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Why naming your child Hashtag is a bad idea

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#FAILED By know you have read the news, some parent named their new born baby girl Hashtag. This is a really bad idea but not for what you think. It is not that the child may be teased, or confused, or her future cost of therapy. The reason that this is a bad idea is ironic:

If the parents named their child hashtag because they like social media, the name actually completely disadvantaged their child in social media. What do you the child can use as a name in her online identities? dashtag may well be a reserved word. How about her personal brand? I would suggest "www.mymomnamedmehashtag.com". Because if I were to look for her, and perform a web search for "hashtag smith", do you think I will find her easily? Or would I get a thousand result pages talking hashtag the social media term instead?

Boston's new Lack of Innovation Center

[gallery] I love Boston. I lived and worked here for 20 plus years. My own little office has been in the Seaport district and South End for the last 8 years. Open loft office, bad HVAC ,cheap rent. It is, or rather was, a place for small start up companies to live. But developers are always looking for the next big thing. These areas are being bought up and developed into condos and apartments.

Reading Scott Kirsner's article this morning sadden me. He is right of course, as he is well plugged into the start up ecosystem in the area. This new "Boston Innovation Center" is just another insult. It is not cheap office space for start ups. It is a conference center and a restaurant. But wait -- is there not a beautiful and mostly unused conference center across a few block? How about asking the Boston Convention Center to contribute part the space for used by smaller businesses? A quick look at their schedule shows that they are not that booked up.

If the city actually meant to foster innovation and small business instead of pander mostly to large real estate developers, they should try the affordable housing model. Each time a developer gets approval to put up any new buildings, they have to contribute to a portion of low rent office space elsewhere.

The City's responsibility is to bring infrastructure to these low rent office space areas to help them thrive -- we need:

  • affordable and working transportation
  • parking and bike lanes
  • high speed internet connection (city of Boston is one place where you cannot get cheap FIOS)
  • cheap food and cheap rent

As a bonus if you target problem areas in Boston, it will help energize the neighborhoods. Except sadly I know this will not happen without some new innovation from the top.

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Amazon shuts down Special Occasion Reminder, adding birthday to address app in OSX

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I received an email from Amazon at 3 am EST this morning telling me that they are shutting down the Special Occasion Reminder service. They are converting these reminders to their (new?) Friends & Family Gifting service. I understand that they are trying to encourage people to buy things from Amazon for these birthdays as gifts, but do they have to externally rename the service? If you have been a long time Amazon customer like myself, some of the very old reminder setup did not have a marker to say that the reminder is for a birthday. Those older reminders will not be converted. What to do? I can add those reminders back to the new service, or I can add the birthdays to my address book database on my Mac. I updated my address book on the Mac. This is how:

Adding Birthday field to the Address book app on the Mac

  1. Go to the Preferences menu
  2. Click on the Templates button
  3. Click Add Field and select Birthday
  4. Voila ! Each contact in the address book now has a birthday field

 

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-10-07

Amazon Paperwhite Kindle Review

The postman dropped this through the mail slot today! My new Kindle Paperwhite, one day early. I have the original Kindle, and the Kindle Touch (well the kids have the Kindle Touches). How does this one compare?

  • much faster respond time, including typing
  • the display is way better
  • the UI changed a little, for the better
  • remember it does not have audio capability now, so it is purely a reading device

The only negative? My unit has a little scratch on the side edge on the rubber case. I am not going to exchange it for now obviously. Ignoring that, Highly recommended!

Click through the photoset below for many more pictures.

Amazon Paperwhite Kindle, a set on Flickr.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-09-30

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-09-23

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Why I ditched Skitch and Evernote a long time ago

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Today the internet is flooded with "we hate Skitch 2.o" sentiment. I hate to tell you, but I ditched both Skitch and Everynote a long time before today. Some background. I loved Skitch. But soon, Skitch gettings to be buggy and would crash on me often. It got to the point where I had to stop using it because I need a reliable way to share images at work. This was just around the time Evernote bought Skitch.

I was a very early Evernote adopter. I work on multiple machines and being able to automagically sync notes across them is priceless. But slowly I am annoyed by the subtle differences in the evernote clients across platforms. By all account Evernote is now a very mature platform but they still have problem deciding whether to support text formatting on all platforms. So I gave up.

I use Yojimbo for all my notes now. I am waiting for a read/write iPad and iPhone client, and that is a problem, but the Yojimbo guys know software and I trust them to get all the features right. Their notes organization support is very good which is what I need, and I use dropbox for general file syncing across platforms.

So why is Skitch and Evernote so bad? and Dropbox and Yojimbo so much better? Because fundamentally Dropbox and Yojimbo are run by techies -- programmers that put actual functionality first and business model second. They use their own products and will not make it not usable. My guess is product development team now drives Skitch and Evernote, and while "aligning their products with their strategic business model", short changing their actual user base.

Note: Yojimbo is an Apple platforms only product. If you use Windows, stick with Evernote.

Twitter Updates for 2012-09-20

  • yikes, really windy in @LexingtonMA #
  • @bitbucket are you down? #
  • is there an @ATT 4G outage in Boston? I cannot get data on my #iPhone since last night. #
  • my 8 yr old play tested my game prototype, said "pretty good, but need better instructions and more missions" #edtech @cms_mit #
  • mixing in math webinar, maybe I can use this as the new co-chair of the school's math club http://t.co/2UghaUTu #math #parenting #
  • A pretty good list (even if you don't agree with the order) of great #hongkong #movies http://t.co/rgBdCMos #
  • @robreact I love that movie, but it is so hard to pick one as the top. chungking express is comparable #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-09-16

The power and confusion of online communities

A firestorm is brewing over this NYTimes op ed article, by Bill Lichtenstein about his daughter, a kindergartener being locked in a closet standing in her own pee in Lexington, MA.  I am a parent and have my own children in the Lexington Public School system. I participate in multiple online parent communities as well as the Lexington online communities. There are, as expected, a lot of "I am shocked" discussions. There are a few "let's wait for the facts" postings in the minority. I am not here to comment about what happened at that time, but to comment about how these online communities have responded. As comments are commented upon, the details of what we know from the article are slowly diluted and changed. Blog posts about the article started to be referenced as additional sources. Law and regulations around these issues are being discussed and I have no way to know whether those are correct.

From reading the article, I have many questions:

  • Was the child attending a Lexington Public Elementary School? Likely but the article never said that.
  • Was the child in a regular class or in a special ed class? We do not know.
  • Were other school families notified? Seems so.
  • Was there a settlement? Seems yes.
  • Were the schools allowed to respond in the public? Not sure.
  • Where people involved fired/disciplined/or more? Not sure.

So I am writing this post with the sole purpose to ask everyone to read the original article very carefully, picked out the facts as mentioned from the article first.

As a final note -- have you noticed the graphics used in the article? Do you think it accurately reflect the situation? Is there a window in the door? Would a five years old be that tall? Would a closet lit by a lightbulb be pitch dark?

Twitter Updates for 2012-09-09