Digital Lifecycle Management

I know; I am a fanatic on this issue. It is something that bothers me a lot. Futurists are calling the time we are in the information age. But big consulting companies are running around selling digitization. We can’t have both. It is the reality of where we are now. The reality is we are still in the age of acquisition, not the information age yet. The futurists and, well, about everybody loves that good tag ling, though.  I have over the years published several papers on the topic of digital lifecycle management. I even invented a process that involves human and automated systems to capture, manage and keep fresh. You see, people seek information in one of two cases.

The first is they want to learn something. The second is they are solving a problem. In both cases, the information returned has to be valid. When we are truly in the information age, data validity will be easier to manage than it is now in the age of information acquisition. We don’t have proper information filters in place yet. In a Robert Heinlein book many years ago, I read the line “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” It translates to who will guard the guardians. If information is critical, who protects it? I don’t mean just copyright infringement and IP/IC theft (sometimes called industrial espionage). Rather I mean, who will keep the information valid? Making sure it is still the right answer?

I outlined the system I call DLM in my book Transitional Services. IP management is critical for companies building and providing professional services. Why? Put over time, you have to charge customers less for building solutions. They won’t always pay to be first. They will deliver to catch up but, they expect catching up to be cheaper. That is the value of IP. IP or Intellectual property is how consulting companies build solutions quickly. An IP management system that allows for information to age (all data has time to live) is critical. But the other side is that sometimes information changes. When the answer to the question is left, the confines of the problem must remain the same.

In the world of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, we look for IP/IC systems that can do the initial pattern matching when someone asks for help (try a google search and Bing search with an odd question and see what you get back – how many goats would it take to mow a 32.4-acre lot twice a week. Once that answer is produced, it is critical that the system store that for the next person that asks that question. But it also needs to be validated. There are many species of goats, and some eat grass faster than others.  Digitalization has to support the three concepts of IP/IC management. Capture, input metadata, and validate. The last step, validate has to happen many times for the system to remain effective!

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Time to put the anger away

So much anger, so much hate in our world today. Where once people talked and discussed now, people grow angry. Earlier, the middle was the only place to see both sides; now, even the center is attacked. I find the reality around me depressing. I would postulate that leaving people in lockdown, along with their thoughts, resulted in so much anger (because I have to listen to my thoughts!). But to me, the scariest thing is that anger. I have had the fortune to travel a lot of the world. I can say that I find people are the same no matter where you are. We all struggle with the world. We all have things we wish were different. But in the end, we are ultimately the same.

I have one simple rule that I follow. When I realize that someone isn’t discussing with an open mind, I stop talking with them. If you are willing to listen truly, you are free to your opinion changing. When you know you are right, no matter what, you aren’t open, and there is no point discussing the topic any further. The other side of that is people that spew hate at you. They are justified in their hatred and dump it on you. I listened to one of the American Horror Story videos, Jan 6, 2021, and realized that one of America’s things had failed education. There are three branches of the American government. Those three are all housed in three buildings in Washington DC.

The system of checks and balances gives each equal power. So when the terrorist stormed the capital building and shouted, “we were sent by your boss, the president,” they demonstrated a lack of understanding. The Capital building is the seat of the legislative part of the US Government. One of the three (the other is the supreme court and the Whitehouse or Executive branch). Each of the three has a unique power. The protestors declaring their right to be there because the boss had sent them didn’t read the constitution. The time to heal is upon us. We as a world need to move past this pandemic. Hopefully, that will alleviate some of the anger. We need to find a way to peace!

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why computers?

Interesting change in technology in the last few years that I have been watching. Most laptops now don’t ship with a built-in CD or DVD player. It’s easier to download software and install it off the Internet to run a DVD you or CD and install the program. The reason I bring that up is the evolution in rather than a. The other thing I use my computer for is simply using Dragon naturally speaking. It has been pretty impressive. We used to have something called a floppy drive. The last iteration of the floppy drive was a 3 1/2 inch drive that was hard and didn’t block. The original 5.25″ drive was floppy. Of course, back then, a laptop waits 12 times. Now you get a good laptop for 3 pounds. But the thing about laptops now is that there more than they were a few years ago. You can do more with the laptop of today. But the fundamental reason why I have a laptop is for information creation. I love my tablet; it’s an iPad. I often use it to draw architectural diagrams. I then move those drawings to Microsoft Visio and embed them in the documents.

There is still something about the feel of the keyboard for me. I learned to type on a typewriter, and I learn to think and type on a typewriter. Computer keyboards are a lot faster than that old typewriter used to be. The other thing I use my laptop for more often than I would ever use anything else is scanning documents. I also do my taxes, although not a lot. I use my desktop computer to do my taxes. Using I use my desktop computer frequently used to create lifelong. Like this one, except this one is created using my iPhone and then edited and cleaned up on my computer. I also create my podcast on my computer. There are a lot of good podcasting packages out and that work on the iPhone. But I like Adobe Audition, so that’s the program I use.

The other thing I use is a program called Grammarly. In the end, I probably use my cell phone more today than I do my computer. There was a time in the 90s when I used my computer way more than my cell phone. But that has changed, and now the cell phone is the predominant tool. Because it is the tool I can use to talk to other human beings. It’s more of a communication device. But it’s also more of a two-way communication device in the sense that I can send information to another human and get an immediate response. On my computer and in particular blogs and podcasts, I tend to get an answer, but it’s often delayed. It doesn’t come right away. It’s not real-time. I also extensively use my computer for online meetings. Finally, I always write my poetry on the computer. It sometimes takes a month to create a poem.

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Know the destination!

I became a technologist many years ago now. I was a technologist before it was a teacher. And then I became a full-time technology. I’ve watched things evolve fairly quickly for the last few years. The infrastructure, the very fabric by which everything is held together, improved so much in the last few years. Do people wonder why I need 5G? You don’t know today necessarily. Except the 5G fulfills a promise that application developers have been making to us for many years. Nobody builds an application with the latency intended. Applications are designed to work in an optimized environment if we think about an application’s user experience; that’s why application developers pull their hair because the user experience becomes very from a mile by mile throughout the city.

But the other side of the evolution is, of course, the cell phone. I spent way too many columns on my cell phone, so that I will talk about them today. Today I wanted to talk about the structure in which applications operate. What once was traditionally billed the data center and host your applications has now become let’s evaluate where is best to host it. People consider data centers, and people consider the various cloud providers. So that is one change that is occurred in the last 10 to 12, maybe 15 years at the most. The other thing that’s changed the device, which was not going talk about today. Rather today will and with the concept of destination. The more the organization knows about both sides of the destination equation, the lower the security risk overall!

The destination is a two-part problem. The first part of the problem is what device is the data can end up on that’s a destination. The other destination is where am I requesting information from? People often talk about network performance about how well an application is performing. In reality, applicant network performance isn’t always the problem. Depending on how applications work, there is the concept of right around 40 to 50% network saturation the application begins to retry packets more and more often. As a bag fills up with potatoes, start stuffing them in faster as the bag gets fuller, and you’ll see what that looks like. The network expands, but that can grow, so the traffic has to go somewhere. That’s the last piece today of how people interoperate with applications about the two destinations. Of course, the last part of the goal is security, and I’m not going to cover it today.

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Be Responsible!

First of all, I’m not going to weigh in on the current political situation in the United States it is a bit risky. I’m also not offering an opinion as to the constitutionality of the president impeached while in office being convicted out of office. The current constitutionality argument brings up the, oh well, any former president can be impeached then as the justification of the unconstitutionality of these preceding’s. The primary difference is when the congressional impeachment occurred. There have only been three US presidents impeached. All of them were impeached while in office. Andrew Johnson is long dead. Bill Clinton is still alive. And in the United States, the legal concept of double jeopardy would prevent Bill Clinton from being retried for the same things he was impeached for originally. I think the Constitution is very clear that if the president is impeached while in office, he must be tried by the Senate to be convicted. I don’t think there’s any gray areas that allows for the unconstitutionality of trying a president after is no longer the United States president if he was already impeached before leaving office. This doesn’t open the president to try all provisions or impeach and convict all presidents after leaving the office again. To clear this up, this president was impeached while still in office.

Rather the goal of today’s blog is the concept of free speech. There is the concept that in a political speech politician can say any. Somehow out of this mess that we are in in the United States today, we have to temper what can be set. I grew up with parents who taught me to look at both sides of an argument. I do see a right and wrong on both sides. I think the conspiracy theories and the flaming of any obligation occurring today have nothing to do with free speech. Free speech requires that the person be responsible for their address. You can say anything you want, but you are responsible. That is the missing piece right now in the rhetoric floating around global politics. Responsibility is hard work—former United States president. Truman famously had a placard on his desk. The placard read the buck stops here.

The buck stops here, is simply another way of saying I’m responsible. The hardest lesson for a child to learn is responsibility. When you were 12 and 13 years old, your parents are responsible for everything. And you rebel against that. As you know and as you grow, you gain responsibility. But no matter what the matter who you are, you are always responsible for what you say. I guarantee you that if there were more money and suing people for what they say, more people are not saying many things. It is very hard to improve life. It is very hard to prove intent with what someone says. But the reality is you’re still responsible. The measure of you as a person is how reliable you are for what you say. My dad always told me Biblesoft understandable soft, even if you hate the other side, as long as you understand what they’re saying, you’re more likely to be able to hear things that they’re trying to convey. If you hate without listening, then you can never accept. And if you speak and speak responsibly, then you aren’t contributed to the problem. Perhaps I should start a movement hashtag speak responsibly!

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Crunchy snow and missing IP!

The meteorological phenomenon known as snow occurred last night near my house, around my house on top of my house. For some reason, and in 2020 and 2021, we had the always frustrating combination of snow and rain in at least this particular printer. An inch or so of snowfalls and in the rain falls control freezes together into a mass. You end up with a frozen cringing that makes walking difficult because the sidewalks all freeze into sheets of ice. I walk outdoors and walking in the crunchy I see the mess that was left in the DC area yesterday take my normally 16 minute times and make them easily 22 minutes or 23 and a lot more physical exertion completes the same distance.

I had a treadmill for days like this in Indiana, but we just haven’t had that many days like this since moving to DC. So I got rid of the treadmill. In retrospect, I should have kept it. But today’s technology blog is about the reality of snow falling or the slipperiness of ice on roads. Today I want to talk about the reality of the information age. I know most analysts call where worry is now technologically the information age I understand that. I don’t mind being the lone voice in the wilderness on this one. Sometimes I don’t want to be the lone voice, but I do on this particular problem. I have spent years chasing intellectual property and intellectual capital in every organization I’ve been a part of. I have built and managed to run and organize IP management systems. Both regional and international.

That’s why I do not think we preach the information age. There’s far too much information that exists on the hard drives of professionals as they go about their day-to-day business. There’s a reason why hard drives keep getting bigger. And it’s not to do with the fact the operating system is growing that quickly. People need a place to store information if hard drive search were better than it is today. You will find ten times the amount of IP on hard drives that you do today. But the reality is there is still more information on people’s hard drives, and in people’s heads, there is in all the world’s IP systems combined. One of the coolest technology projects that I’ve watched his project, Gutenberg. Gutenberg is the inventor of the printing press. Project Gutenberg is taking all those printed books that exist in the public domain. In other words, the copyright has expired. And it is converting them into digital assets. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books there probably a third of the way through the world’s library if that.

When the project Gutenberg is done, we’re on the cusp of the information age, but it’s not done for now. It’s nowhere near done and was nowhere near the information age. A wise man once said, if I can find information, I can solve your problem. The reality is they can’t solve your problem. They can’t find the information because too much of it exists in human beings’ heads or on laptops or desktops or servers within organizations. Yes, the information age will be Nirvana. And I don’t mean Kurt Cobain’s band. The information age will allow us to quickly utilizing whatever device we choose to find information that we need. It will also deliver information to us so that we can consume it not one way for all to consume but many ways for all to consume. You see, information consumption is the hallmark in the bellwether of the information age!

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Do you track your steps?

Do you track your daily steps? A few years ago, I think nearly 15 now a doctor came out and said that everyone should walk 10,000 steps a day. That’s been changed by ijnhuy7ud7gsgyf6thow most health experts say that women should walk around 7500 steps, and men should walk around 8500 to 9000 steps a day. That’s not walking 17,000 steps on Monday and zero steps on Tuesday that 8500 steps every single day. Eight thousand five hundred steps is a little all over 4 miles. Or around 7 1/2 KM for those who prefer kilometers. For the first ten years or so that I was tracking the steps, I predominantly use the Fitbit. I don’t use a Fitbit anymore for many reasons, one of which is it just never worked consistently rightful me, and honestly, having to charge it every day yada yada never worked out. I wandered around there many applications available the track your steps, but I settled on now.

I use Sweatcoins, and I use the Apple fitness tracker that comes with my iPhone. The other application I use is run, keeper. She uses run keeper predominantly because it lets me map my walks. I can compare the routes I’m taking, and if I want to tweak it or add or remove distance, it’s a little easier for me to do it knowing where I’m walking. All of the applications I use are dependent on the GPS in either my watch or my phone. I have noticed a subtle variance. The error rate, I would say, is probably about 100 feet total. So all of my step totals are always plus or -100 feet, which is about 200 maybe hundred and 50 steps. When I was first using GPS’s in the 1990s, it took on average 70 seconds or more for the GPS signal to lock-in. My phone and watch pretty much lock-in in about 7 to 10 seconds. Since I don’t cross any major latitude and longitude in lines, the GPS doesn’t have to reset its connection.

So I go back to my original thesis do you track your steps? And if you do track your steps, what is your daily step goal? For me, originally, my goal was 10,000 steps a day. I bump that to 15,000 steps per day about five years ago. Since I came to that goal in the five years, I’ve only missed 15,000 steps four times in five years. The fun thing is that in the year 2020, the year of the pandemic, the dark cloud over all our heads, I averaged 20,900 steps every single day for 365 days. Now we all understand the law of averages that meant that they were many days above 20,000 steps in a few days below 20,000 steps, far more days above 20,000 steps then below. You see, by March 2020, my average daily step count was around 17,000 steps a day, so the first quarter of the year, I average 17,000 steps a day or but it does, however, does work, then then I had to average more than 23,000 steps a day for the rest of the year the pandemic was good for walking. So what is your step goal?

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My review of the reMarkable2!

Many years ago, I worked with a person who ran the usability lab for the company I was working for. He would show me videos of the people in the room trying to do things if you saw those videos 20 years ago and used a computer now. You would see many of the things the people did in the labs were part of the operating system. It makes me laugh when I think about computers’ evolution in the last 20 years—a bit of os the EVP; top of the tablet that I want to talk about today. In particular, the newest tablet, the Remakable2 tablet. Reading, signing, and interacting with PDF files is pretty normal for most people now. In my profession, I also tend to review documents before they are sent to the customer.

Remarkable is a tablet-based system designed for two different things. The first is taking digital notes (I like that functionality a lot) the second is reviewing and annotating documents. It works very well, and getting papers to the tablet device is pretty easy. The handwriting conversion is pretty good overall, and I find myself able to convert around 90% of my handwriting into something I can read 2 or 3 days later. That is my measure for converting my writing; if it is converted and still makes sense, it worked! Overall the toolset is pretty good at converting my now very slopping handwriting to clearly understood machine text (or what we used to call typewriter output)!

Remarkable uses the concept of paper to make the interaction with notes and documents easier! The issue with most digital pens is that they don’t have a good feel. The Remarkable pen has a tactile surface, so you feel the cell. I am not an artist, but I do make drawings in my documents and my notes. They are more focused on services and what can be built or delivered, boxes and lines, but the pen works well for adding graphics to the notes. It wouldn’t do for a professional artist, but if you, like me, sometimes draw an example, it works well. Overall the product is easy to use. They have an iPhone and an android application to get documents onto your tablet. They also has a web browser extension and a pc application. Getting content to your remarkable is remarkably easy! (pun intended)!

Overall I give the Remarkable2 a solid 9 out of 10!

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Are YOU willing to wait?

Yesterday I talked about the hue and cried about Big Tech. The fact that Big Tech has a moral and ethical responsibility (they don’t). I realize a lot of people are angry that decisions were made to have certain accounts deactivated. If I ever post something that causes a riot or contributes to a riot or could be conceived as supporting a hoot, I hope they shut down my account forever. The reality of the world and the reality of information is critical. When you have an audience, you owe the truth. Since the truth is often subjective, you owe your audience the facts. That means if you believe something happened that was not right, you have to share the evidence you have.

The truth is often an interpretation of facts and then presented as the truth.” As I said, the truth is often subjective. Facts, however, are not. Facts are pieces of information. They do not come with “this is what I mean” stickers. They do not simply present themselves. They are not always heard the same way by different people. (ergo, the taught being my interpretation of facts). But the thing that is missing right now from the call for Big Tech Ethics is facts. When the people using social media in Egypt erupted, we applauded that eruption. It was a corrupt regime, we said. We have to walk a very fine line. We allow something once, and it is then, by default, allowed the second time.

My father always said you couldn’t legislate morality. He was right, of course. The nuisances of a law that provided the “moral stance” on something would be massive. Let’s try and play that out with a single tweet. There are limits to the number of characters that can be used. Lots of abbreviations are used. But the reality is that tweeting to be legal would have to adhere to the guidelines. Nuances are the problem with morality. It is ok to call your best friend an idiot. It is ok to call a politician you disagree with an idiot. It is not ok for someone with power in a situation to call someone else an idiot. There is a risk there. Just imagine how that would have to be legally written. Because the thing about laws is once written, they have to be enforced. So we repeal section 230 of the code that applies to social media. We now expect big tech to censor what is on their site. That would apply to everyone. Are you willing to wait for two days for those pictures of Aunt Millie’s 100^th birthday to appear on your feed? Or four days for those pictures of you fishing to appear?

Ask yourself, are you willing to wait?

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Seriously, what is Big Tech supposed to do?

I’ve seen a lot of moral indignation lately about the morality of big tech companies. The reality of big tech company is that they are as moral as the people around them. We cannot hold companies to a higher level than we hold ourselves. The reality of free speech is that people can say anything they want within reason. My favorite example of that is that it’s okay to say anything. It is not, however, okay to in a dark movie house screen fire. There are limits to what free speech is. It’s why the Internet is such a mess. It’s why the concept of information brokers is one that will eventually come to pass. It existed in the past. If you look at the legal profession and the medical profession, and the academic world, they have been peer-reviewed journals for many years. It’s a lot faster to use your voice. Ask one of the digital assistants to help build is to find a peer-reviewed journal on the topic and read it. So suddenly we decided that the tech companies need to be responsible for that information. Section 230 of the law under which they operate says that they are not content creators, their content curators. Based on that, they’re not responsible for the information posted by people on their site. If you look until recently, neither Twitter nor Facebook intervened very often when it came to what people put on their sites.

So I ask, what is the moral responsibility of the tech companies? Are they to be held to a higher standard than people? You see, none of the major disinformation sites on the Internet are on Facebook or Twitter. They exist separately. Are they bound and limited to the same rules the people expect Facebook and Twitter to live by now? I see people posting things that are at best bad and at worst racist because I don’t see that. I know that I stop frequenting sites when I see that type of post appear. There is no arguing with people that post on the extremes. And I’m not just referring to extreme right-wing posters; I’m referring to extreme left-wing posters as well. Pres. In an interview, Jimmy Carter talked about how he often at dinner would argue both sides of an argument one night, one side the next night the other side. At first all, Jimmy Carter’s one of my heroes, but he always said if you argue both sides, you have a chance to understand both sides. Honestly, for the most part, the extreme left and extreme right or positions I tend to discard.

Discarding them is my information filter based on my experience, education, and thinking. The issue is the Internet makes those sites much more available to everyone. So I hear the hue and cry, the outrage, and the screams that the big tech companies are being responsible. I would ask every person who feels like the big tech companies should be responsible for the information on their site to look around the Internet. At what point and what limit do we accept that it is okay for sites to publish this information that is harmful to other people? One of the hardest things to prove in our legal system in America and throughout the world is libel. Improving libel requires a significant amount of evidence, a significant impact, and a significant intent. It’s very hard fruit, and it should be very hard to prove. But moderating and controlling information on the Internet should be as big a deal as it is. If we are going to rail against big tack and say it’s all big Tech fault, then we have to go and start applying those rules to the sites that are currently uncontrolled. I can name ten left-wing, and I can call ten right-wing sites that I believe should be removed from the Internet. But that’s my opinion, and I removed them from my searches, and I removed them from my browsing. So in effect, I have removed them from mine. But sometimes, if you’re not careful, information like that pops in your browser. So let’s stop complaining about big tech. Let’s leave Facebook alone. Let’s leave Twitter alone. After the events of January 6, 2021, those two organizations did something they had to do. Let’s say they were right based on what happened on January 6, 2021, in the United States; it was the right thing to do. And let’s stop blaming big tech because it’s not their fault.

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