Chain Smoking Blue Monkey

The Monkey works somewhere that EndNote is the go-to app for bibliographic data collection.  I understand the need for EndNote, but EndNote still is a rather crappy application.

At its most basic, EndNote is nothing more than a specialized database app that is largely built around a plug-in for word processors (primarily Microsoft Word).  The really amusing thing to me is that the way the plug-in works and sees items denoted as entries is very, very old school.  You generally note entries that you want to be bibliographic in natures though some series of special character entries around a name of an author.  Then the plug-in just scours your document for those special characters and looks for the name of the author in the EndNote “library” (i.e. the database) and then proceeds to format the entries with a pre-existing template for a particular Journal.

Here is what EndNote really is all about: templates for journals.

That’s it.  The reality of EndNote has little to nothing to do with with actually collecting the bibliographic entries and keeping them stored.  That’s a pretty standard database.  You could probably built your own by point and clicking your way through FileMaker.  The true purpose of EndNote is that it is nothing more than a Microsoft Word plug-in with a collected set of formatting templates for the thousands of academic journals out there.  The plug-in simply looks at the template and says “Format the entries this way, please.” and then pulls the specific data from the database that is required by that journal.

EndNote is really the only thing out there, too.  There are a few other apps, but EndNote really has this market wrapped up.  They price their application accordingly.  $200 is the general per user cost for EndNote, and they update on a yearly basis, driving that psychological button of panic in academic circles of “That’s new! I need it!  It will give me an advantage over my academic competition!  If it’s new it must be better! Everyone else will be using it! BUY IT! NOW! NOW! NOW!”  EndNote also uses that as an opportunity to charge for basic maintenance fixes that they simply abandon in the previous versions.  In other words, they know there’s a problem in EndNote version X, but they’ll wait until version X1 to fix it and they won’t provide fixes to version X for free at all, because, well, hey, it’s going to be FIXED in the next version, right?  And everyone is going to BUY the next version anyway, right?

EndNote.  I am not a fan.

I hope it is simple and upgrade, but it is hard to tell what is going on.  I had come to rely on that for a variety of things and *poof* it just disappeared.  I am crossing my fingers that it is just an upgrade.  But in that Google usually comments on upgrades in their blogs, I do not have good feelings about this.

1. Moving windows down with the mouse to get them out of the way so you can see other things. There is a much better way to do that on any computer you are using. Alt-Tab for one. Yes, it may be the case than then you cannot “see” the two things together, but that might mean you should be arranging things differently anyway. Perhaps side by side is better for you. In that case, perhaps you need a big monitor. However, I see what you are doing there. I see that you are moving the window down as far as you possibly can move it. And that means you could be using key commands to cycle through open windows. On a Windows computer it is incredibly simple: Alt-Tab. That’s all. That will scroll through all open windows for you. If you install the App Switcher Power Toy you even get little snapshots of the open documents to scroll through. On a Mac, Command-Tab will do the trick, and if you are on a Mac you have a bevy of options in the form of Expose. It’s 2008 people. Moving windows down to the bottom of the screen with the mouse is about as far back as you can dig into habits before you start having to remember DOS commands (which would actually be better than moving windows around with a mouse). Mac users often have the option to scroll through any open program’s open documents via key commands. Command-~ works for Firefox, Safari, Entourage, and a number of other applications.
2. Using “Unread” or simply opening 75-100 emails at one time and using that as your “to do” reminders. Would you like to know why this does not work? How about when you get to well over 3,000 unread email messages? So, you will really being sitting down at some point in the near future and going through those 3,000 messages and addressing each one? Yeah, sure you will. Find a better way. Do I know one? I know what I do (use flagging and categories in Outlook and Entourage and search terms and labels in Gmail), but it may not necessarily work for you. I can tell you this much, however, what you are doing now clearly does not work. You are never going read those. Mark them read and move on. Find a new way to remind yourself of things. If you are 3,000 unread messages behind your system has failed. Your system does not work. It does not matter how long you have used that systems or how ingrained it is or how much of a habit it is. It is a bad habit that is not serving you well. The other habit also is not serving you well. Opening a large number of emails and just leaving them open as a “reminder” does not work once you pass a certain threshold. In fact, that holds true for BOTH of these habits. Once you have gone beyond seven to ten unread items or open emails to serve as a “reminder” to you, then your system has failed you. If you want that systems to work, then create a limit of how many things you will keep unread or how many emails you will keep open as a reminder. Stick to it. Maximum: ten unread items / ten open emails to serve as a “reminder”. Beyond that you simply are doing nothing more than an electronic version of piling paper on your desk.
3. Relying on email attachments. There are so many better ways to work. Email attachments are not only messy, but they really are a burden to email systems and to simplification processes. One of the most misunderstood processes of email email attachments are the fact that for you to read them and edit them the thing you are looking at has to be downloaded from your email account to your computer. If your email is on your computer, then it still has to be decoded by the email application and then moved into some other location to open. Attachments (except for a few things like images) are handed off to the operating system to handle. Are you emailing anything remotely private or sensitive in those attachments? Do you know the location of that directory where those attachments are being downloaded? Probably not. Changing that location on a Windows computer is no easy task, either. Mac users are not immune to this either in that it works the same way by pushing that file to a local directory that you most likely do not know the location of to begin with and might have a difficult time changing later. Yes, it is true that in some instances email attachments are a necessary evil. That is how you should think of them, too: necessary evil. What should you do? If you work somewhere with network drives, then you should save your data there and send links to it in email. Period. If you don’t work somewhere like that, then frankly I believe you should start using Google Docs to create shared documents.  Microsoft Office is not the only application out there, and unless you have a damn good reason to be using it then you probably do not need it.  I have been watching you use that, too, and I know you are mostly generating documents that are very basic.
4. Not saving your work.  Yes, it is 2008 and you would expect your application that does whatever it is your entire life revolves around at the moment would save automatically for you.  You would be wrong.    Most applications do not auto-save things for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being that you may not want to save that change you made.  However, do not assume that Microsoft products like Word and Excel automatically save anything.  If you have been working for five hours on that document and the power goes out, you might be able to get something back via the recovery too, but if you didn’t Ctrl-S every time you stopped typing then you lost your work.  Let me repeat that for you: IF YOU DID NOT SAVE YOUR FIVE HOURS OF WORK IN MICROSOFT WORD AT SOME POINT DURING THAT FIVE HOURS AND THE COMPUTER CRASHES THEN YOU LOSE IT ALL.  If you can develop a simple habit of hitting Ctrl-S (Command-S for you Mac users) you will save not only your work but a hell of a lot of grief for both you and me.  What Word DOES save is and Aut0Recover document every X number of minutes that you set it to save (10 minutes is the default).  So, it is 2008 and it is time for you to start learning to save your work.  Buck up kiddo and take a little responsibility for yourself.  It is a damn simple thing to do and ask yourself what is worse: Losing hours of work on a regular basis or learning to hit Ctrl-S whenever I stop typing an idea or thought?  (This works in Google Docs, too, btw.)
5. Saving everything on your desktop.  This is akin to Number 2 above.  Once you have passed a certain threshold then the desktop’s useful space is cluttered to the point of usability.  The point of saving things to the desktop is so that you can quickly see where it is to open it, but if you have 400 documents on the desktop then not only have you passed the point of usability and purpose but you have created nothing more than, once again, a virtual version of stacks of paper on the desktop.  Indeed, that is fine if you just ignore the desktop entirely and use it as an all purpose catch-all.  However, if you truly believe that you can find things there when you visually not distinguish text because there is so much clutter, then you should simply dump all of those things in “My Documents” or “Documents” (on the Mac) and find yourself a good indexed search tool.  I use Google Desktop for my Windows computer and the Macintosh has built in Spotlight to provide this search (although you can also get Google Desktop for Mac, and it works pretty well in conjunction with Spotlight).
6. Opening a document to do a Save As… to another location.  Yep, some of you are still doing this.  You have all sorts of other options, the main one being to click on a document’s icon and hold the mouse button down and drag the document to another window that is the other location.  Drag and drop.  Introduced in 1984 on the Macintosh computer.  It has been working well ever since.  You may ask yourself why this is a habit you need to get rid of in the first place.  If it works don’t break it, right?  True enough, but you are adding layers of complexity to a simple operation that do not need to be there.  This is a data move, not a data review or a data change.  You are only moving something from one place to the other.  If you need to review it first, by all mean, open it and Save As… all you want.  On Windows you can also Right-Click (oh, we will get to that next) and select “Send To…” and if you are using a flash drive (a.k.a. keychain drive, thumbdrive, etc.) you can actually send a document straight to that drive without even opening a window to show the contents of the drive.  On the Mac you are left to the tried and true drag-and-drop to achieve file copying.
7. Not knowing what a right-click (Windows) or control-click (Macs without a two button mouse) is.  Mice have been around on Windows computers since Windows hit the market, and on Windows computers mice have been right-click enabled since the beginning of Windows time.  What does right-click do?  WHAT DOESN’T IT DO, SIFL?!  Seriously, the right-click has enormous untapped functionality.  In some cases it is is not added functionality but necessary functionality.  On the Macintosh, though, right-clicking is a bit of a new development.  The old Macintosh OS previous to Mac OS X did enabled the ability to right-click via control-click (holding down the control button on the keyboard and then clicking the mouse button), but out of the box Mac OS X enabled two button mice to right-click to get these functions.  That was amusing (as it is now) since the mice that come with Macintosh computers are one button mice.  Throw that mouse out and get a two button mouse and learn to right-click on your Mac as well.  Mac laptop users you are out of luck unless you use a mouse.  The functionality is  still there with control-click.  The Mac laptop has a big, fat single button still, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future since Steve Jobs hates two button mice and trackpads.  I suspect you can remap the atrocious tap-click on the trackpad to be your control-click.
8. Know when to double-click and when to single-click.   Double-click on icons on the desktop to launch applications and double-click on a word in just about any application to select that word.   Have you ever wondered why your web browsing seems to have a mind of its own?  If you double-click on links in web pages or emails, that is why.  You are technically asking the computer to open that link two times.  Hyperlinks in emails, web pages, and within hypertext enabled documents are to be clicked only one time.  That is the case largely due to that being the ethos of the genesis of web browsing: the ability to make text lead to another thing instantly in the shortest possible manner.  One click and you are off to the link.  Of course, right-click can be used as well if you use a web browser that opens things in tabs you can right-click on a link and tell the browser “Open in new tab” or “Open in new Window” if you like clutter (which you do - again, I have been watching you).
9. Do not set your new computer to a resolution that is does not like.  In your case, this means do not set your 24″ wide screen monitor to 1024×768 resolution.  I do not care that you have bad eyes.  There are better ways to deal with that than displaying things in such a way that they do not take advantage of what you paid good money to be able to take advantage of.  A big monitor isn’t so you see things BIGGER, HUGER, CHUNKIER.  It is so that you have more real estate to work with.  If your eyes are bad then work with someone to set your computer up either with larger display fonts for your documents or to use Assistive Technologies.  You may think you want things to be BIG ALL THE TIME EVERYWHERE, but if you set things up the first time with large display fonts and proper Assistive Technologies you will begin to realize what you have been losing in time, effort, productivity and overall ease of use by clinging to a habit instead of moving forward to a new idea that gives you not the same results but a better result.
10. Your actual computer is not a hearty, unbreakable device.    Do not block airflow to your computer.  Do not put electronic devices like pencil sharpeners or space heaters on top of or near your computer.  Do not stack papers up in front of or behind your computer and block airflow.  Do not clean the keyboard with liquid if the keyboard is plugged in (otherwise, yes, wash it in the dishwasher with no heat dry and let it dry for 24 hours - no, I am not kidding, it works great).  Check your computer for dust and cleanliness twice a year and blow the dust out or vacuum it out.  Do not dump small particulate matter on the keyboard or in the computer or into a bag containing your laptop.  Do not put drinks on your laptop.  Do not set up your computer in such a way that you can entangle your feet in the cables and physically jerk them out of the ports on the computer.  Do not keep your computer in the same room (or possibly household) as dogs, cats, birds or any other animal that generates hair or dust.  Do not use Windex or any vinegar or ammonia based product to clear your monitor.   What should you do?

Deep linking used to mean, well, this.  I am sure it still does, of course.  I like that now it also means literally linking to servers that are down, down, deep into the earth too.

White boys may not can jump, but that didn’t prevent Steven from getting Air today. MacBook Air is an ok name. I guess. What about AirMac? Airbook? Yes, I know, it is part of the MacBook line up, and I’m just being silly.

CSBMonkey is not that desirous of power in a laptop as much as he is portability and functionality, and this meets those standards pretty well. The lack of Firewire indicates that despite YouTube, home video simply isn’t more than a niche market for most computer users. USB will let most people connect their still cameras or card readers. This is a laptop for leisure travelers, business travelers, writers and students, even if it does carry a premium price. It can also serve as a backup device for a lot of executives. Weight is a genuine issue when people consider laptops, especially people who travel frequently for their jobs. The DVI out is the main indicator that it was designed for people who want to use it for presentations in business meetings, and the USB port means not only cameras can be attached, but flash drives, which are a mainstay among business folks these days. The mini-DVI still forces folks into using a external dongle, which believe it or not, is a consideration for a lot of people who do not want to be in a scenario involving their presentation that is in Keynote and all of the sudden they realize they can’t connect their computer to the projector.

Air is an interesting product and one that I personally would buy if I were in the market for a Mac laptop. I can see it being an amazing tool for productivity driven workers. Light, easy on the back (but not on the bank account), fastest wireless available, USB port, etc. make it the type of laptop that people keep on their desk next to their regular workstation and then grab on the way out the door. I expect Apple will sell more power supplies for these than they will external SuperDrives. The Air is not a replacement device at all, but an supplemental device for people with high connectivity needs but application needs that exceed the iPhone and Blackberry. It is built for and aimed at (via the price) a high end market that sees $1800 as just breaking the impulse purchase price.

The new AppleTV is still sort of “eh” in my opinion. Definitely a step in the right direction, but squarely focused on you giving money to Apple for any videos it plays, and that still rubs me the wrong way, no matter what 20th Century Fox’s says about their included digital movie files on DVDs. (I saw those on the Die Hard 4 DVD when I was in Virgin Megastore a couple of weeks ago. Interesting that it was a pre-cursor to this announcement. It is good, though, that the media companies are realizing that their encryption on DVDs is laughable at best and downright stupid at worst.)

The inclusion of connectivity to Flickr on the AppleTV was practically under the radar, but I read that as a huge admission that .mac is still floundering as a place for people to put their photos. .mac’s galleries are nice but they are bulky and slow, and there is no getting around that fact. People use Flickr for a reason. As someone who was steadfastly in the anti-Flickr group until just recently, I can say that there are very good reasons to use Flickr over .mac. It’s much more affordable than .mac, and I suspect that the majority of people who are interested in using .mac are interested in using it to easily put photos online for their families and friends. .mac makes it easy, but $99 a year just for a 10B photo gallery and limited bandwidth (Apple does have a well buried but existing bandwidth quota) is a lot when you can up that to unlimited on storage and bandwidth with Flickr Pro for $25 a year: http://flickr.com/upgrade/ Not to mention that Flickr ties into damn near any blogging system you can throw at it. $99 a year for 10GB of space is even starting to bug me, and by the time my renewal rolls around this year it’s likely that I will have all of my email services over to gmail and stop using .mac altogether. Sorry Apple, but .mac is failing given the available resources for the same costs. $100 a year can get you a lot that works just as easy as .mac and which you can use from just about any platform.

Multi-person SMS! WOW! THAT’S REALLY… zzzzzZZZZZZZZZ! Hunh? $20 for what on my iPod Touch? Can’t I just Jailbreak my iPod touch and get those same things for nothing? Fail.

The Google Map thing I have to really look at more closely to get the full grasp of it.

Time Capsule I like. Sure, you can set this up yourself or buy other versions with embedded linux etc. but this thing works the way a Backing Up For Dummies should work. Thoughtlessly. That is how backup HAS to work for most people using computers and I am glad to see Apple making a big enough deal of it to actually design a product to do it. Time Capsule has a much larger impact on me than any of the iPod/iPhone related stuff he announced today. The real test of it for me will be if non-Mac platforms can easily back up to it. It is still a stellar looking product and it is likely to make an appearance in my own home during my next Mac purchase.

Overall I found the MacBook Air and the Time Capsule were the only remotely interesting things really going on today.

Here is a dirty little secret. The place that pays me to act as a chain smoking blue monkey doesn’t have a knowledge base. None at all. They think they do. They think the have provided the monkey a bucket to put his knowledge in. The monkey has inspected the bucket for quite some time now, and it turns out that it is a shit bucket and not a knowledge bucket. Now I know that sometimes those two are one in the same, but most of the time that’s not the case. The monkey isn’t stupid. He knows the differences between his buckets and he would appreciate his keepers not testing him about his bucket knowledge.

The monkey is curious, though, and he does wonder if you have what you know on hand. Do you have a bucket you put all your disparate knowledge into? Do you have a bucket that you put specific information into? And if so, what exactly ARE you using as a knowledge base bucket?

I have taken to using the free, small, fast, and flexible TiddlyWiki for collecting my own small knowledge bases. I have other buckets as well. Often just folders that I can drag things into based on my own little life categories.

The monkeys keepers don’t like wikis, though. I think there must be spirits in the wiki that scare them, although the spirits are not bad just free. Free spirits scare a lot of keepers. The monkey is using one at his pay day job anyway, though, and dumping all of his collected knowledge about day-to-day operations, cases that can impact large numbers of people, and just as a general point of collected information about the how, what and where of what the monkey does.

The monkey recently decided to make sure that the bucket gets smuggled out with him when he makes a break from the confines of the keeper built walls.

There are some simple rule in most professions and trades.  One of the most simple rules is this:

 Know the tools of your trade.

If your trade is being a doctor, you should know how to use the medical technology you use to treat patients.  If your trade is farrier then you should know how to mallets to create horse shoes.

If your trade is scientist, you should know how to use a computer.  As a scientist, as this point in time and history, your tools are no longer just your graduate student slaves, your charming personality and wit, and those piles of aging tools in your lab.  All of that is now secondary if you are a scientist.  Your tool of the trade is your computer.  Because what your profession is all about is information that you collect and then how you think about it.  If you don’t think about it differently than someone else, then you are not really a scientist then, are you?

Let me repeat this.  If you are a scientist, your tool of your trade is now your computer.  Because of that, you should know how to use the computer as well as you know how to use a telephone or a television or a door knob.  You should never have to call a desktop computer support person to ask how to map a network drive.  You should understand how your computer connects to networks.   I am not saying if you own a car you should know how to fix it.  I am saying that if you own a car you should know how to drive it.   You don’t hire a mechanic to drive your car, so you shouldn’t hire computer support technicians to do your most basic computing.  You don’t hire a mechanic to teach you to drive.  You shouldn’t hire a computer technician to teach you how to use your computer.  If you want to learn, then you take a few lessons and then you get in the car and you practice.  A lot.  You do not have to be a race car driver to get back and forth to work.  Similarly, you do not have to be a computer support technician to know how perform the essential functions of your computer.

If you don’t know when to double-click and click, then you may not know how to use the brake or gas.  If you push down on the brake when you meant to push down on the gas, then unexpected and jarring things begin to happen.  In some cases, very bad things may happen.

The things I do for work keep on going. I show up, do those things, and they keep paying me. It continues like that. Repeat.

Overall I can’t say I’m happy. Although I can’t say I am miserable or depressed.

There is ennui. There is malaise.

Why are there these things?

Complicated to define. Boredeom. Learned helplessness. Learned stagnancy. There are a lot of things I read (and have read) that talk about why this happens to us monkey in our efforts to keep on keepin’ on. Three Signs Of Miserable Job has many interesting probabilities. The Slacker Manager 13 of the 30 Reasons Employees Hate Managers (including part 2) also had the csbmonkey’s brain lighting up in the some of the pattern recognition centers.

Csbmonkey took some time during these dog days of summer long lunches to jot down just what it is about monkey’s particular form of daily repetitive tasks are starting to make csbmonkey feel more like a cagedforscientificpurposesmonkey instead. The clue is actually right there with the word repetitive. Csbmonkey hears the same questions every day, yes. Like most of the csbmonkeys out there. It’s part of the job, of course.

Nevertheless, the csbmonkey needs more to his life than the four concrete walls. Civilization shouldn’t collapse and the apocalypse shouldn’t have if csbmonkey is allowed to be outside of the walls some. It’s too bad the zoo keepers believe it’s nothing but pestilence and anarchy beyond the concrete walls they built. Csbmonkey could do some cool stuff.

The csbmonkey’s jobs are many.  Fix.  Prevent.  Crush. Kill. Destroy.  Save. Console.

And noticing.

Noticing things that the regular monkeys are noticing but don’t have the language or facilities to express except with a grunt here or a screech there.  And noticing things that the other chain smoking monkeys don’t notice either.  Things that that other chain smoking monkeys think the regular monkeys are grunting and screeching abou.t

This is one of the days when the csbmonkey  realizes that he is indeed a caged monkey.  One of those days when looking over at that other shiny cage is a realization that a shiny new cage is still a cage.  A day of caged recognition.  That to keep doing the non-monkey things in life one has to subject to being the monkey for a large portion of life.   It is not a good day for csbmonkeydom at all.

Soon you don’t even really bother picking at the lock of the cage anymore, since you realize that the small cage just happens to be sitting in a larger cage.  You can’t escape your monkeydom that easily.  Swinging from cage to cage is not swinging from tree to tree.

The csbmonkey is linked in spirit to his automaton cousins.  He does this thing because other people are doing a thing because someone wants a thing.   Whirrrrrr…