OK, Apple

Just take my money already.

Edit: Update: They took my money. "New iPad" -- I'll just call it iPad 3. 

Win 8 Preview

Microsoft released Win 8 consumer preview last week. I have an old Lenovo X60 tablet at home, a fabulous little tablet even after 5 years, and I loaded the Win 8 preview to check it out.

It is a new paradigm (yes, I used that word!) in the Windows world. It's built to be a tablet OS and it shows - takes a little while getting used to, and unlike several reviewers I did not find the switch to Win 7 interface all that jarring. I quite like Win 8 interface though not so much on a non-touch surface. It really needs a touch screen to shine, but it sure is a refreshing departure.

Microsoft had two approaches, either go step-by-step and take years to move into a very tablet oriented interface, or take a jump and drag people along. They took the latter - betting that in the near future most screen surfaces will be touch surfaces. I think that's the right bet. Enterprises will always take many years before they move, but that's the nature of enterprise computing anyway. My company still runs on Windows XP. My guess is Win 7 will keep business consumers happy for another 3-5 years by which most outsourced equipment providers to enterprises will have begun introducing touch-enabled laptops, paving way for a slow but steady introduction of Win 9 or whatever it is that's running then.

Fresh pair of eyes... your own

Often at work it's easy to miss details when you're staring at the same Excel sheet or Power Point or document (or code) for too long.

We've all seen how effective it can be when you pull someone else to look over your content or just walk through it. You can find errors and often 18pt headline mistakes that you glossed over. But what if no one's around or you don't want to bug someone?

I found a reasonably simple technique that doesn't quite replace another human, but turns out to be pretty good nevertheless. All I do is print the document in PDF (no, not on printer paper) and open the PDF file and go through it. Just the change of look & feel feels like I'm looking at something different, and I almost always find errors I missed the first time.

Try it, might work for you too.


* I don't do that for my blog posts, so don't harangue me for errors in my posts.

There's always that first post

Why this blog?

1. To kill time - I spend time in airports waiting for my planes, most of which are delayed. Writing about a topic that interests me is a good way to spend some of that
2. To have something to look back at a later time and self flagellate - on the lines of "Did I write that? What was I thinking? That makes no sense!"
3. To exercise my writing abilities - you know, sort of to make sure I can write coherent sentences

I have, in the past, maintained a blog. It worked out rather well, and I can look at it and amuse myself. It also had a reasonable number of visitors who found some useful information I shared. That blog, however, had a clear theme. 

This one doesn't.