I was really getting frustrated.  I couldn’t get my laptop to hold a wireless connection with my router, even when sitting six feet away.  I was starting to wonder if they hadn’t somehow integrated the pinch from Oceans 11 into the insulation in my walls.

Well, turns out there are some pretty heavily-traveled WiFi channels in this network.  And my router, set to auto-select was making some pretty bad choices on my behalf.  So, I’ve taken over the play-calling duties when it comes to the router, and low and behold … reliable wireless!

I can only assume there are up to 15 other people around here experiencing the same problem judging by the latest scan.  Here’s hoping they don’t figure it out and start clogging up the other channels.

Picked up a Motorola Droid last week and … I LOVE this phone!  It has been a while since I’ve had one that I could really get along with.  The original Blackjack was probably the last, and before that, in my pre-SmartPhone days, the Chocolate.

Some background:  A while back, I upgraded from the Blackjack to the Motorola Q9h Global.  The Global was a good phone and the reasonably-sized keys addressed my main complaint with the Blackjack.  But then I started to notice that great things were being done with touch-screens.  And, I was having trouble with the Q9h dropping calls.

So, I finally convinced AT&T to let me do an early upgrade and picked up an LG Incite.  Ugh!  Huge mistake.  In theory, the Incite can do a lot of cool stuff.  Unfortunately it doesn’t do it in a very user-friendly way.  The touch-screen was nice when it was in a cooperative mood, but it was often ornery.  Many a time I missed having a physical keypad.  I also discovered that dropped call was a network and not a phone issue so I moved my sim card back to the Q9h.

After all that I figured the perfect phone would have robust touch-screen functionality with a slider keypad.  Enter the Droid! 

Here’s what’s good about it:

-  Super-smooth touch-screen mechanics.  Ironically, it is so strong in this area that I rarely slide out the keypad.

-  Not missing Windows Mobile.  I don’t mean it sarcastically, this was one of my concerns.  Would Exchange email setup and work as well as on Windows?  And I do use the mobile Office apps a bit.  Direct Push is working just as smooth as on a Windows phone.  And, I picked up DataViz’s suite which allows working with standard MS Office files.

-  Other apps.  OK, first of all, you could get “apps” for phones long before Steve Jobs started making a big deal out of offering features that by that point in time one should almost have taken for granted in a SmartPhone.  Anyway.  I was able to quickly find low or no-cost apps to do what I wanted, and then some.  For example, I picked up an integrated PDA suite.  The standard apps that came with were ok, but again, not integrated and there was nothing to sync Tasks with Exchange.

-  I’m on Verizon now.  “There’s a map for that” is no joke.  I never realized how crappy AT&T’s network was.  Well, at least the 3G part of it.  With Verizon I’ve now got solid coverage at home and work.

-  Tethering is a snap, and with the improved network quality, it actually is a viable backup.

-  Web-browsing is awesome.  You don’t need to confine yourself to half-baked mobile versions of the sites you visit.

If I could improve things …

-  The keypad.  Rather than individual keys, the Droid features a single membrane over the entire pad.  I would have preferred it the other way, but it helps keep the device thin, which I do appreciate.  Also, even with this format, the home keys are tactiley marked, so typing blind is not a total impossibility.

-  A separate app (it’s free) is required to set reminder and ring tones outside of the collection that the phone comes with.

But, those issues are minor and easily overcome.  The Droid was easy to set up and learn and is a flexible and functional powerhouse.  Basically, it rocks!

P.S.  I’ve also vowed to stick with what works in the future.  I’ve always had good experiences with Motorola and Samsung devices.  And I’ve pretty much been consistently disappointed when straying from those two.  LG is definitely on the Don’t list from now on.

The View from Harvard Business has this shot across the bow of conventional “wisdom”:  Employees who waste company time are more productive.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I dare say, other than … I KNEW it!

… hmmm, how to breach the ramparts of bureaucracy with this flaming arrow of insight …

Keep an eye on #spolt my friends. I feel another explosion coming on.

Oh frabjous day! There is going to be a TV show inspired by Twitter! It is at once an exciting prospect, but also a disappointment that by now we haven’t managed to integrate Twitter into every shadowy corner of our lives. I mean, it’s so awesome, how are we not finding endless uses each day?

Anyway. Twitter’s the thing, so of course, capitalize on it. Whatever. I’ve ignored American Idol all these years, and the various Dancing iterations. I don’t imagine it will be hard to steer clear of this. But, the coverage has me simmering for some more #spolt action.

Now, I generally enjoy reading Baker’s stuff. He’s interesting and often lets his readers see inside his process to watch his work evolve. But he’s also become quite the Twitter dig-it.

Right off the bat he’s providing cover for a potential failure: “OK, chances are that the Twitter-inspired TV show will be a flop. Most shows are.” So if it goes down it’s because most shows fail, and not because Twitter is lame and shallow. Definitely not.

If you follow on to the post that Baker links you will find the ultimate: “Twitter is transforming the way people communicate …” I don’t know who annoys me more. People who say stuff like that, or those who latch onto it like it’s gospel. It’s one of those statements that seems broad and sweeping at first blush. But then you think about it and ask things like, “How?” “Seriously? Are you using the same Twitter that I am?” or “What does that even mean?”

I’ll grant you, there are a lot of people on Twitter yacking, but a random cacaphony certainly doesn’t equate to communication. Re-tweets, article links, preaching to the choir and throwing out stuff that you know in advance no one is going to pay any attention to is not communication. It’s noise.

Later Tweeps!

Quick! What do the LA Lakers, Denver Nuggets, Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic have in common?

If you said they are all in their NBA Conference Championships you would be correct. But, if you said “name four teams who have no apparent desire to reach the NBA Finals,” you would also be correct.

Both series now move to the underdogs’ home court, tied at 1 game apiece, which is fitting given how the games have gone so far. Did all four games hinge on which team had the ball last, or which team had the opportunity to screw up their chances last?

In LA the Nuggets played like these were mid-December regular season games rather than a battle for a spot in the Finals. Yet the Lakers failed to put them away and let each game come down to the wire. This series could well be 2-0 Denver. But it could just as easily be 2-0 LA. We’re kind of waiting for someone to step up and play like they want to win for more than a few minutes each night.

Now, I did think the West would be close and probably a 6 or 7 game series. But I was thinking more along the lines of a clash of titans, rather than a bunch of guys running around checking their watches.

In the East on the other hand I figured Cleveland would roll. If anything they would lose game 1 because they had so much off time. But here again, where are the Cavs who steamrolled through the first two rounds? Granted, the Magic are more formidable than Detroit or Atlanta, but they also came in with no rest, having played 13 games to the Cavs 8 through the first two rounds. If nothing else Cleveland should be able to grind them down.

Nope. Once again, a battle of teams who don’t particularly care to finish things off when they have the chance. Never was this more apparent than in the thrilling conclusion to last night’s game. Orlando came all the way back from a 23 pt deficit, and found themselves with a 2 pt lead and one second left on the clock. You know the rest. A Lebron catch and shoot from behind the arc later, the Cavs found themselves having salvaged a split at home. That’s a split, in front of their own crowd, in a case where they held double-digit leads in both games. As for Orlando, all that work to dig out of a hole and then they allowed a clean inbound pass to James. With one second left you don’t even have to deny him. Just don’t make it easy and you’re going home to work on a sweep.

I had been rooting for Denver and Cleveland, but right now I’m more intent on figuring out if there is a way that no one can win, because so far no one deserves to.

OK, I’m re-doing this one. I had a lot of tired nights this past week, including when I posted. After re-reading it, this post was so not clear.

For my latest trick, I have installed the Windows 7 RC on my two computers.

It started with my desktop. I realized that my XP Pro copy had run out of lives only after attempting to upgrade that machine. For a while I thought I would be faced with the prospect of re-installing every 30 days or picking up a copy of XP. I mainly use my laptop, so I wasn’t real thrilled by investing a lot in the desktop. When I heard that the RC for 7 was out I wasn’t too hopeful. The desktop is 3 1/2 years old and was a little sluggish at times under XP. Two Windows generations later … that poor HP would be overwhelmed, right?

Not at all. It is at least as quick if not quicker under Windows 7. After reading around, the word is that MS did away with a lot of features to streamline performance. And by “features” I mean stuff I don’t use anyway that slowed down my computer. Well, it definitely feels like an entire layer of behind the scenes “gunk” has been lifted. Very crisp on the execution. There are some interface and structure changes that came in with Vista that I’m still getting used to. They are still there in 7 but again, with the performance improvement the learning process isn’t nearly as annoying. Plus, I remember the first time I saw Windows 95 and thought the interface changes were too drastic. I think I’ll get used to this just fine.

Anyway, the desktop was running so well I decided to switch my laptop over. It had Vista which isn’t the bane everyone makes it out to be, but is also not my favorite. By the way, the Mojave commercials were pointless. No one is arguing that Vista doesn’t have the potential to be a good system. But, unless you are planning to ship a living, breathing MS tech with every copy of Vista, how are those spot relevant?

So, the laptop switch over went great, and I am loving Windows 7. Setup was a piece of cake. 7 even handled my Visual Studio .Net 03 install much better. I wound up having to put it on an XP Virtual Machine on Vista. Networking the machines was also a piece of cake. Syncing with my phone was a pain, but that’s been par for the course since the days when Palm owned the mobile device market.

Of course there was one glitch. One trick that I always unwittingly play on myself. After wiping my hard drives and installing Windows 7 I forgot to re-install all my drivers. So, as I excitedly dove right in, one of my first thoughts was, “Man! The graphics options suck!” Oops. On me. Once I got the drivers in, everything was crystal.

So, it appears my machines are good to go for roughly a year.

I caught a break today. The new router that I ordered wasn’t supposed to get here until Monday, which meant another weekend of dealing with my current on again / off again router, which has become much more off again. I really think it would not have survived until Monday. I had pretty much started resorting to the universal troubleshooting method, developed in the vacuum tube television days, of beating on it. It’s really more of a punishment than a repair.

Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek has a new project going: What is a Friend? It is certainly not a new observation that “friend” has lost its cache at the hands of My TwitFace. But, I’ll be following because I usually enjoy Baker’s thoroug and objective treatment of such subjects. Last year when doing a piece about Twitter he didn’t reflexively bow down and begin sucking Scoble’s kneecaps like the rest of the business blogging crowd. Plus, if you follow the guy at BW’s site it is interesting to watch his research and creative processes unfold.

Anyway, lately I can’t seem to put a complete thought together without finding a way to be a smartass in the process. So, my comment was (they moderate, and my comment hasn’t shown up yet, so this isn’t verbatim):

A friend is someone who I couldn’t give a crap about, and exists only to boost my feelings of self worth by making the followers number on my twitter home page larger. I may follow them, if necessary to close the deal and get them to follow me. The thing is, I don’t really care what they have to say, but I imagine that they are hanging on every minute detail of my mundane life.

OK, so it occurs to me that I’m suddenly throwing a bunch tweets out there under #spolt without any kind of linkage to Friday’s post. No doubt many in the twitter-sphere are all atwitter (lol … I slay me) wondering what this “#spolt” is, what it has to do with the PB&J sandwich I ate yesterday, and how they might parlay it into a bunch more people following them.

Well, on the followers, probably not. On the relationship to the PB&J, I’ll just say that you should free your mind and your understanding will follow. That ought to keep ‘em busy.

SPOLT = Steaming Pile of Lame Tweets. At first I was trying for Bunch of Lame Tweets but #BLT and #BOLT were already getting some activity on other fronts. So yeah, #SPOLT it is. Basically it is my quest to throw 100 tweets out there in one week’s time, all of which would elicit from a reasonable person one of three responses: “And?”, “So what?”, or “Who cares?” So basically they are average tweets. My hypothesis is that they will be accepted into the tweetstream without a second notice.

BTW, the tweet linking to this post doesn’t count as one of the hundred.

Very interesting discussion going on over at The View from Harvard Business. The launch point is actually apost on B-School prof Andy McAfee’s blog about an experiment he ran in his classroom. On one day McAfee granted his class an exception to Harvard Business’ policy of not allowing the use of digital devices in class so they could Twitter as they wished. The prof didn’t like how that one turned out:

I want my students to concentrate on the discussion taking place in meatspace, not the ones in cyberspace. I want to be clear: I like twitter a lot and use it a fair bit myself (follow me at @amcafee if you like), but I don’t like it in a classroom when a live discussion is (supposed to be) taking place.

That quote was actually from the original post at McAfee’s blog. View from Harvard has its own coverage of the topic and the comment section is starting to warm up.

Personally, I won’t speak for other disciplines, but simply attending business school is more than an exercise in soaking up wisdom imparted by books and a professor standing in front of the classroom. In B-School you are actually participating in a form of on-the-job training. When you go to class, just as when you go to a meeting, there are expectations. You are expected to prepare ahead of time. You are expected to participate. You are expected to take the information that is imparted on board. And, you are expected to follow up on directives given. So, B-School is a great place to learn to manage internal and external distractions.

Since it is school however, profs and officials need to recognize that sometimes students must be given latitude to make and learn from their own mistakes, and sometimes it is better for those in authority to simply prescribe the right way to go. In this case, judging from what I’ve seen, children of all ages who use Twitter don’t have the capacity to keep this activity in its proper place, and therefore need help in deciding when to put it down.