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While wrestling my slides into shape for BMC Engage, I saw this:

"If you would like to copy and paste text into this document, please paste as text-only or paste into Notepad first to clear styles."

- In a template for some 451 documents. It’s 2014, and this is pretty much where all the white-collar workers are. That whole "plain text and markdown" rebellion you see among tech-separatists is a weird reaction, but almost an isolationist response to the weirdness of Word.

Who ever, in the history of anything, wanted to preserve formatting when pasting? Nobody, that's who. You always want the format of the destination.

PowerPoint is the worst offender, ignoring the "paste as plain text" option that everything else uses. Of course PowerPoint is also where it is most obvious if the formatting is off. So now I have to paste into TextWrangler¹, copy back out of there, and finally paste into PowerPoint.

The future is stupid.

It doesn’t suck.
" )'s little brother. Check it out.

Dear everyone sending me satisfaction surveys: pay me.

Seriously, if you're an airline or a hotel chain sending me a survey that takes (according to your own blurb) "ten or fifteen minutes" of my time, I want a handful of airline miles or hotel points in exchange for that time. It doesn't have to be a huge amount, but it shows proper respect.

I am not "honoured" by the opportunity to tell you whether my flight or stay was pleasant. If the experience is worthy of comment (good or bad), you'll hear about it on Twitter. Watch out for that type of feedback and engage with it promptly. Surveys will give you more granularity, but without any enticement, the feedback you get will be skewed towards people who place a low value on their time.

Seriously, what's it to you to throw a hundred airmiles at me in exchange for a detailed, thoughtful critique of the service I received? You already have all my demographics from the loyalty programme anyway, so you can tune the hit list of people who receive the survey.

Otherwise, you're not getting my feedback.

There's this hilarious image going around, welcoming Apple to 2012 or something. It's a "humorous" play on the screen size of the iPhone 6 - and of course the 6 Plus "catches up" to monsters like the Samsung Galaxy Note.

It's okay, Android users, we get it.

I'm not going to pick this apart (not even the really really ridiculous parts - "Battery stats"? "IR blasters"? really? you're going with that?). I'm just going to point out that in the Android world, "innovation" apparently means "made the screen a bit bigger". "Not making the user's eyes bleed" is apparently not a factor.

Let's not kid ourselves: phones used to look like all sorts of things, and now they all look like iPhones.¹

What drives Android fans crazy is that almost everyone - including most Android users! - sees Android phones as a cheap alternative to an iPhone, not anything to desire in their own right. Sure, there are exceptions - until now, if you wanted a big-screen phone, you had to have Android - but that loophole has now been closed.

Wait till people start asking if their Galaxy Gear or whatever is an old Watch…

If you are wondering how to type the name of the Watch from your iOS device, wonder no longer.

It may seem odd, but that character is not part of the standard iOS keyboard - at least, not up to iOS 7. You can type it from a Mac (Shift-Option-8), but not from an iPhone or iPad.

Luckily, there is a fix.

From your iDevice, go to mrgan.com/gb.

Voilà! Now you can copy the  character (or any other useful character) from Glyphboard into your review or tweet.

If this is a one-shot, you can use Glyphboard directly from Safari, but if you expect to be discussing the Watch regularly, you can save it to your home screen.

Hope this helps!

Brian Krebs reports a spike in payment card fraud following the now-confirmed Home Depot security breach.

This is actually good news.

Wait, what?

Bear with me. There has always been a concern that many security breaches in the cloud are not being reported or disclosed. The fact that there are no other unexplained spikes in card fraud would tend to indicate that there are no huge breaches that have not been reported, frantic stories about billions of stolen accounts

notwithstanding.

The day we should really start to worry is when we see spikes in card fraud that are not related to reported breaches.

California has passed a law mandating kill switches for smartphones:

A kill switch is software that allows consumers to disable a phone after the device has been reported stolen and reactivate it only with a correct password or personal identification number. Proponents of the bill have argued that wide adoption of this type of antitheft technology would lead to a reduction in phone theft because it would make it more difficult for criminals to resell stolen phones.

This is all well and good, and if your phone has this functionality available, then you should definitely turn it on now. If stolen smartphones are known to be useless, it will not be worth thieves' while to steal them. Note that this works even if the technology is not perfect. If it turns out that the lock can be bypassed, but doing so is difficult or time-consuming, fences will demand more discount from thieves, making the phones less attractive.

But what is the connection with enterprise IT?

I would be willing to bet that many admins have wished that servers came with kill switches, for instance. Who hasn't had a mis-configured VM running on somebody's desktop hijack DHCP for an entire subnet, for instance? Yes, that one happened to me - although I had some choice words for the OS vendor that chose to make the DHCP server default to on…

Unfortunately, problem servers these days are often not directly under IT's control. This is infamously known as "shadow IT": business units frustrated with the pace or quality of service they get from IT go rogue and obtain service elsewhere. Gartner famously predicted that 35% of IT spending would be happening outside of the IT department's view by 2015.

Depending on your own definition of shadow IT, this prediction may seem more or less realistic. For instance, does shadow IT include rogue BYOD? The same pressures drive both, but BYOD users generally want to use company services. However, nobody can deny that a non-negligible amount of shadow IT is already taking place.

The question is what to do about it.

I got into a Twitter exchange on that very topic, starting from this blog post by the IT Skeptic, Rob England.

How to deal with Shadow IT http://t.co/2g8k0CoprG < @theitskeptic How about causes? #ShadowIT represents unmet needs in the business.

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) September 1, 2014

IT departments would love to have a "kill switch" for shadow IT. No more rogue users going off and doing their own thing! Back to the good old days of everyone going to IT on bended knee. After all, what alternative did they have - buy their own mainframe? Yeah, right!

Well, the world has changed, and now users do have alternatives. The hell of the thing, from the point of view of an IT department, is that users get better quality of IT service at home than they do at work, and this has changed their expectations at work too.

When a user goes around the IT department, that is a signpost to value that is currently not being delivered by the IT department. No matter how easy it gets to do IT, users would rather someone else were doing it. It's just that the level of effort required to do it themselves has fallen below the point where the returns are sufficient to make it worth their while.

@dwellington @theitskeptic Shadow IT is best seen as an implicit demand request.

— Charles T. Betz (@CharlesTBetz) September 1, 2014

Time was, only the most dedicated people would do the BYOD thing and bring a Mac or a laptop running Linux to work. Now, it's easy enough that pretty much anyone can do it¹, and the returns are obvious. We are getting to that point with cloud services, especially SaaS.

Now, I do agree with Rob England that distributed IT is better than shadow IT. Distributed IT simply means IT that is engaged with the business, instead of skulking in their ivory tower ^W^W darkened basement. Where we differ is on how blame is apportioned.

To my way of thinking, shadow IT is an indictment of the IT department's failure to engage with the business. Users should not go rogue, but let us all recognise that there has been some long-term provocation going on. In fact, IT people are shooting themselves in both feet by not engaging with the business, because not only are they losing relevance as the users bypass them wherever possible, but they still get held responsible when something breaks or the company hits the front page of the news for all the wrong reasons.

If you are in IT, talk to your users, figure out where there are bottlenecks, and help remove them. This is no longer a "my way or the highway" world; users have any number of roads, pathways, railways, navigable rivers, gyrocopters and teleporters to get to where they need to go. You need to prove your value, not just assume that users have no choice.

The good thing is that the rewards are also significant. IT can be a differentiator, not just a cost center. Business processes today are entirely computerised, to the point that the performance of IT is the performance of the business in a very real sense. (If you doubt me, try visiting any office when the power is out or the network is down. I guarantee you that not much business is being transacted.) An engaged IT department - distributed, as Rob England puts it - can make a very visible contribution, and stop being lumped with Facilities and janitorial services.

And all you have to do is stop calling them lusers…

I cancelled my service with [the Most Incompetent ISP In The World](http://www.fastweb.it "FASTWEB" )[^1] months ago, and somehow they are still able to ruin my week right from a Monday morning.

If you wish to access the service, please press 1.

    WHY DO YOU THINK I CALLED? Whatever. 1



    > If you have this type of contract, press 1. If you have this other type of contract, press 2. And so on for a non-interruptible eternity.





    I actually wanted *billing*, but okay, whatever. 2.



    > Please enter your phone number, or alternatively, your contract number. (long pause) Press 1 to enter your phone number, or 2 to enter your contract number.





    Phone numbers are ten or eleven digits, contract IDs are seven digits. Why are you making me go through this?





    Anyway, I no longer have my phone number. I do have my contract number, but I bet this won't work, since it's not active. Here goes nothing. 2, *beep beep beep beep beep beep beep*



    > Sorry, that contract ID is not valid. We can not complete your call. (hangs up)





    <img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/43436e974c3790f2ee56b2edd751d00f/146ddeafd21f2cca3444417c55cb0909/w600_7a45ec02a9e2f4f901879c666c5419c0.png"  height="300" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; height: auto;" alt="00000065-001.png" width="291"/>





    Then I figure out there is a **different** number you can call for inactive contracts, because of course there is. Call *that* up, and on the first attempt it won't recognise DTMF tones. Great start.





    Call them back again, this time it takes the tones. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that.



    > Due to high traffic levels, we cannot take your call. Please call back later. (hangs up)[^2]





    **WHAT IN THE NAME OF CTHULHU? SONS OF A MOTHERLESS GOAT, MAY YOUR BEDSHEETS ALWAYS BE FULL OF BREADCRUMBS, MAY A CHERISHED PET CRAP IN YOUR SLIPPERS, MAY ALL YOUR DOWNLOADS STOP AT 99% IN PERPETUITY.**





[^1]: Yes, that's my tiny attempt at Google-bombing them. Feel free to join in.

[^2]: It should tell you something when the cancellation help line is tied up. Remember, this line is for customers who have already leapt through several hoops to cancel, all of which keep moving, and some of which are on fire.

Some days it's tough to take the tech industry seriously. Other days it's really tough.

The latest thing is that we are apparently back to judging people by how they dress. First Peter Thiel was quoted in The Economist advising startup founders and VCs:

don’t do business with anyone who dresses in a suit

This would be of course the same Peter Thiel whose Twitter avatar shows him wearing not only a suit, but a tie as well:

Admittedly he doesn't seem to use that Twitter account, unless he's a prolific DM'er, but still.

Then the US White House was forced to relax its dress code to attract coders, which Wired reported with the excellent title "The White House Gives Up on Making Coders Dress Like Adults".

In a White House video, Dickerson says he is asked one question again and again by people curious about his new job. They "want to know if I’m wearing a suit to work every day," Dickerson explains in the video. "Because that’s just the quickest shorthand way of asking: 'Is this just the same old business as usual or are they actually going to listen?'"

I'm not advocating for a 1950s IBM approach of everyone wearing suits all the time - but what sort of entitled, coddled man-child do you have to be to complain about being made to wear a suit in the White House?

I don't wear a suit to work every day, although I don't wear a T-shirt either. However if I'm in a customer-facing situation, you'll find me suited and booted. Since I'm on the vendor side, it shows due respect for current or prospective customers' time. I also wear a suit to meet analysts, though, despite the fact that in that situation I am on the customer's side of the table. Again, it's about respect and being a grown-up professional.

What is noticeable is that it has happened a couple of times that I have got it wrong. One day I was in the office and ended up having to attend a customer meeting at short notice. I had on a shirt and a blazer, but I had no tie and I was wearing jeans and sneakers. I apologised to the customer, and there was no issue.

On the other hand, it happened to me to visit a "cool" cloud company in my normal business warpaint, and was told in the lift to remove my tie as "otherwise they won't listen to you"….

Let's not even get into the high-school sociological aspects of people wearing the wrong shoes… Distinctions between suits are subtle, but it's obvious when someone is wearing cheap sneakers versus branded ones.

I have written about this before:

In fact, suits & ties are actually the ultimate nerd apparel. You have to put some effort into shopping, sure, and they tend to cost a bit more than a random vendor T-shirt and ancient combats, but the advantage is that you can thereafter completely forget about wondering what to wear. You can get dressed in the dark and be sure that the results will be perfectly presentable. If you want you can go to a little bit more effort and inject some personality into the process, but the great thing is that you don’t have to. By wearing a suit & tie, you lead people to pay attention to what you say and do, not to what you are wearing. And isn’t that the whole point?

Some days I think Shanley goes a bit too far in condemning this industry. Then there are the days when I am reminded that she is absolutely correct.

Louie Mantia makes some excellent points:

Just the other day I was wondering… what happens now? Not with me, but with the next fourteen-year-olds who are ready to be inspired. Do they look at Dribbble and decide to make things? Do they jump in and make an app?

I started by tinkering, customizing. Just as an engineer might. You start with something that exists and you change it to understand it. You do things on your own. But now… companies like Apple have locked down things like theming. It’s so hard today that no one even bothers. Changing icons is hard too. With some apps you can’t even do it without an app breaking because of code signing.

Most of the people I know listed above have a similar story. Maybe young people will be inspired by our apps, maybe they’ll be inspired by our art. But will they be able to tinker like we could?

I can't claim results anything like Louie Mantia's, but I also got into computers through tinkering. I took a course in elementary school writing BASIC on Olivetti 286es, and our programs were superficially indistinguishable from system built-ins. When I graduated to Macs, I soon discovered ResEdit and started playing around with that. When I got an after-school job that required me (among other things) to do data-entry on a FileMaker Pro database, I improved the UX in several places, fixing things like the tab-order, then adding validation logic and primitive auto-completion.

My initial reaction was "how do kids today get into tinkering?". Then I realised I was looking at the wrong level of the stack. Kids get into tinkering with Minecraft or by messing around with web pages. So what if I didn't hand-wind my own resistors or learn to count in hex until much later? The point is the learning and the playing. Some - even most - will stay at the top levels of abstractions, but many will be prompted to dig deeper.

I look forward to seeing what treasure they bring back.

So I finally got to go to Australia and use those weird slanty bits on my international power adaptors. I also met and ate kangaroo - not the same actual individual, but still. That photo above is taken within shouting distance of the Australian Parliament in Canberra, by the way.

Lovely country, even in the depths of winter. What was truly amazing to me was the contrast between the depths of geological time on show, and how short the human history is.

Let me qualify that statement a little. I live in the heart of Europe, where the landscape has been shaped very actively and extensively by human activity over thousands of years. My hometown was founded 2200 years ago - no typo, that's two thousand two hundred years ago. Actually the date of foundation was 218 BC. Of course the place was inhabited for ages before then, but that is the date of founding of the current town, with the Roman street layout still clearly visible today.

This is to say that I am not discounting Aboriginal cultures, or the terrible impact that European colonisation has had on them. However, the cities are very recent overlays on a landscape that had remained relatively untouched until then. Canberra, as seen in the photo above, makes that very obvious, with huge stretches of primal bush right in the centre of the city. Sydney too makes a great deal of its Big Dig, where they are digging up remains… from the late 18th century. By my hometown's standards, that's yesterday. Much of the housing stock in the centre of town is older than that!

This is why I love travel: experiencing such a different perspective. America is kind of the same, to the point that there is a saying that "in America, a hundred years is a long time; in Europe, a hundred miles is a long way". This kind of builds on my point from yesterday.

People, including many Italians, bemoan the lack of infrastructure around here. The problem is that as soon as you sink a shovel in the ground, you hit a priceless historical artefact. Then you have to spend months digging it out with toothbrushes and tweezers, and then you get to shovel a few more loads before there is another clunk and everything has to stop again. I shudder to think of how many times things have just been quickly reburied so as not to delay work... Here's an example from my home town: this monstrosity was built over the city amphitheatre, and it looks like the replacement will still not allow the ruins to be visited.

This is very much like what happens in established corporations. You can't just sink a shaft or dig a trench, because there are very good chances you will interfere with something that's already there. You also wind up with your brand new shiny thing still relying on thousand-year-old culverts for its drainage. You have to allow for all of these things when you plan what you want to build next.

If you have the advantage of building on an empty plain, it is much easier just to go build whatever it is¹ without having to worry about the layers of things that people already built on top of other things that were already in that spot. Startup companies have the advantage that young cities have, of being able to go out with measuring tools and a clean sheet of paper and draw up an ideal system. Those of us with a bit more history have to make messy compromises with our past choices.

Update: Here is the trip report
on my work blog.