More on technology in 2000 - AOL, , Pocket PC

People looking for decent bandwidth in 2000 were trying things like modem-bonding.  The theory is that two modems hooked up to two telephone lines could be “bonded” using software. Theoretically you could download at 112k.  As they say, my mileage varied.  I got less – but more than 56k.  Back then if your internet service provider didn’t charge extra for using the second line, it might have been a reasonable deal.

AOL Anywhere was a familiar phrase in 2000.  The concept  was that AOL would bundle together a lot of information about restaurants, theatres, things to do, and help you complete a transaction using a wireless phone.  Yep, Ted Leonsis was a big part of that.

Miscrosoft was late to another party in 2000.  It was called the Pocket PC, which was to compete against the Palm/Handspring offerings, including the Palm VII.  Not only could the Pocket PC be an electronic Rolodex for contacts and schedules, it could play mp3 music and serve as a digital recorder.  At the time, Microsoft’s Steve Balmer called the Pocket PC, “A quantum leap forward.”

On the slightly technical side, the Digital Edge guy was once again reminding people to be careful about donating their computers without properly taking care of their hard drives.  The truth remains today that deleting a file doesn’t delete the information, just an entry in an address book the computer uses to find the information.  And when you put something in the recycle bin, and empty it.... it’s gone – except it’s not.  Again, just the address of where the information is.  Nothing is deleted until some stuff comes along and overwrites the old (several times to meet some standards).

Maybe this post has brought back a few memories…please share…  :}

More from the Reporter's Scripts - 2000

The year was 2000, and the specter of Y2K was fading fast.  We had survived.  Things worked after the stroke of midnight.  Almost everything worked.  We watched carefully as the New Year came in from Australia and headed toward us.  Each new celebration confirmed that Y2K issues weren’t going to cause the problems predicted by some.  

Did we survive because of all the preparation work, the hiring of folks who knew the older programming languages, or because we really hyped Y2K beyond its dangers?  I think I did at least three dozen, “will Y2K affect (fill in the blank) stories leading up to the end of the year.  I balked about doing a story on whether Y2K would affect your socks.

Several online services popped up after a Surgeon General’s report said that 1 in 5 Americans had a mental problem.  These new sites, including lifescape.com, suggested the Internet would help people open up.  There would be support through chat, etc.  I guess people have opened up a tad on Facebook.

In 2000, Flat screens were coming down in price (about $4500 for a family room set) and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was featuring a lot of MP3 music and CD Re-writers. 

On the less technical side, a story I did on gasoline prices grabbed my attention.  3/7/2000:  AAA says gas prices have risen 24-cents from mid-january to mid-March in 2000.  The average cost for a gallon of unleaded regular in the Washington, DC area is ----- (wait for it)

      $1.54

 

 More on 2000 later....

A Message of Few Words

I do not love abbreviations, acronyms and slang.

I do not think they are worth a dang.

(Whoaa! Almost went Dr. Seuss for a moment)

We refer to a gaggle of government agencies as “alphabet soup.”   We call them agencies, even though most of them are not agencies, but administrations. And, at least one of the “agencies” ending in “A” – the A stands for Affairs (Did you know that?).  Perhaps that’s where former congress people go after being exposed for wrongdoing.

We use acronyms at work, are subjected to hundreds of them on the TV cop procedurals.  BOLO used to be an APB.  BOLO is a letter longer, but a syllable shorter.  It seems everyone takes every opportunity to shorten anything longer than a word or two.  Low testosterone is “Low-T.”  I’m not going to let this post rise and fall on that one. 

Sports junkies know a team name can be shortened to almost nothing on the third reference.  A product, or even an entertainer can be shortened to a “symbol.”

I smiled when I read a recent story about the Wakefield High School Track & Field ordering sweatshirts that read, “WTF.”  It also stands for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday (according to the cartoon, “Maxene.”)

Maybe it’s generational.  Is TMI “too much information” or “Three Mile Island?”  

Is there a point here?  Sure.  I buried the lead.

Make your point: clearly - concisely – in the context and language your target audience understands.  

Give your supporters something simple and direct to pass along that has a strong chance of maintaining its meaning. 

                                                                

"Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear."

 "Let me make this perfectly clear."  That's one of many quotes attributed to Richard Nixon.  That quote should resonate loudly in today's social media, and in any effort to get a message across?

I love reminders that we need to communicate simply and directly – without a veneer of words and phrases that we know, but our audience may not. 

Jeremy Epstein did a great job of doing just that. He was writing primarily about talking to non-native English speakers. But here’s the real nugget is his post:

“It’s extremely easy to forget how much we already know…and ASSUME that our audience knows as well.”

Well said. 

I’m not questioning that some people and their presentations assume the audience has the same breadth and depth of knowledge.  In many cases, it’s okay.  But I’m also suggesting that we get too wrapped up in acronyms, abbreviations and buzzwords the “big guys” use.  We do the same presentation but keep adding the new “pro” words until we start missing some of our audience.  

 Surely you’ve seen someone nod their head in agreement during a presentation, then afterwards say, “What did he mean by that?”  We thought everyone was on the same page, but a few folks were behind a few chapters.

Our mission is to communicate clearly and give people reasons to communicate about us, about our product, about our ideas.  Don’t let your own familiarity dull the focus on words and images. If we expect people to pass along that we are remarkable, special, top notch, etc. – shouldn’t we take extra time to be sure they actually get the right message to pass along?

My suggestion:  take everything off the table and put it back one piece at a time.  Examine the audience, then decide if your words, stories and images match their languages, cultures and contexts.  It’s all about them.

PEPCO keeps its word

By I.J. Hudson

Is it magic?  Is it social media?  Is it coincidence?

The answers could be, “probably not,” “maybe,” and “unfortunately, yes.”

The last post whined a bit about PEPCO’s tree-trimming program.  Maybe their folks read it – or maybe not.

Background:  I gave permission for PEPCO to take down a couple of pine trees that could interfere with their lines in my neighborhood.  My beef:  they took down the trees and left the proceeds on the ground for two weeks – nobody considers “free wood” a bargain when it’s pine.

I wondered, “What lies beneath?”  Has my grass been killed?  Is there a major landscaping job to be done (paid for)? 

Well today, tah-dah, the crew came through and picked up the dismembered pine trees.  Yayyy!  That’s good news.   

 

The pictures show that damage to my lawn, IMO, is minimal – not a big deal;  certainly not enough to fuss about.  

But for the social media gurus out there, how could this have played out as a big-time advantage for PEPCO?

Hmmm?  I can’t pretend that I know everything PEPCO has been/is doing with social media, but I might have sent a crew around to record interviews with customers as the contractors took down trees, let PEPCO talk about the tree trimming programs and the customers talk about giving up some branches and some trees for reliability (if it really helps that much.)

---And let people complain “on camera” about PEPCO, its service, outages during blue sky days, trees toppled but left on the ground – and answer those complaints --- directly and honestly.  

Trust is based on long-term relationships.  It takes years to earn it; only a few minutes to destroy it.  If I were PEPCO, I would start building it slowly - under promise and over deliver.  Keep the dialogue between the real people of PEPCO and customers totally in the open.

The deal

PEPCO eventually did what it promised it would do – written down on a little piece of paper I signed back in March.  But no one would know about it, unless I wrote about it.  Yeah, I complained.  We all do.  But I also am giving PEPCO credit for following through.  PEPCO should give itself credit, too.  

Silence these days is foolish, not golden.  You need converts - people who were complaining now saying, "Thanks, you did what you said you would do."   

That conversation needs to be out in the open so people can see how a big company deals with the good, the bad – and the….well, me.

Pine-ing for a Pickup.

By I.J. Hudson

You may recall PEPCO announced it would be more aggressive in its infrastructure replacement/repair and tree trimming efforts to reduce power outages.  I received a letter citing some improvements in the wires/insulators/electrical stuff in my neighborhood.  Glad to hear it.  Thanks.

I am also part of the tree trimming campaign.  They asked if they could take down two of my trees that were “involved” with the lines, and I signed on the dotted line.  They would take down and remove the trees - for free. It would all start in about a month.

Looking very skinny

Sure enough, about six weeks later, the first contractor came through and trimmed the branches off the main “trunk.” (4/27) That left the trees looking like slightly deformed spears.   

A few days later(4/30), a second crew came through armed with serious chain saw:  both trees came down ----  each section lowered gently to the ground. 

Free Wood!   Not happening.

I must confess I had mixed emotions about losing these trees.  One of them had served as a “support” for one end of an amateur radio wire antenna for a bunch of years.  It’s hard to find a good 65-foot tall support.   

Now there is a lot of empty space at 65 feet, and I’m still figuring out what to do about the antenna. 

However, two weeks later, there is still a lot of tree on the ground.  tree sections have been occupying a lot of lawn space, and no one, it seems, wants free pine.  It doesn’t burn so well in the fireplace, etc.  

No doubt the grass below has been complaining to no avail, and likely has given up under pressure.  My Superman cape remains at the dry cleaners so I haven’t tried to lift or roll these sections to check the health of the grass underneath.

While the contractors lowered each section they cut to the ground, I suspect there are indentations in the lawn to mark the day.  My son found one last weekend as we played Frisbee on the lawn.  His foot found it.  Luckily, he didn’t twist his ankle, and I filled the hole with topsoil.

The deal was – complete removal and clean up of the trees.                            

I’m grateful the trees are down (I guess), and await the “complete removal and clean up” part.  

I guess there’s a logjam of work to be done, and a lot of us in the same boat.

If it leads to fewer power outages, I can wait a while longer for the logs 

to be picked up, but I'm a little concerned about 

                "What Lies Beneath."

Caught between Yesterday and Tomorrow - Fee, Fee, FI, Fo, Fum - FiOS or Landline?

By I.J. Hudson

A lot of organizations have different divisions, different silos, that don’t communicate with each other very well – or, not at all.  And sometimes they seem to do it in a deliberate strategic way.  A case in point is Verizon.

You may remember them as Bell-Atlantic, but these days they’re doing business as Verizon Wireless, FiOS, and just plain Verizon (landline). 

Okay, let’s look at this movie 15 years ago.  Verizon’s T-1 business was drooping because of DSL (several competitors).  Verizon was faced with cannibalizing its T-!  market to push DSL in the face of very strong cable competition.  In the DC area, Comcast kept getting faster;  DSL, not so much.

Fast forward to today.  Verizon FiOS is trying to compete against cable – both offering bundled services (phone, Internet, TV) and each running ads that snipe at the other guy.  And, at the same time Verizon has been fighting cable and satellite, Verizon has other in-house competitors – Verizon Wireless and Verizon FiOS.  Wait – that sounds confusing.  Of course it is.  Verizon is fighting real competitors and itself – competition from its past and its future.

Why do I mention this?  I’m a sandwich generation guy.  I’m a baby boomer:  older parents, kids with kids.  Gosh, I’m a grandfather.  And, because of my location, I’m caught between Verizon’s squabble with itself.

I’ve had a land line since there was land and phone numbers had five digits.  I’ve had the same number for decades, even though I get an occasional call for Pier One Imports. (wonder why directory assistance hasn’t changed that yet?)

The problem is that my landline gets a lot of static when it rains, and then the phone quits altogether.  We‘ve reported it a bunch of times.  And every time it turns out, “the trouble is not in our set,” and after a few hours or a day or two, the “infrastructure” dries out and the dial tone returns.  Privately, linemen I’ve talked to say, ‘hey, your lines and stuff are old.  They’re not going to invest in fixing up the old stuff when they’re bringing  FiOS to your neighborhood in the next year or two.”  

That means I can:

1)      Maintain my land line service and put up with spotty/no service when it rains.  Gosh, how often can it rain?

2)      Drop the landline and go totally wireless, like a growing number of folks.  Not a great idea in my situation because cell coverage at the house isn’t great.

Does bringing FiOS to my neighborhood solve the problem?   Only if I decide FiOS makes sense.  Will I really have to give up the copper and depend on fiber.

Okay, fiber is not the problem.  Did I mention I’m also served by PEPCO and have frequent power outages.  That means if I switched phone/TV/Internet to FiOS, I’d be totally offline during a power outage – at the mercy of backup batteries, etc.  At least with the land line (and the rain hasn’t killed my service yet) Verizon is supplying voltage that keeps the land line working even though the power is off.  And you thought phones were powered by natural gas.

I’m almost ready to cut the wire – which wire??  And do I really want to leave copper for the land of fiber optics?  Oops.   I hear a beeping in the background – my battery backup is toast. Time for the generator.

Two steps forward; one step back.  How's the cell service? How's the copper?  Is the infrastructure sound enough to earn my confidence?

(Donald Trump !!!!  just to get your attention.)