Business On Software

Image from schimilblick via Flickr

Many of my friends, colleagues and readers of this blog will know that I am a true gadget freak, and am totally enamored of technology, and will try and use it in all aspects of my life.

Which is why many of them are totally surprised when they find out that March 2009 will mark one year that we have not had TV at our household!  I mean, we have a TV set – an ancient 17 inch cathode ray that was given to me by a former employee about 10 years ago.  People walk into my house – see this in the lounge and laugh, saying “Where is the 50 inch plasma display?”.  They are incredulous when I tell them this is all I have, and No, we don’t have any other TV’s in the house.  Not even in our, or the kids bedrooms.

When we moved into our house last year, we noticed that there was no ‘free to air’ aerial on the roof.  There was a satellite dish for Austar, but we never had an account, and my wife put her foot down and declared that from now on, we were not going to be a TV household.

To be fair, my sons and I had a lot of problems about this in the early days, but now, 12 months down the track…I don’t even miss it.

We do have a collection of DVD’s that we watch from time to time, but what do we do after dinner and on those long Sunday afternoons I hear you ask (as many of our friends have).

Well, we have reverted back to the ‘old fashioned’ ways of entertaining ourselves.  We play cards – Uno and Skip-Bo being some favourites.  We play Monopoly, and leave the board set up for days while we continue a game.  We talk, we play guitar, we read to the kids, we make up stories.  Sounds quaint I know, but it is FUN…seriously.

Same for game consoles.  People think I am mad when I say we have NO Playstations or XBoxes or Wii’s in our household.  Oh, all right, I bought myself a Sony PSP a couple of years back, but I haven’t seen it for months.  I have no idea where it is now, nor the charger to get it up and running again.

Both my wife and I cannot stand it when we go out for family dinners with friends, and their kids have their noses buried in their Nintendo DS all through the meal.  We try and teach our kids to enjoy conversation and interact with their friends and adults.

It has been challenging at times, especially with the peer pressure that the kids get at school.  But overall, Sam (my wife) and I are happy with the results so far, and we look forward to being a TV and game console free family for a while yet.

Image from ANDI2 via Flickr

This post is a bit off topic from software and programming etc., but it is an event that forced me to rethink things about the way the world works, and my place in it…

I was out on site at a client of mine yesterday morning, who is an egg wholesaler.  Normaly I go out there at the end of the week, when their deliveries have been completed and they need assistance with end of month etc., but this time I was out there early in the week, before they had made their deliveries and I was amazed to see their warehouse piled high with boxes and boxes of eggs.

I casually asked the manager how many eggs they move each week.  “Oh, about 40,000 dozen or so”.  What?? Forty thousand dozen eggs??  That is 480,000 eggs.  Each week.  This is in a small town of about 120,000 people.  That equates to about 4 eggs per week for every man, woman and child living here.  I would hate to think of the numbers that a wholesaler would ship in a bigger city elsewhere in Australia or the world.

It is just that I never ever thought about the number of eggs that would be consumed by our little town.  And if you are reading this, you probably cannot comprehend or visualise such a large number of eggs.  I know I couldn’t – until I saw for myself a whole warehouse packing shed piled high with boxes upon boxes of eggs.  It is mind blowing.

I even started thinking about the sheer number of chickens that would be needed to produce that quantity of eggs each week, and then the land and other resources to support that number of chickens…and on…and on.

Personally, I am not a big egg eater at all, and neither is our family.  We used to do a regular bacon and eggs fry up every Sunday breakfast, but not for many years now.  My wife in fact only purchases free range eggs nowadays on the occasional basis, however reading the definition of ‘free range’ these days doesn’t really make me feel better for the poor chickens.  Apparently as long as a caged, confined chicken can ’see’ a patch of grass it can be considered ‘free range’, which I don’t think is a fair call.

This experience has shaken my beliefs a little bit, and has made me less keen to consume eggs in the future.  If not the enormity of the numbers, then the memory of the smell there certainly will.  Have you ever smelt thousands of eggs in one room?

So apologies again for the off topic post, but I think that in this day and age, we need to take a step back and look at the rate at which we are consuming, and the resources, and animals which go into satisfying those needs.  Perhaps we need to go back to the old days when we have to hunt for our food again?

Image by Valentinian via Flickr

I was cleaning out my car on the weekend, and I found an old PDC phone directory underneath the passenger seat, which prompted me to reflect and post about it.

You see, at one stage we used to request extra phone books from the providers just so that myself, and the rest of the team here at work, could carry a book in our vehicles in order to facilitate us finding customer addresses or phone numbers whilst on the road.  This phone book also contained a handy street map in the middle.

I smiled when I noticed that this directory was dated 2006.  I had completely forgotten about it, and it had laid unused under that seat for three years.  What had turned somthing that was a useful tool into a dormant relic?

The short answer is my Smartphone.  I just take it for granted now that I can access our CRM database from the road to get customer information (or White Pages for that fact).  I can also get Google Maps to find directions, or, if I remember to charge up my bluetooth GPS dongle, I can even get voice directions in real time via my Co-Pilot software on the device.

The book seems really quaint now, and I cannot actually remember the day when I decided to actually stop using it.  It seems that my Treo 750 (and 650 before that) slowly, and ubiquitously seeped into my everyday mode of doing things, and before long it just became second nature so that I took it for granted.

Anyhow, the book is in the bin now, and I am still looking for an excuse to get an iPhone so that I can do everything, with more style…