When a Luddite works in a tech company

My company develops software, so I find today's bit of Luddite minded wtf coming from one of our admins a bit ironic.

We have an admin that sent out an Exchange invite to a meeting. I replied to the calendar event & confirmed my attendance. Anyone who has worked at a place that relies on Exchange calendars to know when people are free or busy, and relies on those meeting confirmations can understand why I didn't think anything further was needed after I confirmed my attendance via the invite.

Today, I got an email from the admin asking me, just to verify, if I was going to be at the meeting. I replied saying yes, I had confirmed on the invite. She replied to me with:

"I know, but I had asked specifically in my original email for everyone to rsvp by e-mail (don't trust exchange).  That is way I said, "just verifying"."

Can't trust that newfangled technolobly.

It reminds me of how many employees are hindered in being more productive because of backwards, broken, kludgy processes being kept in place by the lowest common denominator. In this case, to be fair, there's not been a company wide push to rely on the Exchange calendar, rather than just use it for reminder noises. We're small enough we could do this. I'm going to push for this to get more awareness.

I'm sure that just about every company has some process that's an artifact of people not changing methods to match changes in tools. How much less time we'd all spend on administrivia if people took the initiative to train themselves on the common, not terribly difficult tools at their disposal and/or their company provided training. I'm hoping we can achieve that here.

In the meantime, I'll continue to poke at the Luddite.

Smartphones again, can there be one that doesn't have a Major Suckage Point? Pretty please?

Seems like a good place to resume from where I left off just that little while ago.

The LG turned out to be crap with flaky hardware. There were plenty enough comments around the Interwebs for me to know that it wasn't me, it was them. I'm avoiding that company in the future.

Replaced it with a Samsung Droid Charge, that never saw an upgrade past Android 2.3. And that didn't hit until earlier this year. Oh Android fragmentation, how I loathe thee. Especially after reading today about a serious attack vector that is only patched as of 4.3.

Verizon will never update this thing to 4.3. It can't even run the Cyanogenmod ROM which would get me to 4.3. This is because of proprietary bullshit with the radios that no Android dev has been able to reverse engineer. All this closed source nonsense in my open source is like the fly in the soup. Except that you can't pick it out.

If only there was a phone OS that didn't have a Major Suckage Point.

Android - fragmentation, closed source surprises in a platform that's touted as "open", Google's insisting I need to have a G+ account to write app reviews (no, don't have one, don't want one, won't make one), absolutely shitty customer service from some vendors like HTC (you can read tons about the grief people go through who have tried to get a repair / replacement for faulty hardware). I'm wanting to say laggy glitchy performance, but this isn't true on all Android interfaces, and is supposed to be resolved by Jelly Bean. That gets me back to fragmentation.....

iPhone - a walled garden, weird syncing madness you *have* to do with iTunes, falling behind the innovation and hardware power curves, Apples insistence that they know the absolute best thing for users and just swallow it even if you disagree, blaming users for hardware issues (you're holding it wrong), fighting users who want to root their phone (sorry, it's *my* hardware that *I* purchased, I won't have a vendor telling me what I can and cannot install on it).

Windows - another walled garden, less functionality with more restrictions, ugliness & bah Microsoft

All smartphone OS's - tying you into one ecosystem whether you like it or not (Google /Apple / Microsoft account). The desktop is trying to go that route (e.g. needing an Apple Store account to download software for your OSX machine), but it's still not as much heartache to avoid.

I've not included the potential Ubuntu phone, but Canonical is the Apple of the open source world. They also have that "we know what is best for you" mentality. More than that I can't say as I don't know much about the experience of Ubuntu on a phone.


My personal solution is going to be to replace my current phone (only 1.5 years old) with a newer Android that can run stock Android, no vendor or carrier addon crap. Even if Google doesn't roll out updates to my hardware in a timely fashion, I can throw Cyanogen or another ROM on it because it will be built on standards. At that point, I may not be 100% happy with Android, I'll still be tied into the Google ecosystem, but at least I'll have the phone that sucks the least*.





* ... for me. YMMV, get the phone that's right for you, etc etc. Phandroids, iFans and Microsofties all amuse me.