Advice for the family tech support person (or mechanic)

An acquaintance of mine has been roped into providing computer tech support for a family friend and is entirely too polite to complain about the situation to the correct people to prevent a reoccurrence. I've got friends who are mechanics or at least very mechanically inclined who face similar problems in their field.

Hearing about the headaches associated with this has brought back memories of being in similar situations. Once people realize you have expertise in computers, or any other field for that matter, you may find yourself getting pressured into providing computer or car maintenance assistance. It has made me wish there were a tactful way of establishing guidelines for providing help to friends and family members. What better way than an anonymous blog post you can point to as a gentle suggestion of how to behave when asking for help?

1) Use Google to see if you can't solve your own problem or at least narrow down the possible causes. You'd be surprised at how many problems can be solved without intervention from experts.

2) Just because your friend or family member is willing (or at least too polite to refuse) to offer you assistance, don't assume that he or she wants to extend the same courtesy to your friends or coworkers. Don't volunteer them to do so without asking first and take "no" for a answer gracefully. Just because they're good at their job, don't expect them to be thrilled about volunteering extra hours above and beyond their normal work week on related problems.

3) Should your indentured tech support servant be kind enough to agree to help, don't make the imposition any worse by being picky about where or when the service should be offered. No one enjoys being stuck in a cramped back room working on a computer or on a cold, hard driveway working on a car. If they ask you to bring the PC or vehicle to their place, do so cheerfully. If they do agree to come to your house, clean up a bit to make service less painful. I can't tell you how many times I've had to ask for vacuum cleaners to clean off fan vents sufficiently to make disassembly possible without a big mess. No one enjoys working with a jumble of cables or surrounded by so many knick-knacks that it's difficult to get to the computer. Be flexible about time too. Remember, your potential tech support person has a life too. Don't interfere with work or their other commitments.

4) Find a way to reciprocate and make sure it's something of comparable value. If your tech support person has spent 2 hours fixing your computer, don't let a plate of cookies be your only thanks for their efforts. Think about some skill you have that they may need and offer that, be it mowing their lawn or taking them to dinner. Remember how much you would have spent at the local big box electronics store.

5) If the support you're asking for is advice or if advice is offered as a method of preventing future problems, don't blithely ignore it. You've asked this person for help because of their expertise. If you ignore it or instead follow advice from some less experienced friend or coworker or even worse, fall prey to some slick advertising or advice from one of the poorly trained hourly grunts at your local big box electronics store, how likely do you think it is that your tech support person will ever give you meaningful advice again?

6) Do whatever preventive maintenance is recommended to try to prevent future problems. No family tech support person wants to hear your plaintive cries about how you can't afford to lose some valuable file. So do your backups (or oil changes in the case of cars) and don't expect your family tech support to perform miracles on neglected PCs or cars.

Following these steps will help ensure less resentment on the part of the person helping you.

iPhone/iPod Touch databases

One of the many things I use my iPod Touch for is to store databases of information I want access to on the go such as books I have, books I'm on the lookout for, car maintenance histories, etc. Bento fits the bill nicely for my purposes and there's a Mac version which allows you to synchronize your databases between a Mac desktop or laptop and your mobile device.

It's a full featured database with optional field types such as check boxes, choice boxes, text, dates, numbers, and other options. It makes data entry very easy which is important on a mobile device. One of the things I like about Bento is it's one of the few inexpensive lightweight single user databases available these days. In the old days there were lots of database choices for users on a budget.

I read today that there's a version of Filemaker Go for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. It synchronizes with Filemaker Pro which is available for Mac or Windows. Filemaker Pro finally makes it easy to sync between a mobile device and Windows. The upside is it's a more powerful database than Bento is if your database requirements are a bit more advanced than Bento's feature set. The downside is it's more expensive than Bento.

So you've got another database option if you're a iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad user. It's good to have choices, eh?

Cloud Computing update

A while back I made a post questioning the hype surrounding Cloud Computing. Since that time, I've read a number of articles which support this sentiment.

Since last week's outage at Microsoft's Danger subsidiary, a number of articles like this one have been written questioning the security of data in cloud services. Personally, I trust my incentive to ensure adequate backups much more than I trust any company I could outsource that task to.

This article questions customer's ability to export data which has been committed to a cloud service. I share this concern. Companies have huge incentives to make it easy to get your data into their cloud storage. There's absolutely no incentive for them to make it easy or even possible to transfer your data in the other direction.

Finally, this article points out the dangers associated with storing your data. I'd feel much safer storing data on multiple drives or on a RAID array than in the cloud.

I'm not sure what type of evidence I'd need to see to make me trust cloud computing, but I certainly haven't seen it among all the overly optimistic articles touting this latest buzzword du jour.

Really tough word quiz

Wow. I was lucky to get 4 out of 10 on this really tough word quiz. It features words from the 14th through 17th centuries. I feel like such a Jobbernowl.

iPod Touch update

I'm relieved to report my enthusiasm for the iPod Touch as a replacement for the long line of Palm PDAs continues unabated. This little device continues to amaze me.

I managed to find this very useful article which helped me get secondary calendars in Google Calendar syncing with the iPod Touch. That was really the last piece of the PDA puzzle I needed to solve.

Tonight I downloaded the free Apple Remote application which allows me to control our Apple TV from the iPod Touch. It's not earth shattering but rather a bit of fun with a device which is already ranks among the best technical purchases I've made.

I typically find several reasons to be dissatisfied with any new gadget after a month of using it. Not so with the iPod Touch. It makes using a PDA type device fun again. I recall feeling this sense of enjoyment when I first started playing with most of the new Palm devices I've owned (aside from the Centro which was horribly disappointing).

By the way, the iPod Touch serves as a very nice music and video player in addition to its stellar performance as a PDA. It also works nicely to do some light web browsing at night. The mobile version of Safari is by far the most useful web browsing experience I've seen on a small device.

If you're in the market for a small device which can serve multiple purposes, investigate the iPod Touch. You won't be sorry.

Life after Palm

I've finally settled upon using my iPod Touch as the best PDA replacement device for my Palm. Having used Palm PDAs since I bought my first one at the employee price working for U.S. Robotics in 1996, I've come to rely heavily on a number of key applications to keep my life organized. Fortunately the iPhone application market has matured to the point that I could easily find replacements for all my "must have" applications.

First and foremost, I needed a way to sync my contact information from my Mac to the iPod Touch. Luckily, Apple anticipated that by adding that capability into iTunes.

It was also imperative that I be able to sync memos between my desktop computer and the iPod Touch. Mark/Space has a product called The Missing Sync which takes care of that problem for me.

It was also important that I be able to sync calendars between my desktop system and the PDA. Fortunately a combination of iCal on my Mac, iCal on the iPod, and Google Calendar was able to handle that thorny issue. This article on using CalDAV with Google Calendar and iCal helps explain the rather tricky configuration.

For a number of years I've been using a Palm application called SplashID to keep my passwords secure and yet easily accessible. The good folks at SplashData have created a version which runs on the iPod Touch. Using a new version of the same application made conversion very simple.

I've also grown reliant on having access to a simple database application on my PDA to keep track of things such as books I'm interested in reading as well as a number of other topics. I've used a great little Palm application called JFile for many years to fill this need. One of the best known names in Mac databases, FileMaker, has recently released a personal database application called Bento. They also have an iPhone/iPod Touch version available which can sync with the Mac version of Bento.

The last important thing I required on my PDA was a way to read books. I'd been using the mobile version of Adobe's Acrobat Reader on the Palm. I discovered that there's a free product called Stanza Desktop which is available for both Mac and Windows machines. They also have an iPhone/iPod Touch version which can sync books from the desktop version. Couple this with the fact that Google Books has announced that they have over a million public domain books available in the EPUB format (which Stanza supports) and my needs for a PDA book reader is more than met.

It's been a bit of a challenge but I've finally got all these applications installed and my data transferred. The only problem which remains is I'm still not able to see subordinate calendars from Google Calendars yet. Aside from that, I'm very happy with the new device. It's thinner, easier to read, and has better battery life than my Palm did. Plus it functions as a very good music player to boot.

25 worst tech products of all time

PC World has an interesting list of the 25 worst tech products of all time here. I agree with most of their choices.

I think I might have added most MP3 players aside from the iPod and a general category for "stupid gadgets which derive power from a USB port". You've probably seen examples of this. Little Christmas trees complete with lights, humping dogs, etc. Just because something is technically possible doesn't mean someone should build it.