Mobile office work stations compared

When the weather is cold, grey and wet, days pass when there seems nothing much to do apart from routine domestic tasks. It's not pleasant enough to go out unless it's strictly necessary, and there's not much to do apart from read the news and feel listless. Thus passed Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday I went into the office to complete one of my outstanding tasks, and came home with a Microsoft RT Surface to investigate. It had been hanging around for ages doing nothing, as Sarah had acquired it but not found it user friendly, and had tucked away on the common workspace to be found a use or new user. I took the pass-code details, charged it and satisfied myself that it was working properly, and ending up taking it home. 

It's a neat solid device. It starts up quickly and has a decent enough touch screen. It is runs on an Nvidia Tegra chip, as does the Asus Transformer. Windows RT is a version of Windows 8 built for the hardware. It has a version of MS Office, linked to the One Drive cloud file system. This works well, and is easier to work with than the Google Chromebook equivalent. Both are intended to function primarily as mobile office devices for working on documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. Only after two years of competing production are some Chromebooks acquiring a touchscreen. The Surface is twice the price however. What you pay is what you get. 

The Surface keyboard is one deal breaker, closely followed by limitations of having a single USB port and no card reader in contrast to Chromebooks. If Microsoft had more closely followed the Chromebook hardware specifications it might not have been such a disastrous market flop. As it is, Chromebook sales are growing healthily. Newer hardware designs are of a quality approaching that of the Surface. The Google User interface works reasonably well and has lots of good features, but it's ugly compared to Windows. And in the end, aesthetics as well as functionality make a wholesome working environment, Each has assets and shortcomings. The ideal mobile computing platform would be a blend of the best of both. Good though Android is as a third alternative, it hasn't got email or browser interfaces for touch screen use to the point where you don't lose a precious text draft through an accidental finger swipe. If I use an Android tablet to browse or send emails, I do so distrustfully as a result of bad experiences. 

The Chromebook will continue to travel with me, in preference to the others, as it's so quick to start for use. It's light and has a great keyboard. The awkwardness and relative unfamiliarity of Google's filing system and off-line web apps I can put up with. They'll improve if people moan at them enough.  

A new dongle and a culinary co-incidence

Sarah spent today in the St David's centre main office, meeting with security workers to sign them up and issuing them with 'need-to-know' documents about confidential information sharing. In turn, her efforts fed me with couple of new dozen email addresses to add to our DISC intranet reporting system. Sarah is good at enthusing people, and I anticipate a good influx of useful information in coming months.

British Telecom has now issued me with a new mobile internet dongle to permit internet access working away from home or office. This was vital in the wilds of coastal Pembrokeshire last summer, even if signal reception was weak and patchy, and only out in a country lane, would it work. 

When I acquired a Windows 8 computer however, the software installation led to error messages, not finding a signal. Hence the new dongle, identical in brand name and number to the previous one, but inscribed with different serial number in tiny letters. Software installation on Windows 8 machine was flawless and the old SIM continues to work. I imagine there's been a minor firmware upgrade to the electronic circuitry in the dongle, as well as new software, but there's nothing on the packaging or in the instruction booklet to indicate the new dongle is good for Windows 8. Black mark BT! A Windows 8 sticker on the box or dongle could prevent confusion between superficially identical pieces of kit, and who knows, reduce help line calls.

After several weeks of forgetting, I went to Wally's deli in the Royal Arcade to pick up a kilo of Asturian rice. Funnily enough I was in there two days ago, bought some pimenton, but forgot the arroz redondo that soaks up flavour and makes paella what it's meant to be. I arrived home to discover that Clare had also remembered to visit Wally's and came home with a kilo of the same rice and a kilo of Italian risotto rice as well. I'm so sad that we lost to weevils the kilos of red and black Thai rice given us by Claudine last time we met, a year ago in Switzerland. How we enjoy the different varieties!

  

Business on the move

We were relieved to hear Rachel and Jasmine had arrived safely after the ten hour flight back to Phoenix. Jasmine woke up in the afternoon and went for the briefest of introductory visits to her new school, then back home for more rest. Rachel did some house hunting, in preparation for her move into the city from deepest rural Cottonwood. It'll be great when we know they are settled in their new situation.

Meanwhile, there's a CBS office move to prepare for at the end of the week. Monday and Tuesday afternoons were taken up planning how we can keep working without interrupting the first key task of the year, mailing a hundred or so invoices out to the first batch of signed up radio users. For me it meant preparing the mail-merge data and getting it to run properly, so that Julie has an editable file to work on when she arrives on Thursday. Inevitably I hit snags, and opted to complete the chore at home. With all the admin PCs are configured to synchronise with Microsoft Skydrive, I can put its usability to the test, when Julie comes to work this Thursday on the invoice file generated. 

This  lunchtime I had a funeral at Thornhill. There was a familiar face among the mourners who greeted me cordially after the service. It took a moment for me to recognise Fr Roger Balkwill, who was assistant Curate in Caerphilly the same time as me, forty five years ago. The deceased was his brother-in-law. We've met no more than twice in the years since then. USPG sent him to work in mission in Zimbabwe after his curacy, and when he returned, he went to work in the West Midlands, which was where we next met, twenty years later. Co-incidentally, the last time we met was nearly two years ago, at the funeral of priest who was a contemporary of ours.

Afterwards, I collected Owain from home and we visited PC World together to buy yet another computer for the office. The next CBS move will be our seventh. It will place us in a building where we don't have the 24/7 access we need, so we're arranging a hire a room for a night support base in our present location, where we do have 24/7 access, and that means we need to create a clone of our radio monitoring and recording system, a necessity for continued operation. An extra PC is needed for this.

 The decision to buy a Lenovo 23" all in one machine took five minutes, the purchase took the best part of an hour on top of this, so eventually we got back to the office and Owain got Windows 8 installed and updated, updating being necessary before it was possible to upgrade to 8.1, which is why it all takes so long. NOT a selling point in the business world where time is money! Even so, it took just over half the time it took me with each of the other two PCs I've dealt with this past two weeks, a testimony to the faster BT Broadband we have in the office compared with our very flaky TalkTalk home broadband. Even as I write this, not many minutes pass without getting an auto-save error message, and most nights the signal drops irretrievably and no even a router re-boot will fix it.

With Owain working on PC commissioning, I was free to help pack stuff into the huge removers' crates delivered to our end of the office, and to pack away as much electronic gear as we can do without for the next couple of days.  It felt as if we were making little impression on the task in hand, since our admin area also doubles up as a radio workshop and is rarely tidy, but by the end of the afternoon, most of the cabinets and cupboard were empty and ready for the removers to take. We're looking forward to having extra space with our new arrangements, and hopefully that'll bring more order and calm to our work-space.
   

Windows woes

Today was a damp day. Rachel, Jasmine and Clare went off to the St Fagan's Folk Museum. I went shopping for new office equipment, meeting up with Ashley in John Lewis', and returning home with a seventeen inch HP Windows 8 'laptop' to set up for use as a dedicated crime data work-station for the CBS office in the coming year.

Thus far I have been deterred by so many negative reviews from considering Windows 8, but now it's getting rarer to find Windows 7 kit on sale, there wasn't much alternative to spending lots of time and energy hunting for something to buy of the specification required before the end of our financial year. Ah well, sooner or later I have to find out more about this, and waste time re-learning how to use a piece of equipment to perform familiar tasks efficiently, just because a user interface has been changed without any reason that's at all relevant to my needs. But this is what commercial companies do to prove that we are their slaves, rather than them serving out best interests. 

I much prefer the superior Linux operating system with its choice of user interfaces, but in the everyday world of users who are just consumers of tools and products, persuading anyone to change their habits is as difficult for them as it is for me. So reluctantly I have a go a learning something new and pretty irrelevant to my working needs, as it's less inconvenient than chasing around after an alternative. 

If you're relatively new to computers, setting up a Windows 8 PC is elegantly simple. If you've spent decades getting Windows or Linux machines to work the way you want them to, it's painful. You feel as if you're not in control. The way the user interface works is different, it's more difficult to get beneath the slick looking surface to the level where there's detailed control. At first encounter, it feels as if you have no control at all. The user interface is designed with touchscreen in mind more than mouse. Touch is all very well, but  mouse control is more accurate in the hands of an experienced user. The chosen machine wasn't touch-screen, and I found this infuriating at first.

Setting up the machine for initial use took four time longer than doing a fresh Linux install, then even longer as I pressed on to upgrade the machine to Windows 8.1 straight away, since this fix promises to address some of the complaints made against Windows 8 from day one. All in all, we're talking five hours finding my way around and then machine minding installation and downloading patches and upgrades. This included half an hour going around in circles trying to find out how to do the upgrade, as links provided pointed to the Windows App store, and this had nothing to show how to get the upgrade. I got the upgrade from the Microsoft website, which was less than user friendly, taking to the bottom of a very long page before you could click on a download link that produced to goods. What a mess!

OK so TalkTalk internet is lousy and slow, but it only crashed the upgrade download once, and after a reboot, picked up where it left off, so that's one up for Microsoft. But, the process took up the whole of a Saturday evening, and at the end I still had to find out how to install my small portfolio of programs to turn into a piece of kit for the office desktop that 'just works'.

This is is me, performing a few of the functions of a system administrator (most are beyond me) to keep a small team of people active and confident that computers will do what they need, are secure, stable and don't make unintelligible demands of them that get in the way of productive work, or require them to change and re-learn working methods without hindering their work schedule. If the creative and visionary designers of a new generation of operating systems had understood the needs of the 'drones' at the real workfaces of the world, they would not have changed so much at the functional surface level, or at least made adoption of such a change optional. No wonder PC sales have slumped badly over the past year. Bad news travels fast.

 

Don't be so complex

After dropping Clare off at her class in Dinas Powis yesterday evening, I had time before Tai Chi class to spend fifteen minutes out in the mild fresh air and evening sunshine out by the sea lock on Cardiff Bay Barrage, watching a yacht pass through. After a day of sunshine spent mostly indoors, a moment of sheer pleasure. Photos are here.

It's a pity that it's now so much more hassle to manage uploading of pictures to my photo website, since Google started to absorb the Picasaweb service into its Google+ offering. Google plus is so smart and shiny, in many ways it's brilliant, but with so many options flashing up you end up feeling like you've lost control over the user interface you thought you had mastered. Picasa evolved slowly and consistently. There should be no need to re-learn how to do simple straightforward things. This is not an improvement.

OK you can still use the old familiar Picasa user interface, but like other things due to be phased out, a switch back option appears as a floating drop down menu seconds after the Google+ photos  has loaded, but for how long? Can't we have a user interface switch button that's more prominent and permanent, as is the ubiquitous green 'Share' button. The Google+ share option is very slick, but demanding too much in your face. 

Everyone should have the responsibility to stop and think before they use this, or else they will end up inundating others with links to pictures they aren't interested in. My dear sister still sends me the same photo share link serveral times, and sends me back links to photos I've shared with her. She's far from stupid, in fact she's very methodical, getting control over these tools is dauntingly difficult and she's had a lifetime of working with graphic tools. But this shows that the way the green Share button system works is not as clear and user friendly as the smart young people running the world at Googleplex think it is. It presumes you understand jargon and popular phrases. Not a good idea.

Like junk mailers, there's an intention here to be helpful and offer services Google thinks you want, but that's not the same as asking you if you want things. Frankly, all I want is something simple and speedy that I understand and feel I can control. Likewise my sister! Give us a break Google - make it look as pretty and clean as you like but remember how important familiarity is to technology users. Learn from the disaster of Microsoft Windows 8 abandonment of the Start button (soon to be re-introduced). Don't be evil, Google, but also don't be so complex also.