How Chrome OS Ruined my Music Career

Or How the Google Cr-48 Netbook is an Extra-Time Evaporator

In addition to being a Geek in the traditional sense of science, technology, computers, SciFi and SciFantasy, I'm also a Band-Geek (using the modern PC term so as to not bruise delicate sensibilities). My parents thankfully paid for years of piano lessons starting in the first grade and I started playing trumpet in elementary school, ultimately resulting in 10 years of Marching Band through Jr High, High School and College; School Orchestra, Jazz Band, Pit Orchestra, along with Chorus in Jr and High School and my Church in addition to school and community Musical Productions. Maybe Band-Geek is too mild of a term to begin to describe how large a part Music has been in my life. Fast forward through tons of study and hours spent in the laboratory in pursuit of an advanced degree in experimental physics and the music gets moved to the back burner.

A few years ago I picked up a Harmonica to play around the fire during our family camping trips. That didn't go over very well and my family voted my harmonica off the island -- I'm still not sure where they have hidden it as they assure me they didn't throw it away -- it just got "misplaced".

This past summer my lovely wife had enough of my harmonica withdrawal and gifted me with an acoustic guitar. It is not as loud as the harmonica as long as I am strumming with fingers and not a pick so my practice jam sessions are tolerable. I store the guitar next to my desk in our finished basement and fell into a pretty tight practice schedule -- Every time I would sit down at my desk to work on my laptop, I would pick up the guitar and strum a few bars while Windows 7 booted up. I have an older single-core laptop that I upgraded from Windows XP so it takes Win7 a full two minutes to boot or resume and another three-five minutes to launch all of the background antivirus, registry scanning and defragmenting utilities and then finally run the Google Chrome Browser. That gave me a solid 10-15 minutes of guitar time, several times a day. Things were going well and the callouses on my left fingers where developing nicely. Until...

I found a Google Cr-48 Chromium OS Netbook on my porch on December 15th and my guitar practice time has evaporated. The Cr-48 takes ten (10) seconds to cold boot from Off to Sign-in and then is instantly in the Chrome browser after I hit return. If the Cr-48 is in suspended mode, the Sign-in screen is ready to go before I have the lid completely open (somewhere around a 30 - 40 degree angle from closed).

So there I am, 15 seconds into the "sit-down at my desk" process and my unopened email, twitter and Facebook accounts are up, luring me in. I don't even have time to reach for the guitar. Moreover, I lost my callouses in the shower this past weekend while washing my hair. I need to choose another location to store the guitar...somewhere where I can grab 10 - 15 min of practice time. Hey, maybe the bathroom. Now that I think of it, that room has concert hall acoustics anyway. I can't wait to tell her...

GMail - Outlook Syncing Views Drop 25 Percent

I Report, You Decide.

Two years ago, in December of 2008, I published a Google Knol titled GMail and Google Calendar Sync with MS Exchange and Outlook Web Access. It chronicles my employer's choice to upgrade our University's email system from Lotus Notes, to Microsoft Exchange Server. It is a bit of a custom hybrid system with our student accounts being cloud hosted by Microsoft and our employee accounts being hosted locally on the University's Exchange Servers. It's been a fairly stable solution and things have been cruising along.

As a Google Cloud Dweller, I was able to put in my request to become a Google Apps for Education Campus, but the University chose to go with Exchange. Honestly, we really, really, really needed to get away from our 1990's Lotus Notes system so either choice was a sound one.

The University quickly crafted an Employee Policy requiring all university electronic communication between faculty, administrators, staff and students to use the Exchange email addresses, a policy that still stands today. There was, however, a bit of wiggle room in that the University's C-Level Executive Leadership and IT Departments standardized on RIM Blackberry mobile devices -- allowing for IMAP and POP3 symbiosis between our Exchange Servers and User Cloud Access Devices (UCADs). The Google Knol describes the steps one can use to link your GMail UCAD to Microsoft Exchange Server.

A bit surprisingly, the Knol has received over 130,000 visitors to date. Google Analytics reveals that not many folks are enthralled enough with its content to read the entire entry, but this number does reflect the number of folks that were looking for this type of information. The Knol of course overwhelms everything else I have linked to my Analytics account so when its visits vary the change is easy to detect. This past Fall, the number of visits started to decline steadily and visits are now down by 25% as illustrated in the Analytics graph below.

Google Knol changed the web address of this Knol in October of 2009, so the data displayed on the graph only represents the visits from October 2008 through December 2010.

Analysis

So, the data being the data, what (if any) meaning does this have? I can think of a few possibilities:

• All of the folks interested in this task have already found a solution
• There are better sources for this solution available elsewhere
• Use of Outlook Web Access is increasing
• The number of GMail users needing to synchronize with MS Exchange is decreasing
• The number of GMail users is decreasing

I have my own personal bias that leads me to hypothesize on the correct answer, but I am interested in your thoughts on how to interpret the data. One of the possibilities I have listed? A combination of these possibilities? Additional possibilities not listed here?