Most of my friends have a vague understanding of what I do. I imagine to them it is like “something, something, Internet, with something, something, websites, something, computer stuff.” Most of my friends are not computer savvy, in fact, few of them actually have computers and of those friends even fewer use their computers frequently. So it’s no surprise that they don’t understand the details that go into things like high-availability, high-traffic websites. But it is annoying when a friend comes to me and says “I have an awesome idea for a website, you could make it for me, right? Oh and you’ll do it for free, right?”

There is a sentiment among many tech professions that our skills are undervalued and the work is seen as simple. I suspect there are several reasons for this. The first reason is that there are few physical results from our labors. When I create a web site there is nothing to hold and what people see they think can be created in programs they are familiar with, like word processing applications and imaging programs. Since all the hard work is done behind the scenes to produce what the person sees, they are not apt to think it is labor intensive.

A second reason I believe tech skills are undervalued is the over simplification or such portrayed in the cinema and media. A few good examples of this can be found in Maxim’s “The 13 Hackiest Hacking Movie Moments,” or weekly on any one of the 4 trillion CSI programs on TV. These depictions, while meant for entertainment sake, do influence the perceptions of those who watch them. As a result, people assume that things like hacking the Gibson are just a few simple keystrokes. These are the same people who say, “It’s probably really easy, but I don’t want to learn how to do it.”

The last statement brings me to my final reason I believe tech skills are undervalued. Anything is easy when you are skilled at doing it. I have a friend who can juggle live blades like it’s nothing. He practiced at it for quite awhile to be able to do it on command with little fear of injury. But someone looking at that trick would be quick to say, “That takes skill and must have taken a lot of practice.” But those same people when watching me work my magic on a system just assume I’m hording some simple knowledge from them so they’ll have to pay me to do it. It’s not simple, it takes skill, education, and practice to become good at it.

So, despite the great relationships I have with my friends, I quote exactly how much I would charge a private client. Please realize that good, functional websites are worth their price tag. Unless you want a one-page site with simple text and questionable uptime, good websites cost good money. I encourage everyone to do their research before finding a webmaster/designer/developer. Friends, I have no qualms giving you my real quote if you have no qualms with asking me for free labor.  C’est La Vie!

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During my eighth trip around the sun, my dad came home from work one night with a surprise for the family. It was a shiny new PC! It was the first PC I had ever seen, an interesting contrast from the terminal stations I was used to seeing at my father’s office. My dad had brought this computer home so that he could work overtime from home instead of the office. I took this as a double blessing as I would see more of my father and also have a new toy.

I was already familiar with the QWERTY layout from my constant exposure and experimentation with the several typewriters we owned, but the keys on this keyboard were very different. They made a more satisfying clicking sound, still mechanical but less so than the typewriters. The orange monochromatic monitor was superior, in my opinion, to the green terminals at dad’s work. Always a proponent of white noise, the sound of the chassis fan was soothing and comforting. My first time seated in front of this now less-powerful-than-most-modern-cell-phones device was absolute heaven.

We had to boot the computer off our MS-DOS disks and even then we could only run a few programs available on the hard drive or choose from the multitude of black, truly floppy disks with so many programs. My dad primarily used the computer for work, which meant he would write up reports in LEWP, or compile spreadsheets in Quatro Pro. I also used LEWP, but to write creative stories, some of which are stored on the floppy I recently found. My working with Quatro Pro consisted of filling cells and compiling massive images I would print off our form fed printer.

I used to enjoy the sounds of the floppy disks as the system booted. It was nearly melodic and not as stereotypically repetitive as you would expect. My excitement would build in the 10 minutes it would take to get the blinking command prompt cursor. When I would finally type my first command after boot, I was experiencing a euphoria that rivals any I’ve felt since.

This computer was the reason I choose computers as a career. It was the start of my love for computing. These days, I sometimes dread touching a computer. I get annoyed at waiting “short” periods of time to load programs or download content. It’s difficult  to even comprehend how it once was and how much better off things truly are. But, finding that floppy took me back and reaffirmed my love for computers.

We recycled the family Leading Edge Model D several years ago. I was sad to do so because it was still in perfect working condition and had outlived 2 PC’s we owned since. It was a sad day to lose something so pivotal in my life. I felt the same way about recycling that computer as I did losing my first pet.

Here’s to you, PC of my past! You may no longer buzz and hum in my living room, but you will always do so in my heart.

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I’ll preface this with a declaration that I am in no way a psychology expert nor have I studied extensively into memes. But, having spent more than a decade supporting internet technologies, I have been exposed to countless internet memes and viral videos. Therefore, my opinion on this matter is based on my experience alone.

The first ingredient in a successful viral video is brevity. Brevity is, as they say, the soul of wit. Ergo, brevity and wit go a long way in making a video successful, but wit need not apply. Some videos are just short captures of something that really happened. The event may not even be all that funny, if not gruesome or sad. I posit that the human attention span is relatively short and it takes a lot of work to hold it for longer than a few minutes, like movies. So a short video has a great shot at becoming viral.

Another ingredient is that it has to affect the audience. The best affect the video could have on a person to make the video viral is humor. Most people enjoy a good laugh. But serious videos can become viral if they evoke a great enough emotional response. One example of a negative emotional response is the one elicited from the video of Nick Berg being beheaded by Iraqi militants. There is another great example which involves a video named after a certain number of females and a certain number of cups. Either way, whether the video is funny or disgusting, I believe people feel the need to pass them on to share the experience.

The final ingredient is believability. This works two ways. If a video is believable, people are less likely to dismiss it as being manufactured just to be viral. People seem to have a sense for when they are being duped and they generally don’t like it. However, if the believability is questionable but not outright dismissible, the video can also become viral. This happens because people want to confirm with others that their suspicion is correct and will pass the video on to others to get that confirmation. Videos that completely dispense from reality seem to conform to this as well. This includes animated videos. Like any fiction, reality can be dispensed with when the fictional universe is consistent and interesting. Slip up, and your fictional reality becomes unbelievable. Make a minor mistake or be immaculate and the fiction can become viral.

So many great viral videos have come about in the past decade as access to high bandwidth internet has increased and more users begin to adopt social networking sites. However, not all viral videos are instant successes. Some take a while to be noticed. But if a video is brief, affects the audience, and is believable it has the right ingredients to become viral. All it needs is someone to find it and pass it on.

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For those of you like me who look at the computer screen and keyboard simultaneously, focus theft can be a serious time waster. I’ve lost entire sentences in emails to popup dialogue boxes. Even those who affix their eyes to the monitor are at risk of terrible things happening. For example, you are typing something up and a program gives you a dialogue box to restart your system. Your next character in your typing happens to be a capital “O.” Capital “O” just happens to be the hotkey which clicks the “Ok” button to shut down the computer. Now your document is lost and you are left frustrated.

There are several notorious focus thieves. This is my top 5 list of usual suspects.

#5: Installation programs

If you are in a position like mine, you will install a great number of programs throughout a given year. Installation programs offer two things I really dislike, the first being status bars and the second is focus theft. Installations can take several minutes, and being the multi-tasker I am, I will minimize the installer and perform other tasks. Nearly all installer programs will popup when they are finished, steal the mouse and keyboard focus, and tell you “Hey dude, I’m done installing!” Wonderful, except for the part where I don’t care and nor do I need the focus stolen for that. This one is only a minor annoyance to me and probably even less so to the general public, who may installs one program every few months. They only get worse from here.

#4: Flash

I hate Flash. I don’t know if that was clear in my flash intro blog, but if it wasn’t, let me make it clear here. I really hate flash. So many popular and wonderful websites use flash as either a primary content provider or an tertiary product like banner ads or animated pictures. Flash has the ability to steal the focus from the rest of the webpage. This is the default operation when you click on any flash object, whether on purpose or accident. Say you are clicking away from an input box and accidentally click one of the flash ads that monopolize the right margins of most websites. You then go to use your scroll wheel on your mouse to find that the page is not scrolling. Ugh! How annoying!

Even worse is a flash object that can be programmed to steal the focus outright. This renders the entire page useless until you click a blank space on it. Why is this even legal?

#3: Anti-Virus Programs

You may be thinking that anti-virus popup messages should be the one thing everyone would want to have. I agree, to an extent. I don’t like that these dialogue boxes often include hotkeys which perform potentially dangerous actions. By all means, please let these steal focus so that people are made aware of virus/malware/spyware infections. However, all options should require some form of user interaction beyond simple alpha-numeric keystrokes.

For example, let’s say you’re prompted with an anti-virus dialogue that has hotkeys to ignore, repair, or delete a file. Let’s say the file in question is winword.exe, the application file for Microsoft Word. You are happily typing away when this happens and you press “D”, which is the delete hotkey. Goodbye MS Word, hello two hours of re-installing. You might get lucky and hit the repair hotkey, but Murphy’s Law would disagree. The ignore hotkey is no better either because then you might unwittingly send that document on and infect others.

#2: Instant Messaging

Instant messaging and the Internet are married. So many people use IM that it has become an almost integrated part of our comminication. Great as it may be, new messages can popup new windows and steal keyboard focus. This may not imply catastrophic system failure, but it can be catastrophic to your social life.

This is a scenario that has played out many times in many workplaces. An employee is complaining to another employee or a friend on their IM. Their boss sends them an instant message just as they are typing “my boss is such a tight-wad” or something a lot more salacious and less appropriate for this blog. The return key is struck and the pink slip is on the desk. Sure, employees should be careful when speaking ill of their boss, but if it wasn’t for focus theft they might still be employed.

#1: Windows Update

Yes, the biggest, baddest, worse focus thief of them all is Windows Update. Seriously, this box will pop up every 15 minutes if an update has been installed and you have not restarted the computer. Capital “N” is the reboot hotkey. “N” is the 5th most commonly used letter in the English language. “N” is the 18th most commonly used first letter of a word and may not be capitalized, but who is to say that caps lock isn’t stuck or you are writing an acronym? In any case, you combine the frequency of the letter “N” and the frequency of the windows update dialogue and you have a recipe for disaster.

If you have never accidentally rebooted a system as a result of the windows update dialogue, you are in the small minority. Even if you own a Mac, chances are you work on a windows machine or interact with one at some point.

Sure, there are ways to change or disable this behavior as there are with many of the focus thieves. The default behavior, frequency of popups, and the letter ‘N’ being the reboot key makes this the prince of focus thieves.

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Today’s business operates on a model that requires 100% uptime and 0% data loss. All websites, from banks and store fronts to blogs and social networking, cannot afford any downtime as it could result in loss of revenue. Data loss can require hours of recreating the data which is also unfavorable to a company’s daily operations. Many companies, large and small, have disaster recovery plans, but even fewer have disaster prevention plans. These two concepts are vital in ensuring 100% uptime and 0% data loss.

Disaster Recovery

Most people are familiar with disaster recovery, though they may not realize it. Disaster recovery is a combination of procedures and technologies that bring systems back to a working state from a disastrous failure. The disaster recovery plan for a company can be as simple as a single server with backups running, or as complicated as having a 100% survival plan that would completely recover from any number of potentially unfortunate circumstances. The most common disaster recovery technology is data backups. Data backups copy all or some data from one server to another server, off-location.  Alternatively, they can be stored on removable media such as backup tapes or hard drives.

Disaster recovery’s primary advantage is that it allows you to bring a system back online from complete failure. Hardware is not perfect and failure is not always predictable. Additionally, any other form of disasters such as fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms can cause a system to fail. A solid disaster recovery plan can alleviate the inconvenience of a hardware or weather related failure. However, the major drawback of disaster recovery is that it is slow. Restoring a single server from backups can take anywhere from 24 hours to a week, depending on the amount of data to restore and the backup technologies used. As it stands, disaster recovery does not ensure a 100% uptime but does ensure a 0% data loss.

Disaster Prevention

Disaster prevention is a combination of policies and technologies to prevent a system from going down. As stated previously, very few companies are aware of disaster prevention and even fewer actually implement it. Disaster prevention can take form in many ways, the most common being user policies. These are security permissions and internal company policies that are implemented to prevent a system from failing due to user error. Redundancy technologies are also a form of disaster prevention. These technologies provide redundant hardware and software to ensure that if one set fails, the other stays online. Redundancy technologies include hardware RAID, load balanced clusters, and off-site failovers.

Disaster prevention’s primary advantage is that it will ensure your systems are up 100% of the time. With a website, frequent hardware, software and OS maintenance may need to be performed, which requires a server to be taken offline. Redundancy allows this process without downtime via an alternate server or set of servers that continue providing the site. Also, if one server fails, the others can take over seamlessly. A large disadvantage to disaster prevention is cost. Redundancy often times means doubling or more, the operating costs of hardware, licensing, and maintenance. Smaller businesses may find it cost restrictive to implement redundancy. A company needs to evaluate the value of it’s uptime to determine viability of redundancy and no one formula fits all. However, if your primary revenue stream comes from your web presence, disaster prevention needs to be highly considered.

Which One to Use?

Neither disaster recovery nor disaster prevention alone can provide for 100% uptime and 0% downtime. Increasing more effort, time, and money will directly impact how closely a company will reach these goals. We don’t live in a perfect world and not everything can be planned. It’s important to remember technology is not a cure-all, but with the right amount of preparation and helpful tools, a company can rest relatively well, knowing their bottom line is protected.

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It’s been awhile since I posted. Part of the reason is because I made my trip to Maui and the rest is my catching up from being out of the office. Boy does work pile up when I’m gone!

But enough about work…

The trip to Maui was great! I took my friend Christina along with me and we both had a blast. We stayed at the Royal Lahaina Resort which was relaxing and accommodating. The beach access was simply amazing. If you’ve never been to the Kaanapali, I highly recommend it. The water was warm and calm for the most part. The Thursday we were there it was pretty windy and the ocean was pretty choppy, but we still got in the water.

I’m not much of a tourist so I didn’t really have any drive to do much of the touristy things. We spent most all of our time either on the beach or enjoying great food in the area. One day we did stop by the Jodo Mission Temple in Lahaina. The grounds are very well maintained and the Buddha is awe inspiring. The weather was perfect our entire stay. We only say a couple of 5 minute mist like sprinkles, the rest of the time it was a mid 80s with a light breeze and sunny or partly cloudy. Just perfect!

The only other tourist thing we did was take the road to Hana and visited some of the stops along the way. If you are not familiar with the road to Hana, it is a 52 mile stretch of road that has about 620 curves, 49 single lane bridges, and takes a couple hours each way (you can see more stats here.) We had upgraded to a convertible so the drive was just that much more amazing. We stopped at a couple water falls and a black sand beach. The sights were just breath taking. We also stopped by one of the banana bread stands, chatted with some locals, and munched on some fresh banana bread. I love how the people there are just so laid back. It’s a real and welcome contrast to the busy-always-on-the-go-need-it-now life here in Dallas/Fort Worth.

I came back from my trip feeling relaxed and a bit eager to go back to work. I’m happy to report that I will be returning there December of 2010. Christina and her boyfriend (both of whom are my best friends) have announced they will be getting married on Kaanapali then. I’m excited for their marriage and for the chance to go back to Maui.

I didn’t make it to see our customer in Hawaii. We were just to lazy to go island hopping. But, I spoke with him shortly after I got back and we will try to make plans on my next visit.

A big Mahalo to the company for sending me to Maui. Maui no ka oi!

Mark in Maui Jul 2009

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Flash intros, to me, are much like the FBI warnings on DVDs that you have to suffer through every time you watch them. No one I know of reads the warning but they all either leave the couch to get something to eat or drink or sigh/grunt/moan at the screen. The same is true for Flash intros, and especially true for sites with Flash intros that do not have skip options or show every time you visit the site.

A certain favorite band of mine used to have a Flash based website that could only be navigated via the Flash interface. No mater what link you visited on the site, you would be redirected to the intro page and forced to watch a non-skippable Flash intro. It was no wonder a fan site popped up that contained the majority of the official site’s content (and more!) in HTML format that exceeded the official site in number of unique visitors per month by nearly triple.

But, bureaucracies being what they are, and website content often driven by the nontechnical visions of upper management, I know having these on sites will be unavoidable. In light of that, I’d like to offer some constructive criticism on the use of Flash Intros to the poor web developers being forced to implement them.

Rules to Follow when Implementing Flash Intros

• Always offer an HTML based skip link as well as a flash based skip option.
• Use cookies to determine if the user has visited the flash intro before and if they have, redirect them to the home page.
• Make the Flash intro short and sweet. A majority of people will skip it, so spare expenses on the creation of the Flash intro. In addition, if it is short enough it will catch their attention before they can skip to the home page instead of forcing them to watch the intro again.
• After the intro has finished running, automatically redirect the user to the home page. Requiring a button press is not necessary and annoying.
• Do not redirect fresh site visits to the Flash intro. This will decrease the likelyhood that other sites will link to content on your site and ultimately hurt visitor flow.
• Limit the size of the Flash intro in both screen size and memory size. Not everyone has 1GB or more of RAM in their PC and not everyone has high-resolution, large monitors. Alienating your visitors is not wise in any site endeavour, but fatal on the intro page.
• Set the default sound setting to muted. If you have sound to go along with the animation, then create a button to play the sounds. Sites that play unsolicited sounds alienate office workers and personally annoy me.
• Avoid having one if at all possible. Try convincing management to drop the flash intro at least once.

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