Adventures in Cell Phone Reception

I live in a city of about 130,000 people. My house is located about 2 miles from a major freeway. Neither of these things seem to matter to my cell phones. At home, they struggle to get two or three bars and dropped calls are a frequent occurrence.

I'm not just talking about the notorious A.T.T. here. I'm also talking about  Can you hear me now? Verizon. Neither do all that well when it comes to wanting to actually use either of my cell phones in my home. As a result, I've had to also pay for a land line to ensure that I could use the phone at all times. 

So, when I saw the announcement of the AT&T 3G Microcell, I was intrigued. It promised a lot of good things - 5 bars pretty much anywhere in 5000 sq feet and the ability to support up to 10 registered phones. Excellent, I thought, I'll give it a shot. The first downside is the price. $149 bucks is a healthy chunk of change to effectively use my home network to get AT&T service in the house. After all, I'm already paying for the network that AT&T leverages to provide coverage which I'm also already paying for.

Nonetheless, I gave it a shot thinking that I might be able to get rid of the cost of my land line. Setup was pretty easy - if you can or have setup a home wireless router or something similar you can set this up no problem. The odd thing is that the device has an embedded GPS chip. Apparently, this is for enhanced 911 services and, presumably, so you're not taking it with you and selling telephone service. The net effect is that you are best off setting it up very near a window - if not, it can take a long time to acquire a signal. The setup took about 30 minutes and I was even able to move it to the center of the house afterward - and it was able to get a lock just fine.

So how does it work? It's been doing pretty darn well. The voice quality does seem very good - though the range is less than advertised. Walk outside and you loose the signal awfully fast. And, as I said, the price of entry is high. I'm hopeful after using this for another few weeks, that I can drop the land line so this thing can start paying for itself.

Blogging for a reason

I've been blogging for a while now, mostly on whatever thoughts cross my mind. However, I've just begun an MBA class called Management Concepts for eBusiness. This class will explore the questions about how virtual businesses compete with traditional brick and mortar stores as well as dealing with social networking tools such as blogs. So, welcome to my fellow classmates who will be sharing this space for the next 10 weeks or so. I will try to be insightful as well as informative.

I'll also be labeling anything specific to this class with an "MBA" tag. That stream can be found here.

Dual Drive Failure

I've always know that a solid backup strategy is important. In my roles as MIS Manager or LAN admin, I always knew that no storage model is without flaw. I've seen issues even with fully redundant SAN solutions where critical issues still impact the sanctity of storage. 

Last week, the issue hit closer to home. I was away on a trips and I returned to an array failure. At home, I like to run a RAID 1 array to protect my music, documents and video files. I like the security of having one drive be an exact copy of the other. That way if a drive fails, you still have your data. The only point at which this falls down, is if both drives fail at once.

About a month ago, one of the 1TB drives in the array failed. I contacted Western Digital and they quickly verified my drive's warranty and I was able to select advanced replacement shipping - all on their web site. It was great. I put the new drive in my computer and then the array rebuilt in about a day. After that, I was all set. However, after running the new drive for about 2 weeks, I came home from a trip and found that not only had the replacement drive failed, but so had the original drive.  I guess Google was onto something with their drive failure study. Clearly, this left me with a total data loss situation.

Luckily, my Windows Home Server backs up my computer every day. In addition, I have a subscription to Mozy which keeps my backups off-site.  The negative with the Windows Home Server is that it seems to only allow a restore to the same drive letter. Since that array had a total failure, that wasn't an option. Mozy, however, allows you to choose your destination. So, I began a restore from Mozy to one of my other 1TB drives. That was a week ago, and it's still running. I believe the restore I've requested is almost 200GB so I fully expect it to take awhile.

Why I am wasting so much time downloading this when the data is on my home server? I have little faith in redundancy right now, so even though the home server is using data protection, I'm feeling better getting a second copy. In the meantime, I've sent both drives off to Western Digital. I hope they get back quickly - as Advanced Replacement was inexplicably not an option when you have a problem with two drives.

ACORD 2010

Early last week, I attended the ACORD/LOMA 2010 conference. I had never attended one before even though I've been in the insurance industry for quite some time. What is ACORD/LOMA? In short, ACORD is the technical standards body for the insurance industry and LOMA is composed of the training folk who help technologists learn insurance domain knowledge.

This year, the conference was held in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay casino.The facility is top notch and Vegas is certainly a city that's all about the convention. The only negative is that it's a 15 minute commute by foot between the rooms and the convention area. Beyond that, the food was good and the staff pleasant.


As to the show itself, it was a nice blend of sessions for the agency, the carrier and vendors. While it had the tendency to become commercialized at times (what show isn't?), it still was chock-full of topics and issues that are helpful to me in my role as a product manager. The show didn't have an obvious theme, though I was surprised at how much the larger vendors have moved into the insurance space. I'm familiar with all the various insurance vendors, but now joining the effort are the household names such as Microsoft, Oracle and HP. Each of these were platinum providers and are clearly starting to pay attention to the insurance vertical.


Other items of note are a continued emphasis on the standards we know and love, such as ACORD XML, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the move of services to the cloud. Microsoft was intensely emphatic about the latter and freely mentioned their Azure platform, Sharepoint 2010 and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.


I am not sure where all of this will lead, but I hope to attend next year's conference to continue to see how the industry looks to evolve.

Traveling with the iPad

Over the last 10 days, I've made two trips with the iPad. The flights ranged from an 23 minutes to 4 hours.

How did it do? In a word? Brilliant. Here are my observations in no particular order:

1. The battery was MORE than sufficient for a day of travel. On my first day, I had a 4 hour flight, then a layover, then a 23 minute flight. Afterward, I met up with my family who proceeded to monopolize the device for about 4 hours. I was still left with about 39% battery life at the end of all that.
2. The younger faction of my family was intensely interested in using the iPad, but then again so was my father and he is 30 years older than I. 
3. On the various flights, I used the iPad for reading, playing games and watching a TV shows. It was very easy to view in a variety of lighting conditions, including bright sunlight.
4. One one flight, there were at least 2 other iPads. The users of each were women and were aged about mid 40's and upper 50's.
5. It was great that I never needed to take the iPad out of my bag for airport security. It's enough work to take the work laptop out.
6. The Apple case continues to hold up well and makes it easy to prop the device up in a variety of angles. This was helpful for watching video. 

Overall, I think I've found my newest best friend for traveling. It still is a little heavy for pure book reading, but I suspect I'll get used to it. It is much for flexible as a device, especially since I was so used to traveling with either the laptop or the iPhone. This slots neatly in between.

What I Want in iPad 2.0

No, this isn't about software, this is about the hardware. I know full well that iPhone 4.0 software is coming to the iPad this fall, so I'll defer any discussion about software features.

What I am writing about here is ways in which the hardware itself could be better. In other words, this is a hardware wish list.

1. A silent switch. If you hold down the volume, the iPad will quite quickly go to mute. But the downside to this approach is that you can't move between a set volume and mute easily. This is an annoyance already.
2. Vibrate. Just like the iPhone, it would be nice to receive vibration based alerts - especially when you mute the device. After all, we still do receive push notifications.
3. Faster charging. The battery life is great, but when you run the device all the way down, it takes a really long time to recharge - regardless of whether or not you plug it into the wall.
4. A "less-glossy" screen. Don't get me wrong, the glossy screen works in places with a lot of indirect or low lighting. But power this thing up in a room with overhead florescents and you are looking at a mirror.

Other folks have opined that they want a camera and a forward facing camera. Not this guy. The device is too large to use as a traditional camera and I don't do much video conferencing so I certainly don't need that either. 


I'm quite certain that late next summer, we'll be looking at iPad 2.0 and it will be interesting to see what it looks like.

iPad - One Month In

My iPad's cousin, the iPad with 3G was released yesterday to a significant amount of demand. No sales figures are available yet, but it's clear that a lot of people either wanted connection insurance or the ability to enjoy all the joys of the 'Pad anywhere.

So I thought I should update my ownership report since it's now been a month since I got my grubby little hands on mine. 

• I'm still surprised at how much interested there is when folks see the iPad or find out I have one. There's a lot of curiosity about the device, how it works, if I like it, etc. I'm very cautious when it comes to recommending technology to people, and the iPad is no exception. It's a great device for what it does, but it isn't, in most cases, a replacement for another device. It really does live in its own category.
• People are entranced at how smoothly the device rotates. I guess that's not something that most people focus on, but when they pick up the device and rotate it from portrait to landscape, they're impressed. I guess it's the little things. 
• It has been very stable. The one exception is that I do see issues every so often where it drops off my WiFi network at home or work. Turning WiFi on and then off usually does the trick, but it's a bit annoying.  Nonetheless, I have shut it down/powered it back up a few times and it does it MUCH faster than my iPhone 3G.
• I have not yet traveled with my iPad, but will do so later this month and it will be interesting to see how friendly of a traveling companion it is. I suspect it will be wonderful and it's great that I can take my own personal device with me even when I travel with my work laptop.
• I finally bought a few apps and I have an eye on a few more, but I'm waiting for them to become more mature. I've dropped about 20 bucks on apps and that probably is more than the total spend I've done on the iPhone over almost two years. This does not bode well for my wallet.
• Lastly, the iPad experience is better without the case. I've had the Apple iPad case on it since almost day one since I was very concerned about the safety of this $700 device. (Incidentally, this case has been on massive back orders since launch and now is selling for way more than the $40 I paid.) However, this weekend I removed the sleeve and found it a lot nicer to handle the device with the curved aluminum back rather than stuck inside the case. Try it and you'll see. However, most of the time, I still will have it inside the case, to protect the screen and be able to prop it up with the built in tilt.

So that's the summary. Would I buy it again? You bet? Am I wishing I waited for the 3G version? Maybe. The thing is that I don't really want to pay for another data plan - I already pay almost $80/month for the iPhone. So, I'll make do with a somewhat restricted device. And quite honestly, that's no different than if I would have bought a laptop.

The Downstream Effect

We have been making a lot of changes to our internal systems and software over the past month or so. And, it isn't hyperbole to say that there have been quite a few unintended consequences. They have ranged in severity from minor to critical and we have had a lot of challenge to get back on top of them quickly before there was customer impact.

I'm not pretending our planning and execution couldn't be better in some areas, but these types of issues are hardly unheard of in the midst of complex systems. We've built, in one way or another, most of our systems over the 30 years we've been in business. During that time, a lot of business, design and technological decisions have been made. And, no single person has a full understanding of how everything works together. In fact, most groups within the company are now specialized to one degree or another and have limited visibility that happens to the downstream side.

So what's the solution? There isn't just one, but the primary approach that we're trying to use is to leverage the power of teams and the group mind to view these changes in their own particular way. These groups aren't just technical in nature, they are also functional, operational and executive. There are business reasons to push for a particular time-frame, even though that can be difficult on the development, testing and operational teams. Likewise, it's important for Tech or Ops to report back to the Execs as to limitations in resources, systems and the resulting risk for that time line. 

As with most organizations, I'm finding ours to be a work in progress. There's nothing wrong with that at all though. It means that we keep reaching for continuous improvement, trying new and different things to get to where we need or want to be. At the end of the day, there's a lot worse situations to be in than that.