High School Reunions go High Tech

My wife and I are attending her high school reunion this weekend and while for the most part a reunion is a reunion. People talk about where they live and what they have been doing and of course their kids and now grand-kids. They listen to music, back from their day, as well more current music and dance (or try to dance or try and avoid dancing).

So what does technology have to do with a reunion? Mostly it has to do with how everyone found out about the reunion and keeps up with each other.

In this case Facebook and People Finder, among other tools, were used to search for people from my wife's graduating class. Finding a way to connect with them, after sifting through the false leads, led to many more folks coming back to my wife's home town for reunion then would have happened without these high tech tools.

Now that many of these folks have joined Facebook for this purpose there is on-going communication going on between many of them. This is all good news, but will they stay connected, that is the question that will be interesting for us and Facebook to watch.

One also has to wonder what this connectivity between folks will do to future reunions as much of the draw of reunions is to catch up on what is already being discussed on the Facebook's of the world.

Are you using Facebook or similar tools to connect with your friends, family, classmates and / or customers in an interesting way? Please share with the Technology Plumbing community.

Solar Powered Hand Dryers

First of all I am sure most people don't really care how they dry their hands in a public restroom.

Unfortunately, I am one of the folks who at least thinks about which is better, paper towels or electric hand dryers.

In doing my research, I found I am certainly not the only person who thinks about and asks about this question as there have many people who studied the question and posted a number of articles and studies. The best article I found on the question basically summarizes that overall electric hand dryers are a little better then paper towels and the new high efficiency hand dryers are even better.

The studies I saw also indicated that both were equally effective in terms of hygiene.

So if both are hygienic and the environmental impacts are not significant enough, does it really matter. My perspective is yes it does matter if high efficient hand dryers are better now and new technology keeps making them better for the environment we should encourage this trend.

With that said, we should not only push for more efficient (they become more efficient because they dry your hands faster) hand dryers but push for efficient power sources that run them. If we can move away from coal generated electricity to renewable energy the scales are really tipped. So be on the lookout for the first solar powered hand dryer to appear in a public restroom near you.

Rivers, Lakes and Islands of Information

The good news is we live in an information age, the bad news is all of this information is overwhelming many of us. Mashable has a great article on how to deal with social networking overload and gives very good guidance on how to choose which networks to join and how to divide your social networking lives, but in today's world there is more to life then just social networks.

I look at information as streaming, flowing or relatively static or as:

- Rivers: Tweats, Facebook updates and emails
- Lakes: Blogs
- Islands: Websites

While most data is searchable, the reality is much of it flows past us so fast that if we don't see it when it first comes in, it flows downriver so fast it is gone forever (how many emails did you get today?).

We try and catch what we can and capture it via tags, bookmarks, email and other types of tools and sometimes even we even print them in a vain hope that we can manage the paper we are already drowning in.

Slower moving data like Blogs doesn't require our immediate attention, but blogs come and go and topics hit and miss, so finding the gems in all of this is sometimes like finding a pearl in an oyster ... unless you are reading this blog :)

This brings us to those islands of data, our websites. A company's website is where we need to keep the relatively static data (and e-commerce) that customers come to depend on (try to figure out a stores hours from its twitter feed).

So with all of the focus today on Facebook, Twitter and Blogs (#ftb), it is wise to remember to use these rivers and lakes of information to float people to our websites. In order for this to pay off make sure you keep your focus on building good websites that provide good information, strong content and a great user experience to actually generate revenue for your business.

More Green Ideas

As a follow-on to my Small Green Business posting, the folks at Wisebread have a nice posting on stopping other types of unwanted mail beyond catalogs including credit card applications and sweepstakes entries (trust me, you are not going to win anyway).

Another Single Point of Failure

I have talked before about single points of failure, but I experienced another one recently, when my Internet connection provided by AT&T failed.

It happened early this past Monday morning and so when I woke up to check in on the world and saw all kinds of error message in terms of the many communication tools I use I knew it was bad. I immediately grabbed the phone, since it uses the Vonage VOIP service, and since I was greeted with a recording instead of a dial tone, I knew the Internet connection was down and it wasn't just a problem with the PC I was using.

Heading downstairs to my data closet (yes I have a data closet in my house, more on that in another posting), expecting to see missing or red lights on the AT&T provided DSL modem, but everything looked fine.

As the AT&T tech support would tell you if you called them, I powered down the DSL modem, waited 30 seconds and powered it back up. All the lights came back to their normal status, but the Vonage device still showed no connection.

I then went through the normal other power recycle steps, starting with the Vonage device and then the router, DSL modem again and finally the Vonage device again. After rebooting one of my PCs just for grins and still having no connectivity I knew it was time to break down and call my ISP.

At this point I knew there was nothing more I could do at home, and running late, I headed to the office, figuring to call AT&T from there. My first call to AT&T was disappointing, after navigating through way too many automated prompts including providing a call back number (my cell phone) I finally reached a representative. We tried to discuss the issue, but she kept saying she was having trouble hearing me. OK, maybe we did have a bad connection (I could hear her just fine and I can't remember the last time my office phone had made a bad connection like the one she was claiming existed), but none the less, they had my call back number. But alas, no return call was made, so I went through the whole process again.

This time I reached a gentleman who validated my account status and tested connectivity to my DSL modem and said everything was fine. He suggested my router was the source of the problem, which while possible was unlikely, as it reported no errors and had gone through its own recycle.

At this point it was time to refocus on my corporate job and hope that things would clear themselves up.

Of course things did clear up a few hours later, not that AT&T will admit that anything was wrong or that they did anything, but magically my house got reconnected, it sent me a message a work (my house did, not AT&T).

This was a long story, hopefully worthwhile :), to talk about the fact that all the connectivity in the world at your house or small business is only as good as your ISP connection. So if the string between your two tin cans fails you will be living in a disconnected world.

In most cases it is hard to justify in the home or small business a second Internet connection, like my corporate office has, however depending on what you do and how much it will "cost" you to be disconnected it might make sense. If you can't justify the extra cost, at least plan for losing your connection on occasion (in the case of AT&T it has been rare) and know how you will operate without it.

A Small Green Business

Everyone is talking about green these days, while to many this means getting enough money to keep the business going, in this post we are going to talk about the environmental green. While the corporate world is all atwitter (pun intended) about green jobs, what can the individual and / or small business person do to both help the earth and help their bottom line?

One of my favorite ways is to cut down on the number of catalogs that come to your home or business. Catalog Choice is an organization that works with many mail order vendors to allow you to set preferences on what you receive by mail and when. OK, it is not going to make or break your business, but it will save vendors (and perhaps you are one) money in sending out wasted catalogs that often go to straight from the mail box to the recycling bin (you do recycle, don't you?). Using the service also provides you a way to organize all of the vendors that you do business with, perhaps helping their business and maybe organizing your life or business.

Speaking of recycling, if we are going to recycle all this paper, it is only going to work if we actually buy recycled paper instead of continuing to buy "new" paper. The premium for recycled paper continues to shrink and if we all increase our purchasing of recycled products it will shrink even more. Good deeds produces good things for your business.

Finally, something relatively new on the market are smart power strips. With smart power strips, devices that reach full charge will stop drawing power through that specific outlet. While not all devices support this kind of intelligent charging more are starting to do so. Once again not a huge savings for the individual person or business, but every penny helps your pocketbook and the earth. As with recycled paper the more folks who buy smart power strips the lower the premium for these devices and the more manufacturers will produce devices that can take advantage of them.

Taking advantage of these easy and inexpensive ideas may not make you rich or save the earth, but they are a move in the right direction.

Share your ideas on how you are making your small business into a small greener business.

This blog is now available on Kindle

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