Endless Knots

Boston KM Forum - April 9, 2008

I'm speaking at "KM 2.0 – Real or Hype?" - the upcoming Boston KM Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge at Bentley College.

Here's the abstract of my talk, "Moving Beyond 2.0 Resistance:"

Twenty years ago, an aspiring social network analyst asked us for the names of everyone in our database. He had a program that could link them up, he said, help them find one another, spark new connections. How intrusive, I thought. Who’d want that? Years later, he would go on to design one of the major social networking sites. I resisted and resisted – and then something happened: someone I trusted explained blogging to me, someone else invited me onto Facebook…and the rest is what brings me to Boston KM Forum. This talk will be about resistance to Web 2.0, even among people like myself who’ve been online forever, and what happens when that resistance gives way to powerful experiences.

And here's the rundown of the other speakers and their topics:

* Mark Frydenberg, a Senior Lecturer at Bentley:  Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management

* Ray Sims, formerly Director of KM at Novell:  KM and Web 2.0 – A User’s Perspective

* Dan Keldsen, Director of Market Intelligence at AIIM:  Enterprise 2.0 = KM 2.0?

* Jeff Cram, Managing Director, and David Aponovich, Content Management Specialist, ISITE Design:  Case Study:  The Siemens BeFirst Portal

* Larry Chait, Chait and Associates:  Wrap-up:  KM 2.0 - Why We Should Care

8:15-4:00 on Wednesday, April 9, 2008, Bentley College in Waltham, MA.  The fee, including light breakfast and full lunch, is $50.

For more information and to register, go to the Boston KM Forum site.

Hope to see you there…

No books in the whole apartment?

I generally like the-back-of-the-book essays in The New York Times Book Review, have been composing one in my head for a long time: “How I Came to Learn that Carlos Fuentes Loves Bluefish.” Alas, I cannot give this away before writing it so, in the meantime, today’s essay in the Book Review, It's Not You, It's Your Books, prompts this post.

Dump him/her, it says, if your reading tastes are not compatible. Fortunately, my hubby and I didn’t make this a criterion, lest those shelves of science fiction - which he regards as something close to sacred and I’ve never gotten past Page Two of - would have rent us asunder. That said, I made this compatibility a key magnet between the main characters of a novel.

Read Rachel Donadio’s piece if this difference in taste troubles you.

Meanwhile, this tidbit from the annals of relationship history as contributed by my friend, Hannah, who spent many a year searching for her true love, a mission successfully completed two Junes past.

Before the Internet, she was a major contributor to the income stream of the personal pages of The Village Voice and The New York Review of Books. Her ads weren’t turning much up so I jumped in with my aforementioned pencil (previous post), wrote what I regarded as a killer ad, which naturally turned up many suitors (including a few suits). None was so amusing as the attorney whom she went on one date with, during which he talked about their respective summer homes and how wonderful their shuttling between the two would be. Said he’d call her the next day (remember the phone? that communication device that people once used?). Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. And then three months later he left a voicemail, said he was sorry, that he couldn’t continue the relationship.

Back to the point of this post. The drill went like this: Hannah would call to tell me about an impending date, then report in when she got home, on occasion the following morning. We’d do quick  post-assessments including checklist questions like whether he held the door, picked up the check, appeared to have changed his clothes since the ’60s, and of course whether he was cute, funny, and smart, without which...One night, around 9 o’clock, early for the post-date call unless the guy was a real loser, Hannah was whispering into the phone.

“I’m at his apartment.”

“Wow, things went that well,” I replied. “Where is he?”

“He’s in the bathroom but he doesn’t have any books.”

“No books in the whole apartment?”

“None.”

“Get out.”

She did. And guess what? The guy she married has books, is something of an expert on Muriel Sparks, an English professor even.

Oh, my aching email

Just for the record, I turned my machine on five ten fifteen twenty (switching to numerals now) 25 30 minutes ago and I still don’t have my mail - nor have any web pages loaded. Comcast? Idearc? Both? Anyone want a couple of computers? Where’s one of those pencils I once had boxes of, the implements without which I could not write? And where’s my library card?

PS: I’d call it a fluke and reboot but this is the norm of late. OK, 45 minutes and I’m restarting. And this post is going up an hour and 20 minutes after I wrote it.

Update: One hour and thirty minutes after restarting, my email has arrived.

Today

No email. Strange. Explained by this perhaps? Chris in Idearc Tech Support is perplexed too, says not to accept any info unless it comes from him. I asked Amber from Internet Operations to test the timestamp problem on her Mac at home - she has approximately the same operating system as I do.

On to the purpose of this post. Does anyone know what this is? It's along the walking path on the south side of the Charles near Boston (locals: between Bridge Street and Watertown Square parallel to California Street in Newton). It's marked with a large N and the number 13 on the left side. Looks like it's been there for a while.

Update: As per Doug Cornelius's comment below, there's a W on the opposite site of this granite marker, W for Watertown, N for Newton, in other words, the boundary.

And since we're on the Charles already, here's a snapshot from the footbridge toward the Watertown dam that powered an old New England Mill.

Or so I thought, Superpages - don't cancel Ticket #2280341

Being an apologetic person, I just wrote to Superpages, admitting my mistake about the time stamp problem.

AND THE AUTO-MESSAGE THAT CAME BACK FROM THEIR SERVER HAS THE WRONG TIME ON IT!!!!!

So now I've solved the problem for the NetAge generated messages...but not for the ones coming from my email provider. Everyone else who loves me: please send me a message right now so I can prove, yet again, that this really truly is not my problem.

Ode to hyacinth

An unexpected gift of a beautiful stem holder has led to flowers in my study. I started with three daffodils, cheery and bright, followed with tulips whose petals were a bit heavy, next the lovely lily, then yesterday came its cousin, hyacinths. This morning the whole house smells of hyacinth. Do yourself a favor and get some.

I mean I really goofed - cancel Ticket #2280341

Forty lashes with a wet URL for me. Or I'll take crow with a side of crow.

I did get a call this afternoon from Nadim, a supervisor with Superpages. He said he was calling to update me and that he'd tested my mail and found no problem. I quickly accused him of being on a Windows machine, but he said no, that he was using Mac Mail 3.2, and, for the record, what version was I using? Wow, I'm really out of date, Mac Mail 2.1.3, I said.

So I quickly searched for an update (which I'd done earlier in the day) and alas nothing more recent. How could that be? Turns out he was on a machine running Leopard, the new, as of last October, Mac OS (operating system, Em, Jude, and friends). Well, I'm not on Leopard (I'm on Tiger), I said, and not planning to be on Leopard. (Holy Cats, I thought).  Both of us were troubled that even if he could clear the problem with Leopard, why was it still happening when messages originated on their server? All in all, it was a rather unsatisfactory call, we agreed, and Nadim said there'd be another update tomorrow. (He also said he'd heard about my blog posts - ah, bloggers, we are powerful after all.)

I felt bad when we hung up. What if it was an email version issue after all and I'd caused all this fuss for nothing? I decided to search yet again, something I've done before, only this time I chose the very canny terms "mac mail timestamp problem."

First hit's a charm. According to Philip-Elmer DeWitt, there's a known bug in Mac Mail that creates my very problem!

Mail is plagued with a bug that users have been complaining about, to no avail, since the release of Tiger: when it receives mail on a POP account, it stamps it as incoming in Greenwich Mean Time, no matter what time zone you've set your clock.

Here's the workaround:

In Mail, go to the View pulldown menu, select Columns, click Date Sent and unclick Date Received. For reasons unexplained, it now does the right thing, more or less.

How many years has it been since Tiger was released? Geeze, guys, it's not as if Mail is an obscure app that nobody uses.

Good point, Philip. Thanks for the tip because I followed the instructions and alas it cleared the problem.

Thus, my apologies to Verizon and Idearc.

Now how to feed this info back so the next poor person who experiences this can be spared my  pain? Apparently this known bug is a Great Big Secret. The Apple Support people I spoke with any number of times didn't know this nor did Derrick, the great guy at the Apple Genius Bar last week, who did clean up some other problems for me (thanks). And certainly poor little Idearc and its ex-parent Verizon didn't know. What's the knowledge management solution to spreading this little bit of critical info?

And the quandry remains: why did this happen first when I switched to Verizidearc, affecting all my mail and then, with the  recent time change, affecting only mail coming from their servers? Methinks there might still be a bit of a problem there. For now, though, I'm happy. (And feeling a little silly.)

"Something will be calling you shortly"

Latest from my new friends at Idearc, requesting the long headers for the umpteenth time:

Hi Jessica,

We are actively looking into this issue for you. I have one request of you at this time, can you please send me the long headers of the three messages that came in from Superpages Hosting Support. I know that you have already sent it but I would like fresh info.

Something will be calling you shortly to assist you.

Thanks,

[Beleagured tech person]

Ok, I goofed - it's not Verizon's fault, no, no

So it turns out that Verizon bears no responsibility for my email problems. They spun off Idearc and now only market Idearc's email and web hosting. A friendly fellow with the title of "Executive Customer Relations" responded to my email to Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg with this: "I will refer your issue to their CEO, Kathy Harless' office for handling."

You can write the next sentence yourself. Nothing has happened.

Except for this: continuing email from Idearc's Tech Support explaining the difference to me between GMT 0 and GMT -4, telling me that I don't know how to attach documents to email, asking me for the same long headers of emails that I've sent multiple times....AARRGGHHH!!!

But there's a bright side. I'm gathering terrific material for an article (never mind all these blog posts).

One last thing: I've looked at Idearc's site and cannot figure out what this company actually does. Can you? "Idearc consists primarily of assets, liabilities, businesses and employees engaged in the delivery of our multi-platform suite of advertising products."

If anyone has a suggestion for a good email/web hosting solution for small business, please let me know.

Mother and Daughter Pastan, reading, together

My friend Meg emailed last week: "Wondering—I know this is last-minute—if you’d be interested in going to hear Linda Pastan read on Monday night at Blacksmith House. She’s a kick-butt poet and is reading with her daughter, Rachel, whose novel came out (with great reviews) last year."

Truth: I'd never heard of either of them and this is shameful, as I learned last night. What talents. Rachel read first from her new novel, Lady of the Snakes, which begins with Jane, a Russian literature scholar, in labor with her first child. Linda, author of many books of poetry and former Poet Laureate of Maryland, followed with complementary readings -- first from Queen of a Rainy Country and then from her other works, including a new manuscript -- about giving birth to Rachel, about family, about the window to the future closing (not precisely the words).

These were readings where (this doesn't always happen) the mind sparked, the heart beat a little faster than is comfortable, and where eyes leaked as words pulled together, sentences completed themselves, whole paragraphs took shape, and, when I left, an entire piece was ready to be written. Inspirational, motivational, and a strong reminder of how much we all have to say.

Thank you, Linda, Rachel, and Meg.