Computers can be one of the greatest time wasters if they aren’t set up properly. By this I’m referring to having the best software and hardware configuration so you can work as efficiently as possible.
Unfortunately there are so many configuration and software options it is nearly impossible to find the best combination.
What is the best Computer and Software set up for me?
Hardware manufacturers and software developers are constantly changing their products and so I find myself (yet again) having another review of how best set up our systems so we can work as efficiently as possible.
I’ve never had advice on what hardware and software I should be using. I’ve just tried to keep an eye on what options are out there and then each time we decide we need to change, I go through a software evaluation process.
The article I wrote last year (Keeping up with Technology) explained how I’ve managed to keep all my contacts information in order over the years, but now I’m looking at the next evolution of this too.
Anyway…
When I started looking around for tips from the experts on how they set up their computers I found a great site at http://usesthis.com/ where they have interviewed a lot of nerds to find out how they set up their computers and what software they use.
If the world’s top computer nerds don’t know how to set up their own computers, what chance has everyone else got?
It makes interesting reading but apart from the obvious fact that almost all of the nerds use either a Mac or they run Linux, (even Danah Boyd, a researcher at Microsoft uses a Mac and an iPhone).
You may find this useful if you want to know what people use to get the job done. http://usesthis.com/
I saw something today that triggered me to again ponder on past jobs I’ve had and how things have changed.
When I worked in the advertising game, I wrote and art directed a number of television commercials among other things for Canon in the mid to late 1980’s. This was in the days when a fax machine was pretty cool technology.
It seems funny when you watch these TV ads now. Wow – we could send to ‘131 locations with the touch of one button’. – Tell that to kids today and they won’t believe you 
Don’t forget, you also had to program all 131 phone numbers into the machine – not as easy as you may think – and then you paid for 131 phone calls – but hey, it was automated!
Excuse the quality of these video files, I did these in Quicktime 2 (it was very cutting edge at the time.) In fact I actually put five of my TV commercials on one floppy disc using Quicktime – that’s how small these files were. (I remember them looking a lot bigger on my little MacIntosh). This is one of them:
No CGI back then, we made this globe and punched holes in it, putting a standard light bulb inside it and then tracked the camera around it to make it appear as though it was spinning. All very expensive and time consuming compared with today’s software solutions.
For those interested in the strategy behind this; we had already used the campaign theme for Canon, ‘The big gun in fax’ which clearly branded Canon as THE manufacturer of fax machines in the minds of consumers. It became a little trickier when we wanted to use the same branding (ie a Canon going off) to launch the colour copiers. Copiers don’t fire anything in the same way a fax can blast messages, and we already had a dalmatian as a theme on black and white copiers. This TV ad shows how I managed to blend the two messages together for the colour copier launch.
I added the dog nodding ‘in approval’ at the new colour copier, which was kind of cute and linked the old and the new.
You will notice that the copier ad ends with the canon, but it doesn’t go off – it didn’t make sense for the canon to explode as it did in the fax ad, but we did want the visual branding for brand recognition.
Are we better off today?
This campaign included many point of sale components, leaflets and specification sheets and other business to business campaign elements but as I think about how differently a strategy for a product launch is done today.
Gone are the days when you reach almost everyone in a city like Sydney by advertising on only 3 TV Stations. Look how much more expensive it is to try to reach the same number of people with all of these new TV stations, new radio stations, the Internet and other distractions.
It cost a lot less to make TV commercials these days, but now it costs a lot more to reach the target market because there is so much competition. So, are we better off now or not?
This is the ‘Information Age’. It is a time of incalculable and unpredictable change. It is a time when no person or organisation can plan very far in advance, because technology will more than likely develop in a way that will cause a dramatic effect on anything we can think of today. As I write this, the medium and long-term future of every workplace remains in a state of unpredictability.
This is me in 1980 working as a finish artist putting a magazine together by hand - what ever happened to that hat?
Six months from today, a job that seems permanent and irreplaceable may quite suddenly vanish. In fact, the whole business may become commercially nonviable. I enjoyed a short period of stability in my working career between 1977 and around 1980, after that, my world would never be the same.
Over the last twenty five years many of the jobs I’ve had, either no longer exist today or have changed so much that they require a completely different skill set.
One company I worked for in the late 80’s was bankrupted by the release of a cheap piece of software that, ‘to add insult to injury’, was virtually given away by it’s developer; Microsoft. (more about that in another post)
Have you had a job that no longer exists thanks to technology?
How secure is the job you have now?
Some people sit down and plan their New Year Resolutions and then just power into it. (They usually burn out a few weeks later, but that’s another story!)
But what if you are one of those people who was getting about your life, minding your own business when Christmas and New Year suddenly came upon you and before you knew it, you are living in 2010? Life just didn’t give you time to sit down and think about the year ahead.
That’s ok. In fact it probably isn’t bad at all because it means you didn’t get caught up in all the euphoria of making New Year Resolutions for the sake of it. Now you have time to really consider what you want to do, what you want to become, where you want to go, what you want to achieve etc.
Revisit last years goals
A great place to start is to have another think about the goals you set last year and then build on them.
One of the things I wanted to do last year was go hiking and camping, but unfortunately 2009 just came and went so quickly and frankly, I didn’t put a high enough priority on camping!
If you also had some still born goals last year, my recommendation is that you deal with them now using one of three options:
- Make a conscious decision that this is no longer a goal and cross it off your to-do list
- Grab your diary right now and allocate time toward your goals
- Drop everything and just do it
Now, where did I put my tent?
