In my experience most of those who are complaining about how Microsoft Office works haven't actually used it in a pretty long time.

The reality is that the most anybody could pay for Microsoft Office is $499 per seat and almost nobody ever pays that. In reality it's going to be more like half that. Microsoft Office is upgraded about every 3 years but most firms don't upgrade every time, most skip one or even two upgrade cycles. We have firms today who are considering a move from Office 2003 to Office 2013.  That means they skipped TWO versions.

But let's assume you DO pay the full $499 for some reason and you upgrade every 3 years. That would be a bit less than $167 per year. For most of you that's about 1 billable hour. 1 Billable hour A YEAR for the software you use every day to get your work done. In the words of law practice management expert (and friend) Debbie Foster: "Shut up and buy it."

Spammers killed the comments section on this blog but if you'd like to discuss this article feel free to reach out on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

You can reach Ben M. Schorr at bens@rolandschorr.com or by phone at 928-526-3970. You can follow him on Twitter @Bschorr

I'm wrapping up the latest edition to a 298 page book right now. There is no scenario where I would rather do that on a 10" screen with a chiclet keyboard. None. My daily work, like many people's, involves a lot of content creation, a lot of online communication, reading a lot of documents online. Now the tech hipsters like to pretend that we all will be doing that on an iThing while sipping an overpriced latte at Starbucks but the reality is...most people don't have jobs that let them do that all day. And as above...even if I could spend all day working from a park bench I don't want to.

I *LIKE* my dual 24" monitors. I *LIKE* having a real keyboard and a real mouse. I don't want to buy an app that lets me sort of read Word documents and a screen cover that cuts down on the glare when I'm trying to work outside among the pidgeons. I want to use Word, in my very comfortable chair, with Pandora playing in the background, on a real keyboard and a big screen.

What we're in is the "PC-Plus Era" where people are still going to largely have PCs on their desks for getting real work done and they're going to have a smartphone that lets them check e-mail while they're waiting for their spouse to finish an errand or confirm movie times.  And oh yeah, probably some kind of tablet device they can use to check e-mail from the breakfast table, read a book on a long flight, and do a little bit of work during half-time of their kid's soccer game.

Most of the professionals I know have a tablet device of some kind now. I can count on one hand the number of professionals I know who actually do (or even want to do) all of their work on a tablet device.

Now...there will come a day, some years in the future, when we have tablet devices that are powerful enough that we can use them as desktop replacements. We bring them to the office, snap them into some sort of docking station that connects them to real monitors, a real network connection and a real keyboard, and do our work. When we leave, we take them out of their docks and slip them into a traveling case. But even with that...the world is full of workers that companies don't want taking their work PCs out of the office with them. Every week I have companies, concerned about after-hours worker access, asking me how they can lock their systems down so their workers CAN'T do unauthorized work outside of the office hours. It's an HR headache, not to mention a potential security issue.

Of those workers who ARE allowed to take their PCs out...a lot of them simply don't want to.

There are hundreds of thousands of cubicles across America that are still going to have PCs in them for many years to come.

When people tell me "The PC is dead" I can't help but think a little bit of their credibility has died too.

You can reach Ben M. Schorr at bens@rolandschorr.com or by phone at 928-526-3970. You can follow him on Twitter @Bschorr

Well, I got a bunch of travel articles and photos. Hmm. O.K. Mom might like that. I don't have time to read about Thailand right now.  Can't I search for and book travel in this thing? I scrolled right. More articles. I scrolled left, more articles. Shouldn't they have named this the "National Geographic" app, I mused.

Finally, seeing nowhere else to go, I right-clicked in the desperate hope that might do something useful.  Hey...it says "Flights!"  Now we're getting somewhere. I clicked on that and got a simple-looking search box that lets me search for flights.  Simple.  Yes.  The first simple thing about this process and it falls down in some important, and simple, ways.

1. The search field from the airports is not quite as easy as I'd like. This is the least of the sins. I need to check airfare from Flagstafff to Maryland. I don't know what airport so I start to type "Maryland" but that gets me nowhere. I guess "Baltimore". O.K. That'll get me to Baltimore, but maybe that's not the closest airport to where I need to go. Or maybe it's cheaper to fly into Reagan? I ended up having to go to Google Maps to sort out the closest airport to my actual destination then come back to enter the info. But...

2. There is NO option to search nearby airports. I can get airfare quotes from Flagstaff to Reagan...but not compare them to Baltimore. Unless I want to run a separate search. Next month I need to go to L.A. I can fly to LAX or Burbank pretty conveniently...but again no way to search flights that go to either.

3. There's no options for searching for alternate schedules. "1 day before or after" sort of searches to see how the fares might compare.

All of the power of Bing Travel at their fingertips (and Bing Travel is very good) and they give us this? It's like using WordPad instead of Word.

It's very pretty but ultimately there is no reason to use the Travel App when you get a LOT more features by going to any number of travel websites (Orbitz, Travelocity, Bing Travel, Kayak, etc...) Even if you figure out the secret password to get into the Flight search (WHY is there no obvious link to that right on the front page of the app?!?!) when you get there you find that the options are pretty limited.

Like so much of TUIFKA-Metro it seems that form was prioritized over function.

You can reach Ben M. Schorr at bens@rolandschorr.com or by phone at 928-526-3970. You can follow him on Twitter @Bschorr

If you'd like to comment on this article please do so over on Twitter or on our Facebook page. I've disabled comments on this site for the time being due to the ridiculous volume of spam we get.

1. It's fast. Let me disclaim up front - I bought a new 180GB SSD hard drive to use as my boot drive and installed Windows 8 on that; relegating my 1TB drive that was my main drive with Windows 7 to be primarily my data drive now. That said I know, from running Windows 8 on other devices, that some of the speed I'm seeing now is just because of the operating system. With Windows 8 on an SSD though...boot times are amazing. I did a full reboot, from desktop to desktop, in under 90 seconds the other day.  I've installed my applications (like Outlook, etc.) on the SSD and running those under Windows 8 is about as fast as you could want.

Want a blazing fast machine? Get an SSD, a healthy dose of RAM (I have 10GB) and Windows 8. It's a dream.

Even on a regular machine that just runs Windows 7, though, I think Windows 8 will be faster.

2. The "Windows 8 Style" (Formerly "Metro") interface is going to frustrate desktop users and give help desks a headache. It's very pretty, don't get me wrong. It's not hard to use, but it's very different from what you're used to and folks will have to get used to different kinds "swipes" and such to use it. On a tablet device that's fine. On a desktop with a mouse...it's taking a lot of getting used to.

Further complicating matters is that Windows 8 is a Jekyll & Hyde situation...you've got the Metro desktop and you've got a completely separate desktop that looks more like what Windows 7 looked like. It may not be obvious to user which one to use in which situation and, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to turn one or the other off. This is going to be a pretty big problem, I think, for enterprise IT departments.

User training costs will be significant and the help desk phones will probably be ringing a lot.

3. Metro-style apps are difficult to work with. Not the actual USE of the apps. Navigating the weather app or the messenger app is plenty easy enough. The problem is...they're full screen apps for the most part. You can snap them into an awkward half-screen look, but you can't resize them the way we could always resize things in the past. If you're used to multi-tasking you're going to find Metro to be frustrating - you'll have to constantly switch apps back and forth.

For some users this will be especially frustrating. The Metro Messenger app is nice, but I don't want my IM client to take up the entire screen. With Metro Messenger you don't really have the choice. Furthermore, though you can install the Windows Live Messenger client we're used to from Windows 7, there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to turn Metro Messenger OFF. Which means that ever notification that pops up you get TWICE - once from Live Messenger and one from Metro Messenger. Very annoying.

Dual-monitor desktops will be almost essential.

It's also not obvious how you CLOSE a Metro-style app. (Press ALT+F4 or drag the top bar to the bottom of the screen...which is sort of a long drag on a mouse, if we're honest. You'll be longing for the "X" in the top right corner pretty quickly.)

Summary

I've been using Windows 8 full time for about 4 days now. There are some things I really like. The speed is great. Some of the "Metro" apps are nice. Certainly it's very pretty. It also feels like I'm still not quite where I was with my Windows 7 machine in terms of productivity. As a general rule I'm avoiding all of the Metro apps when it comes time to do work - and I've too often found myself trying to get Windows 8 out of my way (like the redundant messenger notifications, or the e-mail notification sound that won't go away no matter how many places I turn it off).

I think Windows 8 will be brilliant on a tablet. But most knowledge workers still do a great deal of their work on a real computer. A desktop PC with one or more (hopefully more with Windows 8) monitors, a real keyboard and a mouse. For those users...this OS may be a bit of a challenge at least initially. And I really don't look forward to running this OS on a laptop where I'm going to have to use a touchpad to fight with the OS to get my 14" screen the way I want it. Nobody wants their Twitter app full screen on a regular computer Microsoft. That's fine for a phone, but on a PC we want it tucked off to the side, not dominating a 24" monitor.

Comments?

Due to the overwhelming volume of spam we received I've decided to just turn off comments on this blog. If you'd like to comment on this entry I'd be happy to have a dialog with you about it. Best way is via Twitter...my Twitter handle is @bschorr.

Let's Talk DNS

By popular request I thought I'd give a quick overview of how DNS works since it's been in the news a bunch lately. In the interests of time/space there will be a few oversimplifications here but if you're a network engineer you should already know this stuff. This little primer is intended to help the novice understand the basics of what, how and why DNS does what it does. So let's get started....

Devices on a network (or a collection of networks, like the Internet) generally use TCP/IP as the protocol they communicate with. Each device gets a unique "IP address", vaguely like the postal address on your home or office. A TCP/IP version 4 address (which is what the vast majority of the Internet is still using, for the moment) would look something like 207.155.63.6.  Four numbers, each between 1 and 254 separated by dots. There are some numbers in there that are reserved and 0 and 255 have special functions, but you get the idea.

In the beginning there were two machines on the precursor to the Internet and addresses weren't really an issue. Then there were three machines and people started to realize that typing in "207.155.63.6" was a minor pain and trying to remember it (especially when there got to be hundreds, never mind millions, of devices connected) would be a major pain.

So they figured out a way to assign friendly names to these numbers that humans could remember and type and the computers would just look up the friendly name to find out what the IP address is. That was done initially with static text files called "HOSTS" files. In fact your computer probably STILL has a HOSTS file though it's not usually used for much these days. The HOSTS files lists the names and addresses much like a phone book lists names and phone numbers.

EServer                172.23.1.4
FileServer            172.23.1.5
PrintServer         172.23.1.6
JoePC                   172.23.2.50

And so forth. This was deployed to the handful of machines on the early "Net" so that people could use English machine names and there was much rejoicing! Until the network grew to hundreds of machines and new machines (and different addresses) were being added daily (Hourly!). Then the guy in charge of updating the HOSTS file and distributing the HOSTS file and keeping track of who had what version of the HOSTS file wasn't so happy.

So a new service was invented called DNS (Domain Name System). Basically it does what the HOSTS file does but it does it in a far more automated and easy-to-maintain fashion with a database maintained, distributed and updated somewhat more automatically. With a little tweaking it scaled nicely and once again there was much rejoicing!  In fact it's what we still use today.

When you type "http://www.google.com" into your web browser your computer, behind the scenes, connects to whatever DNS server(s) it's been configured to refer to and asks what the IP address for that address is.  (173.194.79.106, if you're wondering, though in actuality they have a LOT of addresses for scale)

Every device connecting to the Internet has been set to connect to one or more DNS servers to do address lookups. This is true of a lot more than just web browsing, by the way. It's DNS that tells your e-mail server how to resolve @rolandschorr.com when you try to send an e-mail message to me. There are LOTS of DNS servers out there - in fact many if not most companies even have their own.

Fun trick: You don't NEED the friendly names if you happen to know the IP address of the server you want to go to. Type http://173.194.79.106 into your browser and your browser will very happily open Google for you. (In fact, it may open very slightly faster because it doesn't have to look up that address in the DNS first).

Maybe next week we'll explain this topic in a bit more detail...or do a totally different topic!

Word Trick of the Week

I probably shouldn't call it the "Trick of the Week" because that implies there will be another one next week.  Well, there might be.  Anyhow..

Ever open a long document you were working on and find yourself having to do a lot of paging up and down to find the spot where you left off? No need for that. Open the document and press SHIFT+F5 and Word will take you back to the last spot you were editing. This also works if you're in the document and you've scrolled (intentionally or accidentally) up or down in the document and you want to go back to where you were working. It doesn't, however, work very well in Word 2007. A bug in Word broke the feature in that version, though the clever Word MVPs have a workaround for you here.

Where's YOUR Taskbar?

As monitors get wider users sometimes find that they're more likely to have free space on the left or right than at the top or bottom. For myself I found that the nature of the way items on the Windows Task bar display meant that they were much wider than they were tall. Either way it's a possible reason to move your taskbar from the bottom of the screen to one of the sides.   Didn't know you could do that? You can! Just grab an empty part of the taskbar and drag/drop it to the side of the screen (or top of the screen) where you want it. It will happily snap into place. I dock mine on the left side of my right-hand monitor - which means it's roughly in the middle of my two monitors, easy to see and not a far mouse-throw from whereever I am.

If it doesn't move for you...right-click the taskbar and make sure you don't have it locked. You'll need to unlock it, then move it. Then you can re-lock it if you like.

You can reach Ben M. Schorr at bens@rolandschorr.com or by phone at 928-526-3970. You can follow him on Twitter @Bschorr

One of the features MetroTwit DOESN'T have yet is the ability to schedule tweets but I'm experimenting with two other services that can do that:

Buffer

Buffer (http://www.bufferapp.com) is an interesting concept. Basically you post Tweets into it and it will automatically post those tweets for you on a specified schedule. You can set up a schedule with as many regular "slots" as you like at different times of day. For example: 10:15AM, 11:33AM, 1:42PM, 2:58PM, 3:27PM and 4:19PM.  You put a tweet into Buffer and it will post it for you at the next time slot, let's say its 10:15AM. Put another tweet into Buffer and it will post that one at 11:33AM. The idea is that you "fill up" your buffer with a bunch of tweets waiting to go and Buffer will automatically post them in the time slots you've specified. If you have 6 time slots (like our example) then the 7th tweet you put in Buffer will get posted tomorrow at 10:15AM.

The free version of Buffer will accept up to 10 tweets at a time. The paid version is $10/month and allows an unlimited queue of posts.

I'm a little mixed on Buffer right now...I do like the simplicity of posting into it and letting it send the tweets but I can do that for free with Tweet4Me (we'll get to that).  What I like most about Buffer I guess is that it tries to give you analytics on each post. So you can see how many people retweeted, mentioned, clicked (if you have a link), favorited and so forth each post. Over time you could probably use that to get a feel for which time slots are most beneficial for you to post in and that could let you dial in your social media strategy a bit more.

That said, at the moment, I'm having a hard time justifying $10 a month for it. Not that the price seems unfair...just that I'm trying to figure out if it's worth $120  a year for those kinds of analytics. I'll keep evaluating...

Tweet4Me

Tweet4Me (http://tweet4.me) is a free service that you can use from ANY twitter client. First you need to follow @tweet4me and it will follow you back. That's essential because the service works via DMs and you can't DM people you don't follow and who don't follow you. When you want to use it all you do is send a direct message like this "d tweet4me +2h Wow, this is a really imporant tweet".  That would post "Wow this is a really important tweet" to your account 2 hours from now.  You can also tell it to post on a specific date and time with d tweet4me 13-8 1530h...  Which would be the 13th of August at 3:30PM.

There are a bunch of options - you can schedule at a specific time today, a certain number of minutes or hours from now, a specific time on a specific day, etc.

There's no discernable limit on Tweet4Me and you can schedule tweets well into the future.

You can even have Tweet4Me place tweets into your Buffer (see above) by using +b as the scheduling code.

Why Schedule Tweets?

You might be wondering why to bother scheduling at all. Shouldn't we just post them? There are a few reasons to schedule, actually...

1.  It's 11:45 at night and you just had a great idea for a work tweet...but you know 99% of your audience is asleep right now. Schedule it for 10:30 in the morning when you' know they're more likely to be up and logged in.

2. You've just posted 6 straight tweets and you don't want to totally flood your follower's stream. I hit this one a lot - I read an interesting article or a series of them and if I tweeted every single thing from those I'd have 20 or 30 straight tweets...which is a little annoying. By using the scheduler I can spread them out over the next few days...so my followers don't have to deal with All Ben, All the time.

3. To provide social media presence even when you're not present.  I know I have a travel day coming up and I won't be tweeting too much that day. I've also got a few tweets ready to go that aren't especially time sensitive.  So every couple of hours, even while I'm in mid-air, a tweet will get auto-posted for me.

4. To post when they're more timely. I will often post reminders to people just before certain events or dates. With tweet scheduling I can actually post those tweets NOW even though they won't actually post to Twitter until the exact day/time I wanted them to. I don't have to worry about remembering it now.

At this point I actually schedule most of my tweets - I generally only "live tweet" the things that seem time-sensitive. Tweets about things happening right now for example.

Twitter is still a useful and powerful tool in your social media arsenal. Use the right gear and you'll get the most out of it.

You can reach Ben M. Schorr at bens@rolandschorr.com or by phone at 928-526-3970. You can follow him on Twitter @Bschorr .

When is Vaporware Not Vaporware?

...when it's iVaporware apparently. Microsoft caught a lot of flack a couple of weeks ago for announcing the "Surface" - a new tablet device without a lot of particulars. Microsoft was widely derided in the tech press for neglecting to say exactly when the Surface will ship or specifically what it will cost (among other things). Which is why it's so ironic that many of those same folks are anxiously repeating rumors about a smaller iPad that may (or may not) ship later this year for some unspecified amount of money.

Apparently it's o.k. to talk about future products without all of the details unless you're Microsoft.

Cutting the Cable

I wasn't sure it would ever happen in my house but it looks like it's going to. We're going to put DirectTV on hold and try just streaming our TV and Movies online from NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and the assortment of network websites like NBC.COM, HGTV.COM, BravoTV.com and so forth. The device that's hopefully enabling this for us is the Rikomagic 802. It's a tiny, inexpensive, Android 4.0 computer that can also run Linux. It has 802.11n networking so it can connect to our home network wirelessly and HDMI out so it can connect to our LCD TV. It also has Bluetooth so we can control it wirelessly with a mouse and keyboard.

We've come to realize that we don't watch very much TV and most of what we do watch is available online via streaming. True we might not be able to watch as many things live that way but...we don't watch much live anyhow. We DVR almost all of the few things we watch.  The cost of the Rikomagic? Less than 1 month of DirectTV.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Are You Contributing?

I think I may need to do a full blog post on the subject of crowdsourcing but the fact is that there are some powerful communities out there and you're probably already using some of them. The question is...are you contributing to them?  Let's talk about a couple...

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the elephant in the room when it comes to crowdsourcing. As you probably know it's a giant encyclopedia of information about just about any topic you could imagine. What makes it truly remarkable is that all of the content in it...was contributed by regular folks who were passionate and/or knowledgable about the particular topic. I think it's quite possibly the single greatest repository of human knowledge in history. An encyclopedia, updated constantly and in near real-time, available for FREE to anybody in the world (unless there's a firewall blocking it). That's remarkable.

The question is...are you contributing to it? I don't mean with $ (though they would welcome your financial contributions too) but actually with your knowledge! I'm sure there are topics that you're passionate about. Maybe it's what you do for a living, where you live, what your hobbies are, people you've admired, places you've been, events you experienced, a favorite movie, TV show or band....I'll bet if you think about it you could easily think of at least half a dozen topics that you know a fair bit about and that you're excited about. What topic do you bore the relatives with every Thanksgiving? The classic car you're restoring? The most recent book on the Crusades that you're reading? Egyptian furniture?  I'm sure there's quite a few (for me: Columbo, Football, The USS Missouri...)

Why not go to Wikipedia (here's the link again) and look up the article on that topic?  Read it?  You might learn something!  But more to the point you might find something you think is wrong! You might have some piece of information that's missing. The brilliant thing is...you can EDIT the article and contribute your knowledge. You can click the Discussion tab and interact with other people who are knowledgable and passionate about it too! Your people!

Why not contribute 10 minutes of your time and a little bit of your knowledge and passion to make Wikipedia a little bit better and share that information with other people all over the world?

Waze

If you have a SmartPhone you've probably used the GPS navigation app on that phone at least once. Ever wish you could make that app better? Ever wish that app had better traffic or incident reporting? Ever realize the navigation app was directing you to the wrong street? Waze is your answer.  It's free and available on almost every platform (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, etc).  What's interesting about Waze is that when you're driving along and you see heavy traffic, you can tap the screen on Waze and report that traffic so that other "Wazers" in your area will know. If you see a hazard in the road - an accident or even just a big piece of debris, you can tap the screen and report that too.

And, of course, since other Wazers are reporting these things you'll often be warned if you're about to come up on an accident or hazard (or Police speed trap).

If you see something wrong on Waze's map...you can report that too. You can even log into the Waze website and EDIT the maps yourself! Give Waze 10 minutes of your time and you can make the maps around your neighborhood truly useful for everybody.

But Waze goes better than that. When you're driving around with Waze running you're actually sending your track back to Waze. Waze can learn about the streets from your driving AND...even better...Waze knows how fast you're going. That means that if there are 3 Wazers driving down the freeway and they're all going 15MPH Waze can infer that there's heavy traffic there and warn others. With a glance at your Waze map you can see areas where other Wazers are moving unusually slowly...and that might help you steer around that traffic.

Waze does navigation too - give it an address and it'll give you turn by turn directions. It's not bad at that and they're improving it all the time (with a lot of help from the users) and of course it has the ability to route you around traffic that was reported by...other Wazers.

There's the catch though. The network effect.  Waze is at its best when it has a large volume of users. Imagine if 1 out of every 10 cars had a SmartPhone running Waze in it. You'd get some pretty dynamic and accurate traffic information.

So give Waze a try...just by trying it you're contributing to that community and making navigation better for everybody.

Gas Buddy

The last one I want to mention here is Gas Buddy. Gas Buddy is another free app that you can install on your phone and it helps you find the best gas prices (or just the nearest station) in the area. Gas Buddy can save you a fair bit of time shopping around and a fair bit of money as well. There are stations right here in my town where the price currently is $3.59 a gallon for regular. But just blocks away you can get gas for $3.35 per gallon!  Why overpay?

Gas Buddy relies upon folks to report the prices at their local stations though. Next time you get gas, fire up Gas Buddy and if it doesn't have current or correct prices, submit the right prices! Sometimes if I'm stopped at a light and I notice that the station on the corner doesn't have current or correct prices I'll submit those - hopefully it helps somebody.

Like Wikipedia and Waze, Gas Buddy gets better and more useful for everybody if everybody contributes.

Patch Tuesday

This Tuesday is Microsoft's Patch Tuesday which means there will be some patches and fixes to download to your machine. Expect a possible reboot Tuesday night or Wednesday.

O.k., that's enough for today....enjoy your week!

You can reach Ben M. Schorr at bens@rolandschorr.com or by phone at 928-526-3970. You can follow him on Twitter @Bschorr

Tech increasingly has the capability to anticipate our wants and needs and I think it's foolish to ignore that capability. A simple example is e-mail. We no longer have to press send/receive to get our e-mail delivered to us. While we may well want to turn off the notifications that interrupt us, it seems more efficient to have the e-mail already in our Inbox when we turn our attention there.

A more complex example? When I get home I want my smartphone to automatically connect to my home wireless network so that any data transfer uses the WiFi instead of the carrier network where I might incur extra charges. My phone already knows I'm home - it has GPS built in.

An even more complex example? I like my smartphone to detect that I'm in the car and automatically engage my GPS navigation app. I like it to detect when I'm out of range of my home WiFi and turn the WiFi radio off to save battery. Or...when it's plugged in on A/C power I'd like to disable the screen save capability. I'll turn the screen off when I want to, but if I turn it on, I'd like it to stay on if the phone is plugged into external power.

Fortunately we have tools now that can do that. On the Android platform Tasker lets me do pretty much all of those things. On the PC an increasing number of scripting tools can be aware of what I'm doing and suggest (or just do) the logical next steps for me. On the navigation side Waze promises to learn your favorite routes so that when you tell it you want to navigate back home it can prioritize the routes you like to take, rather than insisting you take the ugly drive past the warehouses that you never do. Car companies like Ford are catching onto this with increasing in-car tech to try and make your drive more pleasant and efficient.

I'd LOVE it if Microsoft Word would detect that I've just typed and printed a letter and have an option that would automatically print an envelope for me. I know I can do that already with a couple of mouse clicks but I think it would be cool to turn on a little AI that when I printed my letter it would pop up a little window with a preview of the printed envelope and ask if it was o.k. to go ahead and print it.

Tech SHOULD be at our command, yes, but we shouldn't have to issue every individual command every single time. I want my tech to obey, but I also want it to learn.  Thankfully we're steadily making progress on those capabilities.

You can reach Ben M. Schorr at bens@rolandschorr.com or by phone at 808-782-6306. You can follow him on Twitter @Bschorr