Hollywood has used this technique with great success; look at the recent reboot of the Star Trek movie franchise. A wormhole, some time travel, and the whole scenario starts over from scratch.

I’ve maintained a blog, off and on (mostly off), since 2003. It’s been a random collection of, well, crap. Some of it very, very good crap (if I may say so myself), but most of it crap, plain and simple.

So consider this a reboot of my blog. My old blog content still exists, though it’s moved to a permanent archive site. It’s searchable, and there is still stuff of value there, but I’m going to focus my efforts here.

“Focus” is a very important word: one of the problems with a blog like mine is that it was very unfocused: mostly a random collection of stuff I found here and there, and things I wanted to rant about. Here, I’m going to try to be more focused: I really am interested in the intersection of technology and our society, and I want to keep things focused on that.

I also want to be more consistent in my updates. I cannot guarantee a new post per day, nor a new post a week, even, but I do hope to do better than I did before. And I invite your participation and feedback as, together, we explore new worlds, search out new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.

I’ve now been using these headphones for more than a week and, quite frankly, it’s pretty upsetting. A few years ago, I paid more than $300.00 for a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones, and I’m seriously thinking of throwing them away.

Don’t get me wrong: the Bose headphones aren’t terrible. But the bass is so amplified, so overwhelming, that the impression I get from them after hearing the Urbanears is that everything sounds muddy. The Bose have the advantage of noise cancellation, which actually works very well if there are repetitive, droning sounds (like a window fan, and air conditioner, or airplane engines). And the Bose are extraordinarily comfortable; I could wear those for hours and never get tired of the feel. The Urbanears have a tendency to pinch my ears after an hour or so, and the material of the cushioning is more like vinyl than leather so that my ears get sticky and sweaty after a bit.

I also had the opportunity to compare the Urbanears with a pair of Sony headphones in roughly the same price range; very similar in sound, though I think the Urbanears are a bit brighter and have more clarity (and my friend who loaned me the Sonys agrees).

My summary of the Urbanears:

• Pros: Absolutely superb sound clarity and reproduction, approaching the quality of the best studio headphones and monitors I’ve used; elegant design; foldable; spare plug on the side lets a friend connect and share the music with you; microphone and button to let you use them with the iPhone (adapters for Nokia phones or simple stereo plugs are also provided).
• Cons: tends to pinch and get sweaty after a while; no active noise cancellation; makes me hate my $349 Bose headphones.

All in all, a very good value for $60.00.

This afternoon, I came home to find a package from Sweden waiting for me. It was a pair of Urbanears “Plattan” headphones that I had ordered a few weeks ago.

Urbanears is an upstart headphone company; they say that

Urbanears is a collective out of Scandinavia, motivated by a common interest in global relationships and shared involvement in the relevance of the living brand. Urbanears promotes a deeper connection to color, form and people while providing the freedom to transcend individuality and unify the sound experience.

High ideals, certainly, and they’re certainly eye-catching, but how do they sound?

I’ll have to admit that my very first impression wasn’t good. I had been listening to my $349 Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones at work, and my initial impression was that the sound was very flat with the Urbanears. After flipping between several songs on my favorite playlist, I soon decided that these weren’t flat; the Bose headphones were indeed very muddy, with artificially-enhanced bass and poor quality high tones.

Having spent some time in a recording studio, the best analogy I can make is that these sound like a set of highly-balanced studio monitors, with an extremely flat response. I can hear high notes better with these than I ever had with the Bose. The clarity is amazing, at least to my aging ears.

I don’t think these are for everyone. If you live for the thump of the artificially-enhanced bass lines in some music, you probably won’t like these. If you like classical, jazz, or more complex music, you’ll probably appreciate the clarity.

This is just my initial impression, so I hope to report back in a few weeks to see how they stand up to repeated use.

[Robert Scoble](http://scobleizer.com) hits the nail on the head when he says that, “[On my phone I only use voice about 5% of the time I use my iPhone.](http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/11/why-i-cant-kick-the-apple-iphone-habit/)” He was responding to [Louis Gray's post on how he switched from iPhone to Android](http://blog.louisgray.com/2010/07/why-i-turned-in-my-iphone-and-went.html).

It amuses me to hear the ongoing debates about call quality on AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint, etc. My personal experience is, of course, nearly irrelevant (since my personal experience may have little to do with how you or someone else experiences it), but I’ve been with AT&T for 10 years now and cannot yet find a reason to change.

I live in a house in the hills east of the Santa Clara Valley. The nearest cell towers (of any variety) are over 3 miles away. I get one bar of signal strength no matter which carrier I use. When I had an [Amazon Kindle](http://www.amazon.com/kindlestore) (which uses SprintVerizon for its “Whispernet” service), I often had difficulties downloading books to it. Recently, I’ve installed an [AT&T 3G Microcell](http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/why/3gmicrocell/) in my home, and I now get 5 barsstars. Likewise, at work, there is an AT&T repeater. In addition, since AT&T is a partner of Yahoo!, we get a substantial employee discount on service. So, you see, I have a huge number of incentives to stick with AT&T. In addition to that, however, is the fact that I’ve almost never had connectivity problems; I suppose that, if I lived in downtown San Francisco where I competed with tens of thousands of other users, I might have problems, but I don’t.

But, to return to the original discussion—I use my iPhone so rarely as a phone, the carrier is nearly irrelevant. I use [Skype](http://www.skype.com) on my MacBook Pro more often for voice communication than I use my iPhone. Unlike Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, I don’t have companies tossing various models of Android at me to let me try them for a few weeks, so I can’t compare. But the essence of my argument is that, for many “mobile professionals,” the telephone carrier is almost irrelevant. Both AT&T and Verizon are “good enough,” and we should be making our purchase decisions on other factors, such as the battery life (which seems to stink on every so-called “smart phone”).

Louis Gray agrees when he points out that the call quality isn’t what moved him from iPhone:

Yes, AT&T has been dramatically underdelivering in terms of quality and functionality, but this did not drive me away from Apple as much as the lack of choice did.

If you are a person who spends most of his or her time on the phone, then call quality *should* be a determining factor in which phone you purchase. For the rest of us, the user experience, battery life, underlying platform, and so-called “ecosystem” of applications and support are vastly more important than which carrier we choose.

Practice makes perfect

Actually, a better phrase is “Practice makes permanent, so always practice perfect.” It’s astonishing to me how often someone will give a presentation when it’s obvious that they haven’t looked at it in months, if at all. Nothing reduces your credibility quite like saying, “Huh, I didn’t know that,” when the slide of last quarter’s sales figures comes up on the screen. Always make sure you run through your slides in a rehearsal before you present, or otherwise you’ll look like a loon. A rehearsal, by the way, does not mean merely skimming through and reading silently; you actually need to plan on saying what you’re going to say in the presentation (see the next tip).

When you rehearse, you should pretend that you’re actually presenting; make sure you allow time for questions, and make sure that you know how long the presentation will take. You look like a fool if you are on slide 31 of 60 when you’ve reached the end of your allotted half-hour and there’s a crowd of people standing outside waiting to use the conference room. You should know, within 10%, exactly how long your presentation takes.

Don’t read the fucking slides

Is there anything more annoying than having someone put up a slide that says, “Sales increased in the last quarter,” and then to say, “Sales increased in the last quarter,” as if the audience is composed of fucking idiots who cannot read? If you’re going to read the fucking slide, then just create a PDF version and email it to everyone at the meeting and save us all an hour.

Use presentation mode

Every commercially-available presentation software has a mode for editing or creating slides, and another one for presenting them. If you’re presenting, then put the damned thing in presentation mode. I watched a presentation the other day where the presenter kept it in edit mode the whole time, sometimes accidentally moving text blocks off the screen while he was attempting to point out things on the page.

Turn off interruptions

Yes, I know you use Gtalk and Yahoo! IM and IRC and who knows what, but turn them off when you’re presenting. You’re trying to impress people with your professionalism, not give them a laugh when your best friend messages you during the meeting with, “Damn, I just farted and the whole building smells bad.”

Turn off your cell phone. You can’t keep other people from interrupting you with their tinny version of “Don’t Stop Believing,” but you don’t have to inflict that on everyone.

Turn off your email notifications. Do you really want, “New message: Are you as hot as I am right now?” popping up during your presentation to the CFO?

Don’t turn off your screen

Seriously. Most people have their laptops set so that the screen will go dark after some minutes of inactivity. It’s quite common to get involved answering a question, and then suddenly have the screen go dark. It’s hugely distracting; people’s attention is suddenly diverted to the now-dark screen while the presenter frantically wiggles his or her mouse or trackpad, trying to get it to come back on. With some projectors, it will take a minute or two to warm back up again.

If you have a Mac, get Caffeine. This is a little utility that looks like a coffee cup that sits in your menu bar. Click it, and it will turn black, and your screen will no longer automatically turn off. Click it again, and it will turn white, and everything will work normally. I’m sure there’s a similar utility for Windows, or just right-click on the desktop and change the screen settings to not automatically dim/turn off the screen.

Be prepared

Finally, make sure you know how to connect your laptop to the projector. If they projector uses a VGA connector and your laptop has a DVI, then make sure you have an adapter. If your laptop and presentation software supports dual screens, then make sure that the presenter screen is on the laptop and the main presentation is on the overhead screen. Arrive a few minutes early, if possible. It’s stupid and expensive to have a group of highly-paid professionals sitting around while you impress them with your skills or lack thereof in attempting to get everything working.

If you follow all these tips, praise and promotions are sure to follow.

1. lower-level employees are given responsibility and the ability to work under their own initiative, and
2. higher-level managers need to know what’s going on.

This is called *management.* The net result of this is that you will almost certainly, at some point in your career, be called upon to give a Status Report.

A Status Report can be as simple as a casual office conversation, an email, or a fancy presentation complete with overhead slides, video, and a soundtrack. No matter what the medium, there are a number of things that you should and should not do in a status report. Here’s my list of the most important things to understand about a status report; forget these at your peril.

1. No surprises

Surprisingly, a status report isn’t about you reporting on your status. Your manager should already have a general idea of your or your project’s status. If you have problems with your project (for example, you’ve fallen behind schedule), then you need to let your manager know *immediately,* and not wait until it’s time to present your status report.

What, then, you may very well ask, is the purpose of the status report? Simply, it’s to convey all that information to your manager in a form that he or she can use to relay to his or her manager, and to give your manager the necessary time to analyze the status and ask questions about it. If you write a status report, your manager may do nothing more than aggregate your report along with those of a number of other people and transmit it through the proper channels. On the other hand, your manager may actually be able to offer valuable advice or suggestions on overcoming obstacles or roadblocks.

Remember, if there’s news, then a status report is *not* the place to bring that up, though it’s always necessary to repeat it. When you tell your manager your news (good or bad), it will almost certainly be immediately relayed up the chain of command; the formal status report will act as a reminder and will help your manager determine what action needs to be taken in response to the change in status.

2. No big changes

Really, everything else that follows is essentially a corollary of number 1, “No Surprises.” In my organization, we code projects as green, yellow, or red, meaning, logically, “on track,” “possibly off track,” and “definitely not going to make that date.”

A project should *never* be downgraded more than one step. In other words, there is *no* excuse for a project being “green” on one status report and “red” the next. This is a clear sign that people have not been paying attention to the project (i.e., “managing” it) or that something is seriously wrong. If you want to make your manager extremely perturbed, then going from “green” to “red” in one status-report cycle is the way to do it.

Like the “no surprises” rule, this one can be handled by ensuring proper communication with your manager in between status reports. Unless you’re a polar explorer who’s out of touch with your base camp for 60 days at a time, there is *always* some way of letting your boss know when something has gone bad with a project.

Generally speaking, the best way to avoid this is by simply staying on top of your project at all times.

3. Accept responsibility

That is, accept responsibility for what you’re doing. If your status report consists of phrases like:

• “The IT department wouldn’t let me have more paper.”
• “We couldn’t talk the Ops guys into installing our new code.”
• “We upgraded, but the new package had bugs in it.”

what your manager will hear is:

• “blah, blah, blah, blah, I didn’t plan well, blah, blah.”

If you needed to give the Ops team 2 weeks’ notice and you didn’t, then step up and take responsibility. Even better, come prepared with a plan for addressing the problem. If your report says,

• “We didn’t give Ops two weeks’ notice, so we shifted the widget preparation a week ahead in the schedule so that we could move the deployment out by a week.”

then your boss will see you as a capable, responsible individual who is taking charge of the situation.

4. Wrap up with the positives

Which sounds better to you?

1. We didn’t get the encryption keys in time to deploy the patch.
2. We finished the patch ahead of schedule, and we could have deployed it had we been able to get the encryption keys in time. We’ll do that first thing next week.

If you said #2, go to the head of the class. The problem with #1 is not that it isn’t truthful, it’s that it’s incomplete (assuming all the facts are true). Many people will simply state the negatives in their status report (many formal status reports have a section for “needs attention” or “issues”), and this can leave a bad taste in your manager’s mouth.

While some people might simply call this *spin* (and I’ll admit that it has much in common with that politically-charged word), it’s actually a valuable technique for letting your manager know that you’re in control of a project.

5. Use the report yourself

Too many people think of a status report as simply a bureaucratic chore that you do for your manager’s benefit. Don’t think of it that way: make it into something that you can *use* yourself. Make your status report reflect your continuing planning, anticipation, risk assessment, and analysis of your project. You can then speak with confidence, and will be much more valuable to your organization in the long run.