Ed Batista

Technology is Soft

Given the topics I've discussed here over the last few years--leadership and management, personal and organizational development, and the effective use of technology--if you're reading this, it's a safe bet that you're someone with an interest in making change happen and that you see opportunities to help your organization or your community find better ways of doing things, particularly when technology is a factor.

So here's a mental model to help make the process of leading change easier: Technology is soft.

Let me make a brief detour in order to explain what I mean by that.  In the late 1970s Tom Peters, Bob Waterman, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos developed a framework for analyzing organizations known as the "7s Model" which looks at different aspects of an organization and which I still find highly useful.  (The graphic at left is from BuildingBrands.)  The 7s Model is often interpreted as dividing organizations into "hard" and "soft" elements--the former category includes the three concepts in red at the top of the graphic:

• Strategy
Your high-level goals and how you plan to achieve them.

• Structure
An organization's "blueprints": how people and resources are allocated, how work and responsibilities are distributed.

• Systems
All the ropes, pulleys and gears, so to speak, that get things done in an organization.

These elements of the model are seen as "hard" because they're more easily reduced to tangible artifacts--plans and documents and infrastructure--but that designation also reflects a value judgment in our language.  "Hard" stuff can be complex and difficult, but it's also serious and important.  "Soft" stuff, in contrast, is ambiguous, unreliable, secondary.  (I hope it's apparent that I think this is bias needs to be challenged, and Tom Peters agrees.)

We've traditionally located technology among the "hard" elements of an organization, and that's what usually comes to mind when we think about "Information Technology."  We have IT plans, IT departments (or people whose responsibilities include IT), and, of course, IT systems.  Thinking about technology from this perspective may seem logical, but I believe the implications are profound, unhelpful and increasingly outdated.

Some aspects of technology will always be classic "IT": hardware, storage, connectivity.  But these are commodities.  You get the best price you can for them, and you don't expect them to add strategic value to the organization.

I believe the strategic aspects of technology that have the greatest potential to actually make a difference in an organization fit into on the other side of the 7s Model, the "soft" side:

• Staff
Not the org chart--that's part of the Structure--but the real, flesh-and-blood people, and all their strengths, weaknesses, hopes and aspirations.

• Style
Management style, or organizational culture: The tacit norms that govern how work gets done and how people interact.

• Skills
The full range of competencies possessed by an organization, including interpersonal skills, learning.

Thinking about technology as "soft," as an aspect of an organization's staff, style and skills, may seem counterintuitive, but increasingly this is where it truly resides (and it's where you'll have the greatest leverage when driving technology-related change.)

Let me illustrate this approach with an story from my work at Stanford's Graduate School of Business:  As a Leadership Coach at the Center for Leadership Development and Research, I'm a member of a team with many interdependent sub-teams that often collaborate virtually on long-term projects involving multiple sets of stakeholders.  When I started at the beginning of 2007, the tools available to support these collaborations were 1) email and 2) shared network drives.  These tools met our most basic needs, but they were hardly optimal, and we found ourselves frustrated with their limitations.

It was the perfect opportunity to introduce a wiki, and as the unofficial techie on our staff of executive coaches and organizational development consultants, I was in a position to make that change happen.  But in retrospect I can see that I focused on the "hard" elements of the 7s Model.  I developed a strategic IT plan that included a wiki, I explored in great detail how the wiki would be used and how it would fit into our existing organizational structure, and I spent a good bit of time exploring various wiki platforms to find the best system to meet our needs.

I was able to get it up and running, but adoption by my non-technical colleagues was hit-or-miss.  Some people loved it, but others found it confusing or didn't really understand how  it was an improvement over email.  I think part of the problem was the language I used to introduce it.  I'd say, "I have a new system that'll help us collaborate more effectively."   Well, when you say "new," people hear "change," and they realize that means "more work," at least in the short run.  And when you say "system," people  hear "IT," and they know that means, "someone else's responsibility."  So when you say "new system," what people really hear is "more work that shouldn't be my responsibility in the first place."   Not exactly an appealing message.

So as we were about to begin a new academic year last Fall, I took a new approach.  I stopped worrying about the strategic IT plan--I didn't even update it.  I stopped thinking about how the wiki fit into our organizational structure.  And with the system already in place, I didn't have any technical work to do at all.

Instead, I starting thinking about the "soft" side of the organization.  I thought about my colleagues as individuals.  What were they like?  What were their needs?  How did they work?

I thought about our organizational culture.  Although Stanford has a certain culture, and the business school has yet another culture all its own, the Center where I work is a small, informal, entrepreneurial place where we can't do things by the book because it hasn't been written yet.

I thought about our collective skills--not just (or even primarily) technical skills, but our interpersonal skills.  How do we connect with each other?  How do we collaborate?

So rather than asking my colleagues to conform to a "hard" plan, I began asking how "soft" technology like a wiki could conform to them.  And rather than trying to "train" them on this new system, I began having a series of short conversations--sometimes just 5 minutes--about how they were working and what they were doing.  I took advantage of every small opportunity to help people think about the wiki as an integrated element in our organizational culture, and as an extension of their collaborative skills.

Today, just a few months later, we're the most intensive wiki users in the business school, and we're probably among the most intensive non-technical wiki users in the entire university.  I had to lay the "hard" groundwork to initiate the project, but my sustained focus on the strategic plan, the structure, and the system actually delayed our progress, and the wiki's ultimate success is directly related to its integration with the organization's "soft" side.

The 7th circle at the center of the 7s Model represents Shared Values, the commonly-held aspirations that give an organization a collective spirit, a sense of mission.  And if you value the effective use of technology, and you want your organization to adopt and embody that value, I encourage you to remember this the next time you're seeking to promote change: Technology is soft.

Photo by fotologic.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

7s Model graphic by BuildingBrands.

This post was adapted from remarks I made on May 12, 2008, to the second graduating class of ZeroDivide Fellows.  Congratulations and good luck to all the past and current Fellows, and thanks to ZeroDivide for having me.

Cool Tools

I've been able to spend a little time recently digging into some social media tools to understand how they work as well as their potential value for someone like me, i.e. an executive coach and change management consultant with an abiding interest in technology.  So here's a quick rundown:

Utterz is an extremely user-friendly service that allows you to capture and publish audio, video, pictures and text.  The site essentially creates a link between your phone, your camera or your webcam and the web at large.  You can call Utterz and use your phone to record an interview, snap a picture while you're at it, and publish the audio and the video not only to your Utterz page but also to just about any other site you designate on the fly--the audio's captured immediately, and you simply text the photo to Utterz.  You can do the same with video, but if you're like me, A) your phone's OK for stills but terrible for video, and B) uploading video via your carrier sucks up too much time and bandwidth.  No problem--just use your laptop's webcam and send the stream directly to Utterz, or upload a previously recorded video file.  (You can also opt to send all your Utterz videos to your YouTube account simultaneously.)  I see Utterz as a way to turn any conversation into an interview you can share with colleagues AND as a personal podcast for friends and family (depending on where I choose to send the files.) Very cool and stone cold simple.  Many thanks to my old--well, let's say former--colleague Holly Ross for the inspiration.

Tumblr is sort of like Utterz but a bit more lightweight, which makes it both easier to use and slightly less useful--or, rather, useful in a different way.  It's another service that allows you to capture and publish links, text, and photos, and although it doesn't have built-in support for audio and video, it's really easy (especially via their Firefox bookmark button) to publish to your Tumblr page and to anyplace you can insert a little code.  I see it as a great way to share and promote links to articles, posts and photos that don't merit a full-on blog post but merit something more prominent than a del.icio.us tag.  Many thanks to Mark McGuinness for the (continued) inspiration--he's THE most tech-savvy executive coach I've met since I stopped working in technology to launch my coaching practice, and I learn something every time I stop by his site.

And now for something completely different: Don't Break the Chain is a fun site supposedly inspired by the motivational wisdom of Jerry Seinfeld, according to Brad Isaac:

[Seinfeld] told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

True?  Who cares.  It's a great story that translates brilliantly into a free web service.  Your "Chain" account serves as the online equivalent of Seinfeld's big wall calendar, and you use it to "X" out days on which you accomplish your given task.  (The image above indicates that I've gone running three straight days--no mean feat this past year.)  You can create multiple calendars to track different goals, you can customize the display a bit, and if you want the world to help hold you accountable, you can copy-and-paste a little code to publish your calendar anywhere you'd like.

Twitter is a service that's clearly useful for many people..but not me--at least not right now.  If Utterz makes it easier to blog audio and video, and if Tumblr allows you to turn your tags into a mini-blog, then Twitter is a sort of micro-blog, allowing you to send out even more ephemeral messages (up to 140 characters) via your phone or the web to your personal Twitter network.  The How? isn't an issue here--if you've used IM or sent a text message, you know how to use Twitter, but the Why? (or Why not?, in my case) is more complex.  I signed up for a Twitter account months ago, but it's never seemed useful to me.  This is primarily because my work as an executive coach involves a lot of face-to-face interactions that can't be interrupted, and my time online (or text-accessible) is limited as a result.  But I'm also aware that I need a certain amount of distance between the world and myself in order to think, to focus, to stay grounded.  I understand the appeal of feeling more connected with the people in my network via a steady stream of Twitter updates, and I could see myself using Twitter if others on my team did as well, because although most of our work with clients and students is face-to-face, we often work from separate locations--but until that happens, I'm content to opt out.  (See Common Craft's typically well-done Twitter in Plain English if you'd like to learn more.)  UPDATE: One day later, John Unger posts a Twitter manifesto, describing how he uses it--and he notes that his initial response was "Why the hell would I want to do that?"  It didn't change my mind about Twitter's utility to me at the moment, but it did open my eyes to the creative ways people are adapting the service to meet their needs.  UPDATE 2: OK, I give--with Mark McGuinness weighing in as well, I'll see if Twitter can add value despite my unusual schedule.

Finally, even though the services rendered by Creative Commons are nothing like those described above (and even though I've been a CC user for years), my work on this post led me to realize that my CC license was out-of-date, and this seems like a good opportunity to point anyone unfamiliar with them in a helpful direction.  CC provides an alternative to copyright that allows people like me to share our writing, our photos, and any other type of content with the world under the restrictions of our choice.  For example, everything I post on this site is published under CC's "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States" license, which means that you're free to copy, distribute and/or remix my work as long as you also 1) attribute it to me by linking to this site and 2) further distribute any remixed works under a similar license.  Almost all of the photos I use in my posts (including the one above) have been published under the same CC license as mine, and I'm both grateful for the right to access such highly creative work and hopeful that my contributions are as useful to someone else.

Photo by Paul Schultz.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Swivel

Swivel is a content-sharing application for data and graphs.  It's sort of like YouTube meets Wikipedia for people who love spreadsheets.  As with YouTube, you can create a user account, upload your content (in Swivel's case, raw data or a spreadsheet file rather than a video), format and tag it, and set it free for others to view, comment upon, embed or otherwise use as they see fit.  As with Wikipedia, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder, so read the citations and take the figures with a grain of salt.

The most-viewed graph on Swivel today is Growth of Creative Commons Photos on Flickr, by Brian Mulloy, Swivel's CEO and co-founder:

There's tight integration with several Google apps, including the ability to make Swivel graphs from Google spreadsheets and a feed from Google Blogsearch showing people posting Swivel graphs, which just this minute led me to my friend Beth Kanter, who posted today on this very same topic, using the very same graph above.  Small world!

Headaches, Opportunities, Dreams

If your job ever involves helping people think through a set of challenges, here's a framework that might be useful.  I came up with it in response to a colleague's request to help her make more effective use of technology--hence the focus on "tools," although I think it could easily be adapted to non-technical needs.  I thought I'd be most helpful if I had a clearer understanding of the specific issues she wanted to address, so I asked her to draw up the following three lists:

Headaches
These are problems you encounter with tools you use on a regular basis.  We can talk about how to use these tools more effectively by solving (or working around) the problem.

Opportunities
These are things you'd like to do using tools you're at least somewhat familiar with.  You may know that a tool has this capability, but you're not sure how to make it do what you want, and we can talk about new ways of using the tools.

Dreams
These are things you'd like to do in a perfect world—when drawing up this list, don’t even think about the tools, just focus on what you’d like to do.  We can talk about new ways of using existing tools and/or some new tools that might meet your needs.

Photos by Lazy Lightning, destinelee and Daquella manera.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Tighter TypePad URLs

TypePad's post URLs are pretty user-friendly, but you can make them even better by adding one simple step to your posting routine.

The basic structure of a TypePad post URL is as follows:

"your domain"/yyyy/mm/"post name".html

TypePad automagically creates the post name from the first 15 characters of your post title.  (TP ignores dashes and other punctuation characters and inserts underscores for spaces.)

This is usually fine, but sometimes it results in some odd-looking URLs.  A common problem is the trailing underscore:

http://www.edbatista.com/2007/01/conflict_modes_.html

http://www.edbatista.com/2006/10/mcclelland_and_.html

Not a huge problem, but it's a little confusing, and it just looks odd.  The solution is to pick a user-friendly post name of 15 characters or less, and use that as the post title the first time you save the post.  After you've saved it once, you can retitle the post anything you want, but the initial title you used will be retained as the post name in the URL.

For example, I first saved this post with "TypePad URLs" as the title, and then retitled it "Tighter TypePad URLs."  And I first saved "Sage Cohen and Peter Drucker on Rapture and Excellence" as "Cohen Drucker."  The resulting URL:

http://www.edbatista.com/2007/03/cohen_drucker.html

Not a huge difference, but it's just a little more elegant and user-friendly.

On Metadata: What You Can't See CAN Hurt You

I had a vivid reminder this morning that we're represented online not only by the data we can see--from blog posts to search results--but also (and increasingly) by metadata that we often can't see.  (And I also learned just how good customer service can be.)

One of my favorite tools is Feedster, which describes itself as "the largest and richest archive of indexed feeds on the web."  (What's a feed?)  I use Feedster, Technorati and Ask.com's blogsearch service on a daily basis to keep up news from feeds on a variety of topics--including myself.

Searching feeds for my name or for links to my site allows me to see who's commenting on or linking to my posts and to jump into the discussion if I want.  I can also just confirm that my posts are being picked up and indexed by these services so that other people can find them.

Although I do like Feedster, I'd gotten a little lazy and hadn't run a vanity search on their service for a while.  So it was a little surprising to run one this morning and get the following:

If you look carefully, you'll notice that at the bottom of each search result is a link to my feed, which has been given a somewhat lengthier and, ah, more colorful title than plain old "Ed Batista."  To each his own, of course, but that's not really how I want my feed to be described.

I use FeedBurner to add a bunch of features to my feed, so I immediately took a look at my FeedBurner configurations.  Nothing there suggested that my feed should be titled anything but "Ed Batista."  I searched their forums for advice but didn't find anything applicable, so I used their contact form to ask for help directly--and just 34 minutes later I heard from Paul at FeedBurner.  Paul couldn't solve my problem, but he confirmed that it didn't appear to be on FeedBurner's end and suggested that I contact Feedster.

After double-checking that my feed wasn't mistitled on any other feed search services, I went to Feedster's site and used their contact form to ask for help--and 19 minutes later I heard from Jeff at Feedster.  Success!  Apparently "certain fields were corrupted" at Feedster (whether inadvertantly or by someone with too much time on his hands, I don't know), resulting in the "inappropriate title" for my feed.  Feedster solved the problem, but they're still in the process of checking the millions of feeds they index to be sure that the metadata associated with each feed is correct.

And happily, a search for "ed batista" on Feedster is now a little less...adventurous.

Lessons learned?  Even free services like FeedBurner and Feedster can do customer service right, so there's really no reason to settle for anything less.  Kudos and thanks to both of them.  And I'm sure as hell going to run those vanity searches a little more often.

Trumba on TypePad

UPDATE: Trumba has terminated their free and low-cost service aimed at consumers and small/medium businesses, and is now focusing exclusively on large customers with an event management service that's priced at $99 per month.  I've switched to Google--as I predicted in my original post below, resistance was futile--but I'm really not a fan.  If you know any any better alternatives, please contact me.

UPDATE 2: I'm really unhappy with Google Calendar's lack of display customization, so I've switched again to CalendarHub.  I tried 30 Boxes, and I liked a lot of their features, but the inability to display a list of upcoming events (as in my sidebar here) was a deal-breaker.  I also looked briefly at AirSet, but they have no options for publishing personal calendars at all.  CalendarHub isn't great--the interface for adding and editing events is clunky and slow--but it essentially does what Trumba did.  We'll see if they can hold out longer than Trumba did.

<><><>

I'm writing a lot more about personal and organizational development than technology these days, but I recently started using Trumba, an online calendar service, and so far I'm sufficiently impressed that it's worth a post.

Like millions of other people, I somewhat reluctantly use Outlook for my main personal productivity functions: email, contacts, task lists, and calendar.  I seriously considered switching twice in the past 18 months, but for a variety of reasons decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.  And then earlier this year David Allen's GTD and Outlook actually transformed Outlook into a much more useful tool for me.  (I don't use the GTD plug-in for Outlook, I just adopted the strategies outlined in Allen's 40-page guidebook.)

But having decided to stick with Outlook, I still needed an calendaring tool that would allow me to publish information about upcoming events on my schedule.  Optimally it would integrate with Outlook as well, but if I had to maintain it separately that was OK.  Note that I wasn't looking to replace my Outlook calendar--I just wanted an additional tool that would allow me to create and share a public version of my calendar.

I looked into Google's GCal and Backpack's calendar and a few other services, but nothing did exactly what I wanted, particularly when it came to publishing and sharing my schedule.  GCal's options have improved a lot over the past few months, but it's still not flexible enough for me.  (And although I'm a heavy Gmail user, I typically route all my email to Outlook and work with it locally, so currently there's not much value to me in centralizing my calendar and email on Google's servers.  At some point, resistance will be futile Google will make it worth my while, but not yet.)

And then I learned about Trumba through TypePad.  Bingo.  Here's what I like about it:

• Publishing Options:  Highly flexible and configurable.  Link to your calendar, display your calendar, display a calendar graphic, display a list of upcoming events, allow users to change the template, allow users to filter and search your calendar--you can even create a crawl.

• Sub-Calendars: Trumba makes it very easy to create "sub-calendars" that have a parent-child relationship to your main calendar.  You can mix and match events between the sub-calendars and your main calendar, and you can publish the sub-calendar separately, which is great if you have different audiences for your published calendars but you want to maintain them in a centralized location.

• TypePad Integration: Trumba is a TypePad widget partner, and you can create a list of your upcoming events, like the one in my right-hand sidebar, directly from Trumba's site.  I prefer to create a TypeList manually instead, because TypePad gives you more control over TypeLists than they do over widgets, but Trumba still makes it easy to get the code you need.  And functionality aside, the fact that Six Apart chose Trumba as their partner says good things about their business prospects.

• Outlook Integration: I haven't  sprung for Trumba's paid service yet ($10 a month, or $100 a year), but if I really become a heavy user, the biggest incentive to switch will be the ability to manage my Trumba calendar directly in Outlook.  (Presumably it's a two-way synch, but that's not clear.)  At the moment, the free service is fine for my needs, but I'll take a serious look at switching in a few months.
  

My Attention Data at Work

Attention data, simply enough, is any data that reflects what you're paying attention to.  Although I'm writing less frequently about technology on this site these days, I just can't help it on occasion, and the two attention-data-powered widgets below are cases in point.  The first one is a list of the most popular websites in my "clickstream," my personal browsing history.  The data is captured using my Attention Recorder, an open source extension for the Firefox browser, shared with an account I've opened at Root Markets, my Root Vault, and displayed here via a little code embedded in this post.  (Disclosure: I'm the Executive Director of AttentionTrust, the nonprofit that distributes the Recorder, and AttentionTrust was co-founded by Seth Goldstein, CEO of Root.)

I've also embedded the code in the in the right-hand sidebar, just below I'm Listening To..., which is a list of the musical artists I've listened to most frequently over the past week.

The same principle's at work here--the data about the songs I play in iTunes is captured using a plugin from Last.fm, shared with my Last profile, and displayed here via some code provided by Last.

OK, so what?  Well, this is interesting to me for any number of reasons: It's a way for me to express myself, to voice my preferences for certain websites and certain musical artists, without requiring any action on my part other than going about my daily business.  I visit sites, I play music, and that data is automatically captured, shared and published.

It's also noteworthy that this is behavioral data (i.e. the sites I actually visit, and the music I actually listen to), not articulated data (i.e. the sites I say I visit, and the music I say I like.)  It's honest; it's real.

And it's the foundation for an ecosystem--an "attention economy"--within which people are capturing and exchanging their attention data with each other, driving a whole host of personalized discovery and recommendation systems.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy root+vaults last.fm

Happy Birthday, Slate

Slate turned 10 over the weekend, an event that makes me realize both how much things have changed over the past decade and how quickly the time has flown by.  I don't read many general interest sites, but I remain loyal to Slate, partly out of habit, partly because of writers like Christopher Hitchens, Dahlia Lithwick, and Dana Stevens, and partly because I enjoy watching one of our oldest online institutions continue to evolve--and, I might as well add, despite disappointing gaps in coverage (sports and music, for starters) some deadwood that should be cleared away (the Explainer, anyone?  Dear Prudence?) and a baffling refusal to effectively integrate reader feedback, which remains segregated in the navigation-challenged Fray.

Michael Kinsley's look back at Slate's founding highlights just how far we've come:

My original idea, believe it or not, was a publication that you would download and print out once a week. It would have been an inferior version of a print magazine—a bunch of pages stapled together (if you had a stapler nearby).

By the time Slate was launched, we had moved beyond that primitive once-a-week notion. I remember, with some embarrassment, the eureka moment when it dawned on me that an online magazine doesn't have to publish an entire issue at once. Pretty soon, I even figured out that you didn't need to have "issues" at all.

It's worth remembering how Kinsley's move out to Seattle was initially received by most members of the media establishment in Washington and New York ten years ago: they thought he was nuts.  But to me and many others who weren't particularly interested in technology but who were plenty interested in political and cultural journalism, it was an intriguing signal.

I started using email in earnest in 1994, to collaborate with some colleagues on a volunteer consulting project and to plan a motorcycle trip with a friend on the East Coast, and a year later I was just beginning to learn more about the wider world of the Internet.  It was fascinating, but as a non-techie I found the tools hard to use and found it even harder to uncover meaningful information related to the things I really cared about--politics, literature, music, food, art, sports, history.

But the news about Michael Kinsley's project with Microsoft caught my attention.  I admired him as a political and cultural thinker, and I respected him as a thoughtful highbrow with a populist bent.  If someone like Kinsley was getting involved, perhaps the Internet could begin to reflect the richness of the world around us, and perhaps it could be accessible by ordinary, non-technical people.  Of course, many people have contributed to Slate's success, and millions more have participated in the transformation of the Net, but I still mark Kinsley's commitment to the weird, experimental vision of online publishing as an important moment.  Kinsley hasn't been involved in running Slate for five years or so, but I hope he feels a sense of pride and accomplishment, not only for helping to launch a still-running and occasionally-profitable venture, but for helping people like me to see technology's non-technical potential.

tags: slate michael kinsley

Resuscitated Laptop: Lessons Learned

Today I feel like a very lucky guy--even though I just spent over a week without the use of my (previously) trusty ThinkPad T40, it's up and running again and better than ever with a brand, spanking new 100GB hard drive.  I was able to keep working on my wife's A31, for which I'm very grateful, but 1) that's one very heavy laptop, and 2) I'd forgotten how much Windows 2000 sucks.

But I learned quite a few important lessons over the past ten days, and I thought I'd set them down here in the hopes that I won't forget them and have to relearn them, no doubt painfully, at some point in the future.  So here goes:

• Hold On With Both Hands: My old ThinkPad T23 was heavy enough that I'd always have to use both hands to pick it up (and that's doubly true for the A31.)  In contrast, the T40 is light enough that it's pretty easy to pick up with one hand.  Unfortunately, it's just heavy enough that when it's open and lifted that way, the frame flexes a little bit, which can cause serious problems over time.  (The X-series are so small and light that they don't flex when lifted, and the newer T-series apparently have a much more rigid internal frame that prevents any flexion.)  This quite possibly caused (or at least exacerbated) the failure of my T40's system board.

• Always Call IBM First (Or, A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing): I initially thought the problem was related to my over-stuffed hard drive.  Performance had slowed to a crawl, and I actually got (and proceeded to ignore) several warnings about the lack of available disk space  (I said I'd get around to it, didn't I?)  The day before it finally failed, I'd ignored the most severe warning yet, so I assumed that the subsequent failure to boot was my well-deserved punishment.  I knew that upgrading to a larger drive wasn't going to be covered by my warranty, so I didn't bother to call IBM--I just found a local computer repair shop and asked them to take care of it.  Herrick and his colleagues at Ameritech cloned my drive and installed the new one, only to realize that the problem wasn't with the drive at all--it was with the system board.  The bad news: I'd wasted a lot of time by going to Ameritech.  The good news: A new system board was covered by my IBM warranty.  The lesson: Don't outsmart yourself--call IBM first.

• The On-Site Warranty Is NOT Optional: When I'd originally purchased the T40 through IBM's refurbished program, I debated whether spending a few extra hundred dollars for the on-site service warranty was really worth it.  In the end, I decided to do it, and it was clearly the right decision.  It took me a few phone calls to IBM to determine that yes, it was the system board, and no, none of their fixes solved the problem, and yes, they had the part but it would be a day before they could get it to the Bay Area--but once I jumped through those hoops, things couldn't have gone more smoothly.  I was surprised and pleased to find that the repairman who came to my house was the same guy who had replaced a faulty display in my T20 at work about four years ago!  He's a very cool guy--he arrived on an Aprilia, I think a Caponord--and we had a good discussion while he worked.  We both agreed that the on-site service warranty is a great investment because 1) you really can't rely on local shops--the guys at Ameritech were nice enough (although a little slow), but they didn't even put all the screws back in when re-assembling my T40, and 2) when it's fixed, you know it's fixed--no shipping it back to the depot because they didn't do it right the first time.

• Don't Always Believe the Manual (Or Support): Once the system board had been replaced, I still needed to upgrade my hard drive.  I bought a 100GB drive from Ameritech--the same one they'd initially cloned for me, but they'd already wiped it clean after determining that the problem was with the system board--and an EZ Gig Hard Drive Upgrade kit by Apricorn.  Following the directions apparently allowed me to clone my old drive onto the new one successfully, but the machine wouldn't boot.  I called Apricorn support, and they identified the problem, but their recommended solution sounded a little squirrelly.  So I tried using some common sense, and it worked out fine.  The bottom line: Don't boot and run the EZ Gig software directly from the CD, even though the manual advises you to do that for faster, uninterrupted cloning.  And specifically on T40s, don't disable the Pre-Desktop Area in BIOS Security, even though Apricorn will tell you that's what you have to do to clone a bootable disk.  Just run EZ Gig from within Windows--works like a charm.  More gory details are in a report I posted to the ThinkPad Open Forum.  Fascinating reading.

So now I have a very roomy, very fast and very quiet new hard drive in my comfortable, familiar T40, and I'm very happy, as they say.  And if I do say so myself, I was pretty damn Zen about the whole mess.  Things could have gotten very ugly, and I could have really freaked out about it, but, somehow, I didn't.  Perhaps I've accidentally acquired some wisdom along the way.  And to minimize the chance of future freak-outs, I'm taking one final lesson to heart:

tags: thinkpad ez+gig