The Keynote with Victoria’s Own Mike Vardy creative professional extrodinare.

The real power of WordPress is in it’s general adoption and the large community of supporters. This conference is a great example of that. The best quote of the morning was Mike’s ”Familiarity breeds CONTENT”.

The other great thing about these events, especially at this size (not too big.. not to small) is the energy. If you could harness the energy in this room you could probably have new Johnson St bridge in 10 minutes.

It is not like I pine for a career flying the line, like Captain Dave , or the ups and downs of regional flying like the Aviatrix, or even cranking and banking in a CF–18. Although, every once and a while I think that last one might be REALLY cool.

I like being a network geek and teaching was a good job too.

But flying is a passion, to the point I would not really want to make it a job. The thought that I can – with a few dollars – push an airplane around the sky when the immediate annoyance I am dealing with is over, is probably the best feeling in the world.

I can sit and code PERL on my computer but the buzz from the ATC chatter of Live ATC in the background gives me energy. I can walk to work or pull on the rowing machine at the gym but I have The Airplane Geeks or Plane Crazy Down Under on my earbuds. When my niece and nephew send me birthday pictures, they inevitably include an airplane.

I celebrated a birthday recently, which was nice, but next summer I will celebrate 30 years as the holder of an aviation license.

I’m strongly considering a trip back to the place where I got my first set of wings in 1982. To stand on the ramp. To look at a little bit of sky.

It would be great if your job could deliver all the passion you need. But hobbies, avocations, and those bits of true passion you have are frequently found in much smaller doses. Nothing particularly wrong with that, maybe they are truly better served with a bit of scarcity.

Here is my best attempt from my walk at lunch today.

There are so many ways to get at the real ‘source’ of good information that there really isn’t any point in dealing with the ‘smart’ middle men. If I want to know what its like to develop for the iPad – I’ll go listen to Marco Arment , if I want to understand how to get productive, I’ll read David Allen. These are situations that only used to to be achieved by traveling to expensive conferences or, if that isn’t and option, accepting a less capable, cheaper substitute. Usually in the form of one of the many local training and workshop businesses or perhaps an online equivalent.

You can always talk to colleagues or friends and get good ideas that way, and if you are lucky enough to have a true expert in your circle – then why go any further.

So there is an polarization of ‘smart’.You accept local, quick, and un-expert or you reach over all the middle ground and go to the true ‘gurus’. That can happen through a podcast, online forum, chat room, whatever communication mode works…..

So there are people that have made a living re-selling ‘smart’ to a particular audience and I think those days are numbered. The value of their ‘smarts’ will rapidly approach zero. Those training organizations that would sell you an Excel training course, when all you need is someone to tell you how to organize a pivot table from 3 columns of data.

There have been an increasing number of online ‘solutions’ to this problem with things like Yahoo Answers and Quora. But all those really do is make you pool of colleagues with ideas a little bigger, they really don’t connect you to the real ‘smart’ people. Online training has also attempted to do this with sites like Lynda.com. They also really just replace the local strip mall version of “XYZ technical institute”. But soon, someone is going to get this right. Podcasts are the closest I’ve seen with real thought leaders sharing their ideas.

Can’t help thinking someone out there is really close to aggregating supply and demand to be the Amazon of ‘smart’ and make really cool, useful, and thought provoking ideas available at achievable cost. I think it will become critical for a direct cost model so that the audience not some advertiser drive

Here is hoping that is really soon.

12 Epicurious Because every operating system starts with a recipe card application….

11 IMDB the couchside answer to all you TV/Movie watching questions

10 Pastebot Getting Copy and Paste to your computer

9 Remote – the way I want to run all the media in my house….

8 Mobile Mouse – sofa control for my media Mini and any PC or Mac

7 Rivet – just started usign this but it is looking like a winner for my cross device media streaming from the computers to my iPhone,iPad, Xbox, and PS3…

6 Evernote – uses vary but I load pictures of reciepts into it and they are searchable – Sweet

5 Twitter Client of Choice – I use Twittleator Pro

4 GoodReader there are others.. this works and is relatively cheap

3 NoteTaker HD – Handwritting Note app

2 Reeder – All my RSS feeds, all the time

1 Instapaper- Anything I need to read, when I have a moment to read it.

While the best tend to be popular, widely used titles the honourable mentions go to the niche excellent titles…

Foreflight … as a pilot I’d buy an iPad just to put Foreflight on it.

Textexpander – should use it more than I do on the iPad – make that a new years resolution for 2011 – won’t live without it on my Macs…

Omnifocus if you are serious about Getting Things Done…

1Password – it was mostly for password syncing to the Mac but they have a PC client our now too… Saves a lot of typing and keeps you from wimping out on your passwords.

StarWalk – I was initally impressed by Elements for the way to make science compelling on the iPad but Starwalk is just flat out cool on any scale… See the universe by holding it up to the sky .. literally

For the first time since I can remember, I’m not running any analytics packages on either of my blogs. I’d been running either SiteMeter, or Google Analytics, or WordPress.com Stats, or Piwik, since (almost?) day 1. I’d sworn off third party analytics apps recently, because I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be feeding companies with detailed information about everyone that comes through my sites

via no analytics | D’Arcy Norman dot net.

I turned off Google Analytics on my sites a couple of months ago. If I really need to look there are basic stats available from my hosting provider but I find I’m not looking at those either. Unless you are “monetizing” your blog with Ads and referrals there is little purpose in keeping that kind of track of your viewership. It is interesting to be sure, but unless you are actually engaging in conversation with those that come to your site – what does it really matter if you have a ‘profile’ of who they are.

It used to be the case, that there would be some influential blogs and you would go to that site and engage in a comment tread, maybe someone would host a discussion board on something really interesting. But now that seems to be a really rare event. Discssion forums are pretty much dead except for the software support sites and the Facebook Wall. If you want to reply to something someone else you put it up on your own blog and go from there. Peer-to-Peer communication – as it were.

Which is kinda what I did right here….

Forget the fraudently activity that I had to pay for then fight to get my money back. – still waiting by the way!

Forget after the poor service I still need to pay them for an additional 30 days after I cancel.

Because My cancellation will be effective 5 days into my next billing cycle, they will bill me for a complete additional month, beyond the 30 days. Then I will need to wait 74 days to get the excess refunded.

FIFTY FIVE (30 for notice + 25 for balance of billing cycle) days to make the cancellation happen plus SEVENTY FOUR days to give me my money back. 129 days and that is if they don’t f-it up again.
And its probably 74 business days so that is 104 real days so it could be as much as 159 days… it is beyond belief

The other factor in the size of the iPad is the Battery with Battery Life winning fans (~80% ‘totally satisfied’)

All credit for the stats go to Harry McCracken and his publication Technologizer

For example Powerpoint is a functional piece of software (fit for use) and is an acceptable presentation tool (fit for purpose). But some people attempt to use it as an image editing tool because that is all they have – that is a purpose it really isn’t fit for.

For all my talk of the iPad, there was a stated purpose that I had hung a large part of my purchase on. Can the iPad be my Electronic Flight Bag. Saturday, I finally tested that premise with a short but practical field test. A short sightseeing flight with a passenger in one of the club airplanes.

Now the actual in airplane usage is only part of the flight bag concept. Much of staying current as a recreational pilot is staying aware of the rules, regulations and changes in airspace. In Canada, that means dealing with Transport Canada and Nav Canada information.

Transport Canada has done a good job of getting the basic information out in the form of theTransport Canada Aeronautical Information Manual. While the basic rules don’t change that often the Information Circulars and the Supplements need to be reviewed regularly. For example Information Circular 11/10 lists changes to the airspace around Vancouver and Victoria that will affect my future flights which will show up in the new map I need to buy after July 19th. All this information used to be part of a tedious paper process that would fill a small garbage can every 56 days. These PDFs combined with GoodReader on my iPad is a more than capable substitute although I may end up using iBooks which now also does PDFs. The advantage of Goodreader is it will pull these right down from the website.

NavCanada data is a little harder to come by. They have put up basic information such as the Airport Diagrams but you still need the official documents in hard copy. Carrying the hard copies are going to be the rule for the foreseeable future but it would be nice to have a quick reference version (free or paid). I’m really hoping the folks at Foreflight can get a agreement for Canadian charts and info in there excellent iPhone and IPad application. I was able to use the moving map display as part of the US charts overlap Victoria, which is an awesome cross check to the printed charts, but less useful once I get near Naniamo (CYCD).

What Foreflight can provide in Canada is the Weather information I would have collected from the Flight Planning website. Long gone are the yellowing rolls of teletype paper that was the standard up to the 1990s. While I had this on the iPhone for the last year, the iPad takes it to a new level. The graphical forecasts such as the Graphical Area Forecast and the Surface Analysis. It does have NOTAMs but I still would rely on the NavCanada website for that. I printed out the local NOTAMs for last Saturday’s Flight. Foreflight does provide some airport data but not enough to replace the Canadian Flight Supplement (CFS).

I will admit that it was a little more of a reminder to read all this aviation information when those piles of ammendments were siting on my desk. However, The iPad combined with some reliable sources of PDFs and live information does give me a better chance of finding something when I do go looking for it. I’m counting on that making me a safer and more informed pilot, which in the end makes me more fit for my purpose – every time I get in the airplane.

PS – Canadian Owners and Pilot Association has an electronic version of their COPA Flight newspaper. Although it is a Flash version online, I was able to generate a PDF to sync to iBook on my iPad.

If you accept that multitasking is really a myth, then all you do when you attempt to work on multiple, divergent tasks at the same time is preform the PC equivalent of fast-swtiching. This is when computer theory and brain theory have a little in common. Task switching takes overhead, not a lot in some cases, but enough to reduce the efficiency of a person or a process. In my mind that isn’t the biggest risk. Lack of focus, leads to loss of ‘resolution’ meaning that little things can slip.

Eventually you discover the missed bit of info and loop back, voiding a large chunk of work, and do it over. Or worse, you accept a level of garbage in your output. In computer talk, this problem also occurs when you attempt parallel processing (failed branch prediction). For the rest of us, it amounts to “there’s never time to do it right but there’s always time to do it over…” If unitasking helps me focus, and it reduces the ‘do overs’ then I’m a happy guy.

There have been many technology efforts to control the way in which an individual may use content. DRM is the most obvious one but there have been many protocol and regulatory changes that have attempts to accomplish this. The Broadcast Flag is one that keeps rattling around in my head and may be coming back in another form.

In the end this is attempts to create a technology solution to a people problem. On this I complexly agree with Dave – people think content is free and it isn’t. Unfortunately it has been the content providers that have pushed this point and get offended when if bites them. On one had they have been unable to gain a direct revenue model (consumer pays) and rely on a secondary revenue market (consumer watches, brands pay for ads, ads bias consumer behaviour, brands earn revenue).

Some providers have already questioned this model like this article from ReadWriteWeb;  “Financial Times Expects Direct Payments” I already pay (voluntarily) for many of my ‘free’ podcasts.

So back to the original discussion, is accepting Ads prior/along with content something viewers should expect to ‘give up’ to keep content free? The existence of RSS feeds have already seen this battle of full versus excerpted feeds. The Vancouver Sun does that with their feeds that combined with a slow loading website caused me to drop them from my feeds and resort to a Google News Alerts instead. Most sources are prepared to provide an RSS feed which allows viewing of content without viewing the entire page.

I think part of my view is shaped by the fact that Advertising is just Voodoo to me. I really can’t get past the idea that if everyone stopped advertising the market wouldn’t be much different from the way it is today. Probably pretty niave but that is what is at the heart of my attitude toward it.

No matter what technology you try, you may get the Ads to me, but you can’t make me care….