B2OB

Ofertas de formação II

2009-04-22T18:03:00.003+01:00

Afinal as Ofertas de formação da Competir são pagas. Demoraram 80 dias, é certo, mas pagaram. Talvez seja uma boa ideia reverem as práticas internas e passarem a referir tal facto quando acordam as condições com os formadores. Assim ninguém vai ao engano e não se vê logrado nas expectativas acordadas, depois de ter cumprido a sua parte.

No que me diz respeito, e olhando retrospectivamente sobre as acções de formação que dei, percebi que tenho tido muito boas experiências. Foi a primeira vez que tal me aconteceu. Pessoas de palavra que cumprem o que prometem (pois esta coisa dos contratos, quando as coisas correm mal, lá temos que gastar mais uns dinheiros para poder seguir a via da justiça... quando temos).

Ofertas de formação

2009-04-17T20:22:00.005+01:00

A empresa Competir fez-me uma nova proposta de formação, mas desta vez tive que declinar. Passados mais de 75 dias sobre a acção de formação que dei (primeira quinzena de Fevereiro), continuo a não ver nem o pagamento correspondente às 50 horas contratadas, nem resposta às diversas tentativas de contacto. Mas para quem esteja interessado em «dar» formação, encontram diversos pedidos deles na net.empregos, entre muitas outras ofertas de recrutamento urgente.

Mas não se preocupem, pois a empresa é co-finaciada pelo Fundo Social Europeu (FSE) e pelo Estado Português, através do Programa Operacional de Potencial Humano (POPH), e até se encontra acreditada pela Direcção-Geral do Emprego e das Relações do Trabalho (DGERT).

PS1 - Após uma curta pesquisa, encontrei diversos casos que podem configurar práticas mais generalizadas. E isto claro, só para as pessoas que perdem algum tempo a tornar visíveis estas situações. Entretanto recebi uma mensagem que pede para aguardar pois os cheques irão ser emitidos na próxima semana. Ele há cada coincidência...

More than meets the eye

2009-03-27T12:50:00.002+00:00

For the last year, along with readings in personal information management (PIM) literature, I've been making my exploratory fieldwork in order to uncovered information artefacts at the office, at home and what mobile workers carry with them according to length of «stay away» and the kind of transportation used. One of the trickiest problems is getting to «see» what is sometimes invisible in different occasions. The other is gaining access to the places where those information artefacts are, since I have to «intrude» many times, on different occasions, to «record» them by means of photos, drawings, descriptions and/or recording conversations) .

When doing research is very important to assume nothing (easier said then done, cause we all have our world views). The way each individual uses information artefacts is very idiosyncratic and can contaminate our observations. The use I give to my information artefacts can not be transported to the people I'm studying. To explicit my own usage I've been also recording the artefacts I carry with me, in different occasions (first saw this on «what's in your bag» flickr group) and adding comments on my own usage behaviour. This is to say that I can not infer what people do with those artifacts just because the object is present. I have to know the how and why of that information artefact for that person, in that context.

A «simple» key chain can be much more than the eyes can grasp. In a collection of «The Near Field Communication Pool»(1) at flickr, related to RFID artefacts some of them look just like toys, but they allow information exchange by proximity or contact. One of the uses for that alike-key-chains is exchanging personal information with someone we meet. Very similar to exchanging business cards, except the exchange does not have physical visibility. This is something that might trick the observations and alerted me for the need to be alert for the presence of other toys in mobility contexts. First time I saw similar artefacts in use was in public transportation in Hong Kong (around 1997). Around the same time, I was using Amazon book store and found one inside one of the books I had ordered.

I'm closing down this stage of the research and initiating a new one. For that I'll have to gain access to fair to high mobility workers of different business sectors that allow my presence in different contexts (office context and «on the go» context), during varying periods of time, distributed in a year period. Since I'm based in Portugal, and financial constraints limit my traveling (hence the variety and scope of the research), I'll have to limit my observations to Portugal. So if you feel you would like to be part of the study, can handle my presence during different times in an year, allow me to record the information artefacts you use and be willing to respond to some questions, I would be very glad to give more information and more details about the study. What's in it for you? Might not seem much what I have to offer, but you would be part of the research and, hopefully, with all the praxis I'll be gathering you (and/or your organization) would be contributing to the knowledge needed to advance support «from workers' mobility to information mobility» (and a front reservation seat when the research defense takes place ;)

The reason I'm posting in English is mainly for trying to connect to others that might be doing similar researches and/or have already done similar studies and want to share what worked and did not work in their design strategies or engage me in other conversations going on.

[Update, 29/Mar/2009]: More on NFC (Near-Field Communication): An Introduction to Near-Field Communication and the Contactless Communication API(2), by C. Enrique Ortiz (June, 2008). See table below, taken from this introduction on different technologies for NFC:

(1) Found this collection through Ton Zylstra photo in flickr.

(2) Found this on The Mobile Monday, after following VD call for the coming meeting of MoMo chapter in Portugal, on April 6th.

remember swurl? not anymore!

2009-03-04T08:33:00.005+00:00

Recently, this is the second tool I used that does not work anymore. First it was magnolia. Gladly I never cease to use delicious. I used magnolia as a backup for delicious (redundancy if you will) but it was never up to date. Today I went to swurl and the timeline of all users are gone! Gladly it was «only» a timeline of aggregated information from other places. Redundancy seems to be a vital practice this days ;-)

BTW, can anyone recommend a timeline for aggregating data from different places?

in the middle

2009-02-24T18:36:00.005+00:00

Reading Six ways to make Web 2.0 work, in The McKinsey Quarterly. How strange it feels, looking back , only 6 years ago, when I decided to create a space to promote the use of blogs inside the research lab I was working.

Back then I was a lunatic (since i was not a journalist, neither a politician ;) with strange blogger friends, having to hide beyond b2ob. The editorial stopped making sense for some time: blogs and other social software have their place in organizations (and society), my friends are real great individuals, people can not bare not collaborating, blogs helped me found other worlds (and myself),am not working for INETI... and my name is not Mónica André anymore.

The end of a cycle and the start of a new beginning. In the middle, only transitions.

strange:

2009-02-24T14:49:00.003+00:00

I can open my Gmail account with IE, but I can not open it with Chrome?!??!

Smartpen for normal notebooks or Moleskines?

2009-02-24T11:05:00.005+00:00

When I saw Smartpen at first, I thought it would solve the transitions from taking notes in paper and then moving to digital. You might think it's a minor problem, but since the majority of people still use hybrid spaces for relating to their information (paper, digital, web), this gadget would be very handy for bridging those spaces.

After checking all the details to buy myself one, found out that "The Pulse™ smartpen works only with Livescribe™ dot paper. Use it to activate all smartpen applications." This means, one needs to buy special dotted numbered notebooks (1 to 8) in order to make the smartpen work, and apart from the «normal» needs of plenty of our gadgets (recharge, data transfer, and supplies), it does not support Linux or other open source variations, althought it works for Windows & Mac.

If you know a smartpen for normal white paper notebooks or moleskines, do please drop me a line. I'll buy it and I'm sure plenty of more people I know will buy it also.

re-design for a «new internet»

2009-02-19T11:34:00.003+00:00

Do We Need a New Internet? by NY Times.com:

"The Internet’s original designers never foresaw that the academic and military research network they created would one day bear the burden of carrying all the world’s communications and commerce. There was no one central control point and its designers wanted to make it possible for every network to exchange data with every other network. Little attention was given to security. Since then, there have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect."

Problems with openness and security belong to different sides of the same coin: we want the right to open and access information (to infrastructures too) but when implementing this rights and disseminating then does not see everyone obliging the same obligations that come with every right.

Some people are arguing that re-designing the internet infrastructures, what they call «a new internet», calls for a proposal of users abdicating their privacy rights. Still don't know if this feeling for a «new internet» comes only from the US, or if more people from different countries are advocating for the same thing, but I have been listening a lot about this lately. Do you think the solution for a better infrastructure passes by abdicating of our privacy? Are we letting others decide by us? Whose to tell what a «new internet» will be like? What are we making about it?

If we lived in a perfect and homogeneous world of equal rights and obligations, these would come as something «natural». But this is not so. We are (still) not born equal, let alone the inequalities of access to resources, to a proper life, to education, jobs, leisure, housing... freedom (and all the responsibilities that come with it).

Libraries didn't abdicate privacy in the name of their users and they managed to deal with security issues. Isn't this a false pretext for serving other purposes? Imagine all the information each one of us accesses being recorded and crossed with other information. Imagine to whom could this interest? Who would control and have access to that information? Wouldn't this pose other security concerns?

My feelings are not easy on this. I like sharing my information but I don't like sharing all the information. I feel all of us have the right to decide what's private and what's public about us, in different stages. Don't know about the rest of you...

growing a knowledge tree

2009-01-23T11:31:00.005+00:00

Although far away, feel very near. That's what knowledge sharing makes possible. And if you like to see the growing of a Knowledge Tree, see each leave Nancy is capturing in Rome:

Studying technology at work

2009-01-15T07:15:00.001+00:00

by Wanda Orlikowski (2007), Sociomateriality: A Practice Lens on Technology at Work, video and slide presentation on ICTs in the Contemporary World seminar. Main ideas from the lecture:

Agency is an ongoin reconfiguration of the world
reconfiguration of expectations and norms of work
unanticipated consequences
contradictory dynamics
multiple realities

aggregating information in a timeline

2009-01-14T10:01:00.006+00:00

Some time ago (can't seem to remember when), I've created an account in swurl. I was forgotten of that trial until I've received a warning by Google about a citation of B2OB. Went back to revisited that digital space and got surprised by my timeline containing different feeds, from different spaces I have out there. Unfortunately, having my research place (infotransitions)(*) restricted means the feed can not be incorporated in swurl. Another thing that bugs me is that I can not incorporate feeds from my digital libraries (LibraryThing and CiteUlike). Nothing is perfect, even free stuff ;-)

It's amazing how the same bits of information gain such a different perspective through time, when seen in terms of aggregation from different places. «Seeing» is something we have to craft also. In research as I guess with many other activities, is very important, because what we develop can not be seen most of the time.

Sure there are formal places and events where we have to prove our accomplishments (milestones), and to produce products (papers, dissertations, thesis, presentations, communications, reports, etc), but sometimes it can be very frustrating to understand what one as been doing the rest (or the majority) of the time.

I wonder if my advisor as the perception of this information flow? Does he have that perception on the rest of his students? Would he benefit to implement such a timeline to follow students progress? Do others students also use digital spaces to make progress available to advisers? Do advisers feel the need to follow students progresses? What else do they use or need?...

Anyway, for me this kind of integration is very useful for research (and reminding myself) cause it allows me to context information in time from different sources:

data collection (situating dispositions for detecting data collection biases, weighting context of collection, leave trails for information ties to other studies/ readings/ reflections/ etc.)
reflections (information environment, questions that remain to answer or that where forgotten, writing reflections unveil trails and relate to other reflections,....)
readings (how readings in time affect and are affected by research phase)
milestones (It's amazing the number of activities that underline these moments, specially regarding information behaviours... and so easily detected in the timeline)
wish lists - books, gadgets, tools, events... and all the things we wish we could have to accomplish our goals/ task/ work/ etc.
opinions (things that make us trigger and add other possible views on subjects, coming from different people, with so different world views that help me to think differently about my research subject)
life (since we can not separate our research from our lives)
Other uses: this can include Department where students are developing the research, detection of students phases, networking, ...

What else could I be using that would give better results?

(*) «transição de espaços informacionais» was the starting point of my PhD research as it emerged during my master's research work. Like a personal notebook, this space is restricted so I can mess around with my thoughts without the fear of misleading passing by strangers or concerns about my (lousy) writing skills.

Keep in mind before the change occurs

2009-01-13T09:43:00.004+00:00

An interview following the research by HBS professor Boris Groysberg, Lex Sant, and Robin Abrahams, based on their case study "When Stars Migrate, Do They Still Perform Like Stars?" looks at the "portability" of performance and the likelihood that some positions may improve or diminish one's prospects for career advancement:

"What our research suggests is that portability isn't only determined by what industry you are in, or what particular company you work for, but it's also a result of how collaborative your job is. This suggests that workers who have already developed extensive firm-specific human capital (in the form of relationships or mastery of the firm's system and processes) should weigh the decision to change jobs carefully, because their major value is in the company they currently work for and the teammates they work with. If they do change jobs, they should make sure that the new employer is invested in their success and will give them the resources, and the time, to build the relationships that they need. (...) make sure your collaborative efforts take you outside your own team, and get you working across departments and with people outside the firm. These boundary-spanning relationships can help protect your portability—and your value in your current job."

It's never to much to say it again: don't believe in «stars» but I believe in the time it takes to build a productive «star team» because performance is so dependent on the relations we build through working (making things happen) together and learning our way around with that precise team of unique persons and experiences of life.

2008-12-24T11:02:00.000+00:00

Time to be with family, friends and our loved ones. A toast to you all: may you find peace, health and love in everything you do.

On scrapnotes and «technologizing» everything

2008-12-17T11:23:00.002+00:00

Scrapings or information scraps are little notes that we take in a paper cloth table in a restaurant, a napkin, a post-it, the corner of a magazine or the newspaper, a notebook, but also in del.icio.us bookmarks, text files or whatever is at hand, at the moment. They can even be turned into art books (bookscraping).

Maybe the clue to scraping lies not in developing new tools to add to the mash and proliferation of our bits of information, but in understanding that they are part of our own information behaviours for what works in given occasions. For me it seems more relevant to acknowledge it, and incorporate it as a practice that works for individuals, than to see it as a problem that needs a technological solution.

Scrapings are immediate. One takes not of it, with what one has at hand, and makes it immediately available to add meta data to a book we are reading, to glue at the fridge as a reminder or a grocery list that we later take with us, to note down a telephone or the name of the music passing on the radio, a research lead for later reflection, a visual signal, a temporary mark, making eliciting annotations on a paper we are reading, a drawing of complex or simple ideas.

Imagine the time (and problems) it would take for you to make a «simple» scraping in a web application (hardware + internet access + application initiation) while at the supermarket, talking with a colegue on the corridor, having a meal with friends, while driving (or stopping endlessly in IC19 ;), working with others in co-location or facilitating a meeting?...

Ever notice that in a rush moment, although people have their latest technology mobile phones, in order to exchange contacts either they jot down the contact in a piece of paper, or exchange presentation cards, or they dial the number they are given to stay with that record (and confirm they have noted the number correctly) and only later (if ever) they add more information to the plenty of available labels to fill in their sophisticated «contact managers»?

Let alone the transferability and malleability of such notes, in the end is also about reliability. How many of us have lost your long time acquired contact details due to loss, robbery or malfunction of your telephones (or whatever gadget you used)? How many of us will be able to show our present pictures to our future grandchildren (even with all the available storing capacity, gadgets and backup practices)?...

Makes us think about why with so many available technologies, with all the digital facilities that we have, paper production does not seem to be slowing down and the once envisioned «digital office» couldn't look further apart as paper seems to be the most reliable medium in our PIM(personal information management) practices. Maybe paper is still our long lasting backup and not the other way around.

For a deeper knowldge about scraping, there is a lot to reflect in the Haystack Group of MIT.

blogging research papers... and trails

2008-12-16T10:32:00.000+00:00

Adding to Lilia's latest post on research papers on business blogging, 4 more references since 2007 that I think are worth exploring:

How Macromedia used blogs to build its developers' communities: A case study (2008) Jingli Cheng

Business organizations are using blogs as a conversational technology to help build a community of practice where knowledge exchange and sharing actively take place. This case study examines how Macromedia used blogs to build its developers' communities and become more organizationally effective. Four major types of interactions between the company employees and customers through the blogs are analyzed: socialization, information sharing, help seeking, and teaching and learning. Organizational factors that contributed to the success of such a strategy are also revealed in the study. A model is thus drawn to explain how blogs contributed to the organization's effectiveness by strengthening customer relations, product development, and innovation. Finally, practical suggestions are provided for companies that are considering adopting a blogging strategy for customer relations, product development, and community-driven innovation.

'Because I need somewhere to vent': the expression of conflict through work blogs (2008) James Richards:

"Employee resistance has traditionally been analysed as an activity that occurs in the work organisation. In recent years, new Internet communication technologies, such as blogs, have expanded the possibilities for employees to express conflict. This paper explores how these developments can add to our understandings of employee resistance to the labour process."

How social media is transforming employee communications at Sun Microsystems (2008) Paris Barker:

"Sun Microsystems' CEO challenged his Global Employee Communications team to build communities within the company with social networking technology. Wikis, blogs, Facebook fan pages, and six islands on Second Life are just a few of Sun's new social media tools that employees use to learn, boost innovation, connect with executives and each other - and spread the good word about Sun. To achieve this quickly, the communications team collaborated across organizational boundaries, tapped grassroots social media efforts in other parts of the company, focused on a manageable number of short-term projects, and showed a willingness to experiment."

Investigating the influence of employee blogging on IT workers' organisational citizenship behaviour (2008) Sung Tae Kim, Choong Kwon Lee, Taewon Hwang:

"Blogging is a dynamic, interactive medium for the communication between authors and readers. In spite of many stories of using blogs in corporate working environment, these stories are largely anecdotal and it is unclear whether this practice actually delivers positive benefits for companies. This study investigates the impact of blogging phenomenon on employees' behaviour in the e-global age and introduces cases to understand how corporations can improve their IT workers' Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) levels through employee blogging."

Long before blogs where widely used, one of the ways of finding research related to owns interest was following the citation of paper about the topic. After finding those trails, you had to go through library catalogs to locate the paper and then try to have access to the full content of the paper. Today, apart from following bloggers in our interest areas (antecipating published works), we can also follow more easily the trails of the production of researchers through their published work, and through them, discover other researchers that have built on their work.

Ex: If you follow one of the papers of Efimova and Grudin on employee blogging in GoogleSchoolar, you can easily discover other authors that used her work and discover more rapidly how to gain access to work that builts upon the paper. As said, following trails is not new. What is new is information behaviours to follow those trails.

info-byto-ritmo de produção na web

2008-12-11T19:38:00.004+00:00

From the The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, EMC / IDC, 2008: "(...) explores new dimensions of the digital universe (e.g., the impact of specific industries on the digital universe; your digital shadow) and discusses the implications for individuals, organizations, and society."

Do analógico para o digital, APDSI

2008-12-11T18:55:00.000+00:00

A semana passada fui ao evento da APDSI para o lançamento de um relatório realizado por um dos grupos de trabalho constituídos de entre sócios que, sem qualquer tipo de remuneração, disponibilizam o seu tempo para a sua concretização.

Os slides e o relatório final da Evolução do analógico para o digital no domínio do trabalho, já estão disponíveis na página da APDSI.

Apesar de poucas pessoas terem estado a assistir o debate no final foi bastante animado e não foi possível ver respondidas todas as questões que foram colocadas pelos diversos participantes. Infelizmente (para mim ;) a questão que coloquei não foi respondida dada a quantidade de questões colocadas.

Falou-se muito do «teletrabalho» (algo que nas publicações dos últimos anos tenho visto desaparecer) mas não da «mobilidade no trabalho», nem da «diluição das fronteiras entre trabalho e vida privada» (24 hours on call). Pareceu-me que futuros trabalhos deveriam contemplar estas questões, dado que a crescente mobilidade dos trabalhadores é transversal a muitos sectores de actividade e, uma realidade para diferentes profissionais.

Oportunidade também para (re)encontrar caras conhecidas e (re)lembrar uma comunidade que em tempos teve muita animação ;-)

Bons acessos... para quem já os tem!

2008-12-07T14:16:00.004+00:00

Durante algum tempo fui cliente da Clix e não tive motivos de queixa. Antes de ser cliente, tinha na altura uma ligação dialup através da PT. Depois de ter comprado a caixa de activação é certo que esperei cerca de 5 meses para que o serviço fosse activado. No entanto, na altura tinha já acesso em casa (ainda que muuito lento) e excelentes acessos no local de trabalho. Não me causou transtorno.

Passados estes anos, e porque reiniciei uma nova etapa de vida, contactei a Clix para me tornar cliente na nova casa em que estou. Ao fim de 3 meses de espera para me activarem o serviço, e sem nenhuma outra forma de acesso, nada aconteceu, apenas fiquei a saber que o meu contrato já não estava activo, tal como pensava após a assinatura de toda a papelada e da espera.

Na semana passada, fiz contrato com a Vodafone. Fico a pagar menos pelo mesmo tipo de acesso (12Mb, chamadas gratuitas rede fixa das 21:00 às 9:00) e... já tenho ligação! O pacote inclui, até que a linha da PT seja atribuida e activada, a navegação através de SIM e só começo a pagar a mensalidade dos 19,90 quando a linha ficar activa! E, ainda mais importante para mim, é que não foi mais publicidade enganosa.

Ou seja, quando se avaliam serviços, para lá da comparação que se possa fazer do que é oferecido e do seu custo, convém ter atenção aos prazos e aos custos escondidos. Na Vodafone paguei apenas 9,98 mais 50 euros de caução pela connect box que me serão devolvidos após a activação da linha e entrega do equipamento numa loja. Foi tudo o que paguei! Já com a Clix, a quantidade de asteriscos existentes em pé de página, e de outros mais que se vão descobrindo aos poucos, tornam os preços que publicitam muito pouco atrativos face à Vodafone.

Mas claro que a minha opinião está viciada uma vez que com a Clix não cheguei a conseguir uma ligação e com a Vodafone, numa semana, consegui ;-)

Estudo da APDSI sobre novas formas de trabalho

2008-12-04T13:14:00.005+00:00

Hoje, às 14:30, vou estar na apresentação do estudo Evolução do Analógico para o Digital no Domínio do Trabalho:

"(...)um contributo para a análise dos impactes dos novos ambientes digitais no mundo do trabalho e ajudar a identificar barreiras e contextos desajustados ao desenvolvimento de novas formas de trabalho na sociedade da informação e do conhecimento."

Local: Auditório da Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações, Rua do Instituto Industrial 16, Lisboa.

Estou com muito interesse na temática, tanto mais porque é um assunto que toca directamente no trabalho que estou a desenvolver e sobre a qual tenho acumulado mais perguntas do que respostas, muitas delas passam pela observação de comportamentos de informação e práticas de gestão pessoal de informação (PIM) junto de profissionais, em contextos de mobilidade.

Uma das questões prende-se, logo à partida, com o facto de, apesar da crescente disponibilização de informação digital, nas práticas de trabalho não tenho observado um abrandamento da utilização de papel. Papel e digital continuam a co-existir e colocam desafios adicionais aos trabalhadores, nomeadamente quando falamos de «mover o papel» para o digital e vice versa. Em tempos dei aqui conta de uma dessas situações, mas elas abundam no nosso quotidiano.

PS - Obrigada, Pedro. Na tag coloquei APDSI mas nem tinha reparado no título. Corrigido!

Stages, Layers and Blog Networking Study

2008-12-04T11:05:00.005+00:00

It's been awhile since I've been able to follow Lilia's research work (and talk, and discussion, and playing around with things, and... eating pastry and laying out on the grass in a sunshine day :).

The first results are surfacing on her blog with the transcripts of the interviews. Every transcript available had the previous consent of the participants in the study and allow for a richer collaboration with the researcher... and also, add more responsibility for been part of the research (more about use of labels for writing research).

Since I'm still using my neighbours wi-fi (Vodafone delivered the wi-fi modem but not the connect box - anyone working in Vodafone.pt that can help?) I'm just adding some quick notes.

Someone already mention and I also believe that it might be worth exploring the concept of stages by Goffman in the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Blogs add different layers and individuals «act» according to different stages (palcos, in Portuguese). Blogs can be very personal and reveal a lot about a person but they do not represent by themselves the identity of the owner.

When I was trying to talk to Lilia over Skype I also suggested looking for some reference work about the way book authors might feel when they discover they have much more «followers» then they new about it. In general, maybe the act of maintaining a blog can be included in a wider category of «people who create» things. Objects that, after being created, persist and have a life of their own. Wonder if a blog, like a book or a vessel, can also be considered and treated like an immutable mobile. I wonder...

Note to self - relate perceived practices of social scientist with «real» working practices - After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (2005), Law.

Photo by Lilia - final chapter [in the PhD]

Com os meus agradecimentos

2008-12-03T14:02:00.005+00:00

Quando aqui coloquei a última entrada, estava longe de adivinhar que afinal a ligação com a Clix, após mais de 2 meses sobre a assinatura do contrato, viria a ser cancelada! Liguei para saber o que se passava e fui informada que o contrato que o estafeta tinha vindo recolher a minha casa, não constava no sistema. Sem mais história ou qualquer tipo de explicação.

Na sequência deste cancelamento, contactei por telefone a Vodafone para proceder a novo contrato. Virão amanhã entregar a caixa e recolher o contrato. É suposto estar incluída uma connect box para que possa aceder à internet até que a linha da minha nova morada seja activada pela PT. Se assim for, a partir de amanhã poderei retomar as minhas práticas de trabalho que assentavam, até Agosto de 2007, numa infraestrutura de informação e comunicação permanente. Ah, o mais importante (para mim) é que ainda ficarei a pagar menos do que iria pagar à Clix pela mesma largura de banda e com a happy hour para telefones fixos das 21:00 às 9:00. Vamos ver se a Vodaphone cumpre o que promete... e ainda acabo por mudar as minhas comunicações móveis para eles também.

Apesar de não saber quem nomear, nem fazer ideia durante quanto tempo poderei utilizar esta ligação, deixo aqui o registo dos meus agradecimentos a uma/um vizinha/o por me ter permitido aceder a esta ligação wi-fi sem restrições.

(un)connectedness

2008-10-27T11:15:00.000+00:00

Only a few of you may have notice, that I have been away from my digital spaces. Not because I deliberately chose to, but because in my new home I'm still waiting for the installation of my Clix internet account (they tell me they are waiting for PTelecom to instal the line). Since my workplace does not exist any more and I'm on a research grant, my social contacts are almost non existent. My communications are limited to mobile phone use (which is to expensive in face of my actual financial status), so I had to cut down outgoing calls, although I'm very glad to receive any calls :-)

Before, I used to be connected all the time and I didn't realize the importance it had in my daily life, namely the sense of connectedness to a vast network of friends and contacts. Apart from the obvious sense of isolation, I have been missing a lot of events just because I'm not connected. In a way it is like loosing your hearing, cause I'm not able to listen to the conversations going on. It's also like being mute, cause I'm not able to express myself. It's like being eye shorted, cause I'm not able to scan my (previous information rich) environment to see what's happening.

But this situation as given me a lot to think about. We can try to understand how those left behind are loosing opportunities (namely, those without internet access) but we can not feel it. Living the real thing, without being just a few days without access, changes a lot a persons perspectives and behaviours. Things so trivial like checking your email every minute (plus the expectation of the senders that you are on the other side and see it right away!) give way to a false sense of not caring enough with the sender to reply and/or act. The reality could not be further away from the true: not replying just because I'm not there to see the messages. So in the mean time, I've been sending and uploading on the go without the ability of receiving feedback, of engaging in the flow. To better describe what I feel, it's a lot like once in a while going out and talking to a machine with no one on the other side.

The saying that fish only knows they need water to survive, once they are taken from their natural element, seems quiet appropriate. Sometimes we need to be outside our (natural!) element to understand what's really important. The gigantic amount of information flow I was used to dealing with, gave way to, some could say, an information poor context. But, there where some benefits. Things where happening so fast that my time was almost spent for information attention and very little to information thinking and information production. Networks where becoming so huge (and unfamiliar, I might add) that a sense of friendly gathering disappeared and gave place to crowd gatherings with people speaking all at the same time and not listening to current and past conversations. The sense of information overload I was having, greatly exacerbated by the accumulating (unread) feeds I was subscribing, resulted in the ability of identifying the one's that really where important to me. Those where a few dozen, and not hundreds. During this time I've also discovered that to the people that really wanted to talk back, not having access to the internet did not stopped them to find me. They even reminded me of something that I wasn't aware of: in all the emails I've sent them, I had on the bottom of the message my automatic signature providing other means of contact, namely my mobile phone number.

So yes! During this last year, I may have lost a lot of events, new tools and great conversations. But, if they where really important they will persist and I will be able to reconnect after the information buzz. What do you think it was really important this last year that you would bother to leave me a link so I can start to recover once the Clix guys come to install my internet connection? I suspect the lake of answers will mean that I have not lost a great deal ;-)

Crossroads embedded aplications

2008-10-02T08:54:00.006+01:00

A Crossroads Newsletter (Fall 2008) passou a disponibilizar uma versão digital. Para aceder basta clicar na imagem.

Fall 2008

novo ciclo escolar - livros em 2ª mão

2008-10-01T08:38:00.004+01:00

Como muitos devem saber, cada novo ciclo escolar dos nossos filhos, trás consigo novas listas de livros. Com o avançar dos ciclos, as listas tendem a encarecer, ao contrário do rendimento disponível.

Com a entrada do meu filhote no IST (Taguspark), e o avultado preço dos livros de apoio ao curso dele (Informática e Computadores), recomendei-lhe a utilização da biblioteca. Apesar disso, vou precisar de arranjar, para já, um deles:

Linear Algebra and Its Applications (3rd edition), de David C. Lay

Alguém que esteja a ler isto que se queira desfazer do livro (ou que conheça alguém que já não precise dele)?

What???!!

2008-09-26T09:32:00.002+01:00

Applications, Virtualization and Devices: Taking Back Control [needs registration]:

"Employees installing legitimate but unauthorized applications, are a real and growing threat to business security and productivity. Removable storage media and wireless protocols make the challenge of securing data even more complex. This paper explains why control is important and highlights how integrating this functionality into malware protection is the simplest and most cost-effective solution."

Thou I can try to figure out what they mean about security (loosing control) I fail to understand how applications employees are installing are a threat to productivity!