I’m trying so hard to get through my client’s project. I want to finish BLInk!. I now have 4 conferences (which is 3 separate talks) to prepare for (EdgeEast, DevDays in Boston, DevDays in Connecticut and DevTeach), a review of some bits that I’ve been asked to do, want to play with Whidbey, have not even had a chance to touch LongHorn (et alia), Reporting Services, Yukon and somewhere in there I’d like to have a life. How do you folks all do it? My friend Ali keeps telling me to sleep less, and I keep reminding him that I’m not 21 anymore and just can’t physically do that.
Daily Archives: January 2, 2004
Dinner with a non-geek tablet user
I had dinner (oh wait, ala Scoble, a lovely dinner, a memorable dinner…) with a friend who is the Dean of the Business School at University of Vermont. She now uses a Tablet PC exclusively and loves it. Although I wouldn’t call it “standardizing“ , she indicated that they are going to get a number of tablets in the near future. I was fascinated by this, of course.
I asked her WHY??? Why do you love using the tablet so much? Her response was that she is much more used to writing by hand than typing. An interesting slant for someone like me who types – who knows… 100 words a minute or something insane like that and can’t write for beans anymore with a pen or pencil. I asked her what software she would like to see for the tablet. She pointed to Word, Outlook and Excel, then to the Pen Input Panel. “What more do I need than this?”
This just makes me laugh! I sure hope the marketing people over in the Tablet area read this!
She also sent me home with one of the best loaves of homemade bread I have had in a long time (that she had made). A woman who definitely uses many sides of her brain.
The Weight of your Words
Shelley Powers is in a quandry that comes from becoming what is oft-referred to as an “A-List” blogger. She has definitely risen to the top of the pool of a gazillion bloggers because she has a strong, intelligent and fascinating voice. However, that voice carries a lot of weight and Shelley is now pondering the effects of that. My reading of her post is that she is afraid of getting into a position of having to watch what she says and/or how she says it because her words are not taken lightly. The beauty of Shelley’s writing is that she is wide open. She now views that as a potential problem, but wonders if, for her, there is a point in writing if she has to edit herself.
I have edited this post as I have written it. I do not want to misrepresent Shelley or my high esteem of her by any possible mis-phrasing of my words. Luckily Shelley knows (has learned) that I’m a pussy and that I always mean well in my Pollyanna ways. But this is exactly what I think is distressing her – that she is almost feared, and that no matter what she says, people will read it with pre-conceptions. But, just like Sears software (eek what a geeky typo!) softer side to Shelley – she is a very sensitive and creative person and doesn’t want to be thought of as just a thick-skinned tough woman.
But it is because of Shelley that I would even dare to write a post like this. It is why I moved away from the dotnetweblogs so I could feel free to write a little “outside” if the mood struck me. It took a long time to get comfortable with writing technical posts (and exposing possible complete stupidity). It takes nothing to write about how pretty Vermont is or how much I love my dog. But just plain old writing what I think and what I feel is probably the scariest. And I can easily credit Shelley for giving me the inkling to do so in my own way.
It is fascinating to me that through blogging, we have the potential to expose ourselves so much and because of the nature of blogs, it’s hard to erase our little exposes (that is supposed to have little accent over the 2nd “e“).
I certainly would like to spend another hour at least revising this post to make sure I am not misunderstood in any way shape or form – but I’ve got work to do!