Adventures in Tech

At Microsoft we get to refresh our desktops and laptops every couple of years. Most people jump at the opportunity to get the latest equipment, but I usually don’t. I don’t like migrating from an older machine to a newer one and delay the refresh for as long as I can, preferably until the equipment dies, or goes out of compliance. After approving many equipment upgrades for my team this year, I decided to upgrade my monitor. I always had a single small monitor for my desktop, and never liked the dual monitor setup, or what I jokingly call the “flight simulator” setup with 4 monitors—three side by side, and one on top. My team swears by the productivity increase of seeing everything they need at once, and I believe them.  However, for me I was weaned on Unix terminals, Emacs, and command line tools, so I learned to live within the confines of a small screen. Nonetheless, getting a larger and crisper display was appealing, so I took the plunge and ordered a 38-inch monitor...

Last week I made an impulse buy. I was at the Microsoft store trying to pass time while my kids were enjoying painting on the surface laptops and playing games on the Xbox. I walked around the store in search of something interesting and stopped at the phone display. The display had the newest family of the Samsung Galaxy phones, preloaded with Microsoft business applications. I picked up the biggest model and started to play with it. I liked its bigger edge-to-edge screen and the quality of the display. I must have enjoyed it very much, because I tried a lot of my favorite sites and applications, and compared how easy it was to read on the bigger screen than on my smaller iPhone X screen. I was so absorbed in the comparisons, that I did not see the sales associate approaching. She was very cordial, and started to chat about the differences between the two eco-systems—Android and iOS, and that most of the applications that I used including work applications ran on both. Then she...

Twelve years ago, when I bought my car, my decision criteria were simple. I wanted a car that is fun to drive, had good reliability, and was gas efficient; traits that were missing in my prior car. I did not put a lot of weight on the technological innovations the car had; I was happy with a good navigation system, a CD player that held multiple CDs, and a backup camera that made parallel parking easier. At the time, almost all car manufacturers provided undifferentiated versions of these capabilities, with minor tweaks to the user interface, which made my selection a lot easier. Over the years as the technology advanced, these originally innovative features started to feel obsolete. It was almost impossible to upgrade the hardware with newer and faster components, and software did not have a better story.   Only if either had issues or bugs, did the manufacturer offer an upgrade, through vehicle recalls or maintenance, or through map update CDs on a yearly basis, that captu...

I have always been allergic to buying specialized electronic devices that do only one thing, such as the Kindle, the iPod, and fitness trackers. Why buy these when technology evolves so fast that a multi-purpose device such as the phone or a smart watch can eventually do the same thing, but with the convenience of updates that fix bugs and add functionality? So, I was shocked when this weekend I made an impulse buy and got the newest Kindle Paperwhite—a special purpose device for reading eBooks. I was walking past the Amazon store in the mall and saw that the newest Kindle Paperwhites were marked down by $40 for the holidays. The device looked good in the display, so I went in to look at it closely. The Paperwhite is small and light, with a 6” screen that is backlit and waterproof.   The text was crisp and readable, and in the ambient light, it felt like I am reading a printed book. I was sold and bought it on the spot. At home I have struggled to put it down. The bo...

Kids ask the best questions. Unburdened by prior knowledge or assumptions, their questions are driven by pure curiosity and a deep desire to learn something new. As adults we can learn a lot from how kids ask questions and seek knowledge. And we can also learn or strengthen our understanding of a particular topic by answering kids questions. For example, my son asked me a question about even and odd numbers, and why we get an even number when we add two even numbers or two odd numbers, and an odd number when we add an even and an odd number. Because this knowledge is drilled into us since our younger years, we stop wondering why. Intuitively we know the proposition is true, and we can cite a couple of examples to prove it to ourselves. For example, adding 2 and 4--both even numbers, gives us 6, also an even number. When we add 3 and 5--both odd numbers, we get 8, which is an even number. If we choose a mix of an even number and an odd number and add them, we got an odd numbe...

At work, each floor has a kitchen area, with two beverage fridges, containing sodas, milk, and a variety of juices. Beverages are stocked weekly, and often checked for expiry or spoil. Last week, one of the fridges broke down, and to protect the milk from spoiling, someone moved it to the neighboring fridge. The next day I passed by the kitchen, the fridge was still broken, and more beverages started migrating to the working fridge. A week passed, and nothing changed. I realized that we are witnessing the bystander effect in action. The bystander effect or bystander apathy is a phenomenon where people are less likely to act when others are present, because they assume that in a group someone eventually will. The apathy increases with the number of people in a group. The internet has a lot of examples of the bystander effect, and advice on how to circumvent it when you need to ask for help. Most of the examples involve dire and emergency situations, which highlight the incongrui...

Not so long ago, my laptop was my preferred device to use after hours. Relaxing on the couch, I can check my work email, catchup on the news, read research papers, or enjoy reading books. As technology advanced, I could also stream videos and shows at my leisure without commercial interruptions, that for the last 10 years or so, I had no need for a cable subscription or a TV. Then came tablets. I was not one of the early adopters, since laptops were sufficiently advanced at the time: they were faster, had a keyboard and a better screen resolution, and the short battery life was not a deterrent. An electric outlet was always close by, and I could still work while the laptop is charging. Then came kids, and the chaos associated with them. Kids have a natural talent where they know exactly when you need to focus on something that’s not them or when you’ve been sitting down for longer than a minute, and they are compelled to rectify such injustice. This leads to a lot of work inter...