A life more ordinary.

Thanks to this post I finally (nearly one year!!) managed to get my HP Photosmart 4780 printing properly over wireless.

The symptom is that the printing is ridiculously slow, sometimes fails, and sometimes prints a bit of the output.

The solution is to use the HP Photosmart 2700 driver instead of the 4700 driver.

Open the print queue, choose Printer Setup, Driver, Print Using, Select Printer Software, search for 2700 and select the HP Photosmart 2700.  Voila!  Super fast wireless printing as it was supposed to be.

Update for Lion – be careful; so far I’m back to having problems with either driver.  HP recommends using Apple Software Update to install the correct driver.  Am testing it now.

Spot the difference

What is it that drives someone to stand in line for three hours just for the privilege of spending $800 on something they don’t even need? Consumer society, anyone?

Anyhooo… After parting with said $800 I got my hands on a shiny new 64GB black iPad2 with an orange Apple Smart Cover.   After a brief detour for dinner on the way home I spent the remainder of the evening backing up iPad1 and restoring its contents to iPad2. After a very brief play with it last night, this morning I’ve started to dig around and see whether it really is any different.

Upgrading via iTunes: the process was relatively painless – backed up my iPad, plugged in and registered the iPad2, restored everything (slowwwww) and off we go. A few niggles – I had to re-enter all my email passwords (I have seven email accounts), and verify my credit card details for the Apple Store, AND re-enter all my account info for the various Twitter, Facebook etc apps. But overall was an easy process and everything went smoothly.

And 64GB is a lot more space than 16GB (yes, I know, 48GB) so I can finally have iTunes sync all the video podcasts and pictures that I want.

Camera: to quote Sebastian Page “Wow. The cameras on the iPad2 are really shit.” Yup. Really. The front camera has truly awful low light performance – trying to use it for FaceTime was not a good experience. The other tidbit is that the rear camera saves stills with less than 1 megapixel resolution. Welcome to 1996.

Weight: A year ago I wrote that iPad1 felt heavier than expected. iPad2 is 0.2lb lighter than iPad. It feels considerably lighter, but I think that my brain is being tricked by it being thinner and hence expecting it to be lighter. And it really is very noticeably thinner. The iFixit teardown says that this has been partly accomplished by reducing the thickness of the glass itself – only time will tell if this makes the iPad2 more susceptible to damage.

Screen: the screen looks very similar to iPad1. It should – it has the same resolution. Engadget has reported light bleeding from the side of the screen, and the poll on the site shows and many as 20% of other people have too! This is BAD. So far I haven’t noticed any problem with mine.

Performance: the iPad2 is noticeably faster, in some cases dramatically so.  Infinity Blade is still one of my favourite games. It loads A LOT faster, and responds much faster. I lost many matches on iPad because the touch interface wouldn’t respond fast enough. Not so on iPad2. It kept up easily. Bring on the monsters!

Smart Cover: Again to quote Sebastian Page “the smart cover is smart enough to protect the back, but not the front; I’m returning it tomorrow”. The cover is OK, and the magnetic attachment is really clever, but I think I’m going to switch to the MacAlly Bookstand 2BL cover when it comes out at the end of April. The MacAlly cover for my iPad1 has been great, and with the new one costing $29 (versus Apple’s $39/$59) it is a bargain.

Update:

FaceTime: just tried FaceTime for the first time with my cousin Jim and it works great.  The larger screen size really helps compared to the iPhone 4.

Overall: initial reactions are good but not great. Definitely feels much lighter and thinner; definitely faster and more responsive. The cameras I can take or leave.   If I hadn’t upgraded from 16 to 64GB I don’t think it would have been worth the money, but as it is I’m very pleased to have the iPad2, and I think Linda is going to love the iPad1.

p.s. Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the launch day nearly a year ago.  Judging by the line at the Apple Store in Boca Raton yesterday, I’ve got to believe they’ve beaten that number hands down this time around.

So…for the last couple of years I’ve been trying to figure out what my next car is going to be.

When I moved to the US in late 2005 I managed to pick up one of the first (i.e. used) new model Range Rovers at a pretty reasonable price.  I figured what with all the snow and the rugged terrain here in South Florida the four wheel drive and off road capabilities would be really be worthwhile having. OK, not really.  I’d wanted a Range Rover since I was a kid, and since Mr Clarkson had passed judgment that yes, finally, the L322 variant of the venerable beast wouldn’t fall apart before you got it home from the dealer it almost made sense to get one.  When I found out that despite being built in the UK they were cheaper to buy in the US than back home it sealed the deal.

So for the last five years I’ve been the proud owner of a Range Rover HSE.  Prior to that I’d been lucky enough to own some other great cars – the BMW 528, Lotus Elise 111S, Lotus Elan SE – and a few pokey ones too.  Combine that with a series of Japanese super bikes – CBR 600 (twice!), VFR 750 – and you’ll understand that I’m not in the hunt for the typical run-of-the-mill sedan/saloon.

I’ve also felt ever slightly so guilty about the 15 mpg (US) that the Range delivers.  The wallet doesn’t suffer too badly because of the ridiculously low price of fuel over here, but during the five years that I’ve owner the car (or ‘truck’ as the natives like to call it), Mr Gore’s Inconvenient Truth has stirred things up a bit.  When I bought the Range Rover, the US was in orgasmic delight over the ludicrousness that is the Hummer.  Whilst a few small cars were beginning to appear, ‘gas’ was still $2.20 a gallon and was being consumed with scant regard for, well, anything really.

When gas hit $4.00 a gallon something happened to the US collective consciousness.  Despite the fact it was still half the price of petrol in the UK some unknown mental barrier had been crossed, and the US woke up to the fact that engines didn’t need to be 400 cubic inches and V12 to generate modest amounts of power, and that cars didn’t need to be the size of Sherman tanks to be safe.  Almost over night Hummers fell out of favour, and Chevrolet was on its way to producing the Volt, and Nissan the Leaf.  Prius owners were no longer seen as some weird Californians sub-class.

And that brings us back to the Range Rover.  I love it.  It is delightful to drive, has a commanding view of the road, looks great, is utterly capable in the monsoon rain we get down here in the tropics and is just so…British!

What, then, to replace it with?  The current crop of Audis, BMWs and Mercedes are OK, but they don’t ignite any real emotion.  The Japanese and Korean alternatives do little to stir the soul.  ‘Yank Tanks’ – those big, ugly Escalades and Yukons are a definite no-no. The Porsche Cayenne was interesting a few years ago, but not after owning a Range Rover.  I’d had sports cars and would consider one again but the traffic light-laden grids of Broward County don’t quite compare to the sweeping country roads of Northern England when it comes to an adrenaline rush.

I must admit that I do like a bit of comfort when it comes to driving (or the absolute opposite – I considered an Ariel Atom at one point).  I’d love to own a Bentley or an Aston Martin, but they are way out of my price league.  I’m drawn to the Lexus sedans; not the most exciting cars in the world, but they exude quality – a very British facet of live (or so I like to think).  But then we got one for my wife and although I love it (and her!) it just felt like I had to have something different.

So the requirements are:

• sporty (great acceleration and handling)
• luxurious
• lots of toys
• economical
• beautiful
• don’t need to sell the kids into slavery to buy one
• different

Wow.  Tough list.  Gallardo, Audi R8, DB9 – beautiful, but way too expensive and thirsty. Atom – luxurious? No. Another Range Rover? Not different, and definitely thirsty. Jaguar XF?  Maybe, but its a Jag.

But…what about a Tesla?  Being an ex-Elise owner I knew all about the Tesla Roadster.  Economical? Beautiful?  Different?  Definitely.  Sporty? Absolutely.  0-60 in 3.7 sec.  That’s just crazy.  But so is the price.  $109k for the base model; Nigh on $150k for the tricked out Sport version.  But… it is a green as you get and definitely up for consideration if it weren’t for the price.

And then I saw the Tesla Model S.  Wow.  And Wow again.  Gorgeous.  Luxurious.  0-60 in 5.9 sec.  17″ touch screen.  300 miles on a charge.  Definitely different.  And the price?  $49k for the base model.  $49k.  Seriously?  Now I’m sure that fully configured and in the 300 mile configuration it is going to be quite a bit more than that, but still…

So I put down a deposit earlier this week.  Fully refundable no less!  I don’t have my number in the queue yet, but I should have it tomorrow.  Not quite sure of the delivery time, but they should have demo cars around fall 2011 and production cars available around mid 2012.  My car should ship around two years from now.  Patience, patience.

And in case you’ve never seen the Tesla S, here it is…

Like many business people I use Microsoft Outlook.  In fact I’ve been using Outlook for a very long time – since before Outlook was Outlook and it was just called Microsoft Mail.  I’m also a bit of a hoarder.  As a consequence, I now have well over 80,000 emails.  I know, sad isn’t it?

Because of the size limitations of the old ‘PST’ format under Office 2003, those emails are spread across 10 different PST files.  And to help me find those emails (otherwise why file them in the first place), I have a fairly complex set of folders and sub folders.  3,500 of them.

I therefore have all kinds of problems trying to find emails (but that is for another post).  With that many folders I have problems filing messages in the first place.

I’m not sure if you’ve used Outlook’s filing capabilities very much, but they leave a lot to be desired.  Basically you can move a message to a folder or copy it there.  In either case you need to manually navigate to the destination folder.  Even with Outlook 2010′s improvements the process is still very cumbersome.

That is where ‘SimplyFile‘ comes in.  There’s a little company called TechHit based out of San Francisco that I came across a couple of years ago that develops cool add-ins for Outlook.  My favourite is SimplyFile, but TwinBox (which routes your Twitter feed to one or more Outlook folders) is also great.

SimplyFile allows ‘one click’ (literally!) filing of email messages.  It either learns or you train it where you file messages.  As time goes on it gets smarter and smarter to the extent that (in my case) over 90% of the time it knows exactly which one of my 3,500 folders I want to file something in.  In the example to the right it is suggesting a folder called ‘FY10 Investment Plan.  I can accept the suggestion and just push the button, or I can choose from a list of five suggestions (which moves the probability to about 98%), or I can select any file using autosuggest as I type the folder name.

It will also let me file all the messages in the thread with a single click, or create an appointment from the message.  If I need to go to one of the 3,500 folders I can do that too: I start typing the name and it autosuggests the folder.

Version 3.0 has just been released and includes enhanced support for the Ribbon on Outlook 2010.

At $49.95 it isn’t cheap, but it is worth it.  You can download a free 30 day trial here and I’ll guarantee that once you’ve used it for a couple of weeks there’ll be no going back.

Harold Jarche (@hjarche) recently wrote a blog post that contains a number of items I profoundly disagree with, so much so that it’s time for a new blog post from me.  I actually agree with many of his conclusions; unfortunately the road Harold takes to get there is filled with potholes.

Starting from the top, those potholes are:

1. 80% of learning on the job is informal;
2. individual learning in organizations is irrelevant;
3. learner-centric learning objectives are not justifiable

I’ll take items two and three first, because the 80:20 ‘pothole’ is more of a bottomless pit and I’ll devote the bulk of this post to it.

Let’s start with: “individual learning in organizations is irrelevant”,  the argument being that work is done by teams and networks, therefore the individual is less/not important.  Whilst I absolutely support the implication in Harold’s post that context crucial and that none of us exist in a vacuum, I am reminded of one of my favourite quotes (if only I could remember who said it!) “Without people, companies are just depreciating assets”.  Organizations don’t learn (sorry Mr. Senge).  Teams don’t learn.  Networks don’t learn.  People learn.  People can learn to perform (better) in organizational, network or team contexts; they can even learn in teams, but organizations and teams don’t learn. (we could go off and discuss whether processes and/or culture count as organizational memory, but in both cases they are either created or instantiated by people.  Individual learning is it.  But context is crucial.

Next one: “learner-centric learning objectives are not justifiable”. Harold argues that learning objectives should be crafted as “the organization will be able to …”, not “the learner will be able to …”.  Again, organizations don’t do things. People do.  The role of the corporate learning organization is to develop human capability to execute business strategy.  A key skill of the members of the training team is therefore to work with business leaders to translate company goals and strategies into objectives that can be achieved via learning.  The goal of a learning program should be to “enable [employees/partners/customers...] to achieve [company objective].  Learning objectives should support the program goal.

Finally, let’s talk about the 80% thing (alternatively stated as the 70:20:10 rule – 70% of learning is informal/experiential, 20% comes from mentoring/feedback, and only 10% comes from formal learning).  The implication that often follows references to 70:20:10 is that we are wasting resources on formal training, and that social collaboration/informal learning is some sort of nirvana.

I really don’t want to target Harold for this one.  He’s simply repeating what many others have said before him.  The 70:20:10 mantra has reached almost hysterical levels in corporate learning circles.

But all is not what it seems.

I recently had the privilege to spend a few days at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania with a number of academics and a hundred or so senior corporate learning folks like me.  We were attending the 2010 Global Leadership Congress organized by the Corporate University Exchange. (Great event, by the way.  Thanks Alan and team!)  Both prior to and during the event I spent time with Dr Doug Lynch. Doug opened my eyes about a few things, but most notably about 70:20:10.

Doug asked a couple of simple questions: (a) is 70:20:10 true, and (b) if so how do we know?  Everyone in the learning space seems to assume (a) is true, but we all get a bit vague about (b).  The answer to (b) is almost always “because I read it in ____ (insert your favourite training magazine title here)”.  Doug therefore set his post-grad students a simple challenge: find the source of the 70:20:10 concept.  The results are at best worrying and at worst frightening.  The following is taken from information presented by Doug at the event):

• If you google “70:20:10″ you get 2.25m hits.  That’s right, 2.25m.  Hits are split between the education model, and the business resource management model of the same name
• “Informal learning” gets you 402,000 hits, as of the time of writing this post.
• 70:20:10 was the subject of the 2009 ASTD study, “Tapping the Potential of Informal Learning” (exec summary PDF here)
• There is even a Wikipedia article
• Informal learning has been covered in just about every training publication and in the mainstream media, including the Harvard Business Review

The problem is that almost no-one, including the Wikipedia article and HRB cites the original research for 70:20:10 applied to education.

So what does the research have to say on 70:20:10?

• If you step away from the mainstream, you get 46,800 hits with in Google Scholar
• If you drill down to what might be called ‘authoritative sources’, things get a little narrower.  There are a grand total of 46 EBSCO (Peer reviewed) Articles
• If you examine the peer reviewed articles, there is not one single empirical study that validates 70:20:10

That’s right.  Not one. (I hope someone out there can prove me – or rather Doug – wrong on this one)

70:20:10 was never researched; it was conceptualized by Tough in 1968 and put forward as a hypothesis.

Think about it.  All of that wild hysteria that has built up around social learning and collaboration?  All that time and dollars/pounds/euros you are spending on collaboration systems?  Built on a house of cards.  Er. Um.  Time for a headache pill.

Please don’t get me wrong.  I’m as big a supporter of collaborative and experiential learning and the use of social media and web 2.0 tools and techniques for learning as the next person, if not more so.

My engineering background would just like things to be on a bit firmer footing.  Any Academics out there up for a challenge?