how long or deep is that image?
  

I have a lot of others that I eventually end up installing when I need them, but these are normally the first four.

So what tools do you always use?

The Arkansas legislature convened yesterday and it’s apparent the digital revolution is chasing them down at full speed.  Last time around you could tune into the Arkansas Times Arkansas Blog for an overview or Steve Harrellson’s Under the Dome for the details, but you only got their distinct opinion on things.

This year we have my brother-in-law’s Tolbert Report with his ubiquitous flip camera and house speaker Robbie Will’s new blog also keeping us informed on what is going down at the Capitol. I can promise you the Tolbert Report will have a slightly different take on the legislature’s actions than the rest of the pack, but I am wondering if Robbie Will’s will have the stamina to keep up with all the duties of being Speaker and keeping the blog up to date and responding to comments and questions from the blog (it’s fun reading about his struggles with technology).

It’s also interesting to see how the Arkansas legislature agenda compares to other states. The National Conference of State Legislatures has released their  top nine issues of 2009.

Gizmodo: Check out how the yellow line appears on your TV screen when you watch that bowl game. It’s complicated cool.

Some Sun engineers ran some tests to determine if yelling at your computer actually helped or hurt and discovered that yelling at your computer actually slows down the hard drive and slows down your computer.

I guess that means that my infrequent outbursts actually slowed down my compute rmore. I wonder what talking to my computer sweetly and bringing it flowers and chocolate will do?

I’ve pretty much had every kind of phone, internet, tv connection (cable, wireless, no phone, tivo, dsl) that you could name, but in Little Rock I found a new one to try– AT&T U-verse- that had a really long, but still user-friendly sign-up process (although this post focuses on getting the moving and getting it signed up, I’ll review U-verse later). U-verse covers our home phone, Internet and TV connections so this is one post for them all. U-verse has the best online sign-up process so far and left me no doubt that I was sign-up for exactly the services that I wanted.

When you first visit the U-verse web site, you are hit with all of their promotions explaining what it is, how it works and how much it could cost you. Since I wasn’t quite sure what U-verse is, this was a good thing for me. After entering my zip code to make sure I got the right information, their site had a couple of good videos that didn’t contain too much marketing that explained U-verse to me and sold me it was something that I wanted to try.

After I decided U-verse was something that I wanted to sign-up for I had to decide what packages I wanted. Each package has a different discount type and a different array of services and channels. This sounds complicated, but the site had a nice matrix to explain the differences which made it easier to visually see the differences and choose the package I wanted. After choosing the package, I had to enter my address to make sure the services I chose were available to me and then it was off to the races telling them every detail about my life so they would connect me online.  Although they required a lot of information, the form fields were easy to jump too, had the appropriate input masks and gave me a nice little bread crumb trail letting me know where I was in the registration process and how much I had to go. At the end of the sign-up, the site showed me my installation charges (waived) and my monthly fees and then gave me a calendar of the available installation slots (which takes four to six hours) in my neighborhood and surprisingly I had an opening for the afternoon of my move-in day a week later which I selected.

The AT&T installer showed up at my house right as the movers left. He took note of lines where I asked him to run lines for our TVs and wired computer and figured out how to get the lines where we wanted them even though half of the locations haven’t ever been wired before.  Three and half hours later everything was installed and working– although this did seem lengthy to me at first the installer was busy the whole time and had to work at the central phone box in our neighborhood, our main phone box on the back of our house, on each of the TV, phone and computer locations in the house- so the time adds up. The installer gave me a quick overview of  how it works and figured out I knew what I was doing and left so I could play with it all my self (which is the way I like it).  He even gave me his own cell phone number before he left so I could call him if I have any troubles.

Overall I would give the online sign-up and installation an 8.5. I only knock them because the amount of information they required when the service started and the postcard I got in the mail yesterday informing me the price was going up $6 a month less than a month after I had it installed.  I’m also still waiting on my cash back which takes up to six weeks to process.

This is part of my how moving works online series.