This post builds a bit on my Life Philosophy, as outlined in a previous post, feel free to read the first part of that post if you want more background!

Oh, and this is another long one, so if you want the short of it, here it is: I’m going to try scanning analog notes to a digital format to improve productivity, but I’m not sure how it will go. Thus starts an experiment in digital archiving documented online!

So if you’re a frequent reader (Thanks for being one of a handful), you’ll recall my previous post about trying to simplify my life possession-wise. And you’ll remember a part of it was devoted to carrying less to work each day. In the week between that post and this post, I realized something about how I use my Moleskine notebook.

And that simply was that during some weeks, I don’t use it at all!

Let me take a step back and talk about why I pay (willingly) more for a run-of-the-mill notebook just because it says “moleskine” on it. It all has to do with something I found out in 8th grade, when I started using a nice retractable ballpoint pen at school. The pen itself cost around $8 (something I vividly know since I broke a number of them as an awkward teenager), but it was silvery-sleek and wrote well. And I found something out about myself when using it: If I buy something a bit more expensive, I’ll keep track of it and use it until it’s dead – something that cuts down on waste in the long run.

For most of my adult life, I’ve kept notes from classes or meetings on a computer if possible (This is why I can post an essay I wrote for College Comp 1 here if I so chose to…), but more impromptu meetings posed a considerable challenge. I’d usually either grab some scrap paper and make notes on it (Which invariably resulted in me losing the paper sooner or later), or I’d scrawl notes in the margin of a paper we’d be discussing or a meeting outline (Which also usually got lost, or filed somewhere I’d never think to look). About 2 years ago I saw the Moleskine brand notebooks and though “Hey, those are reasonably good looking, look rugged enough, don’t cost too much, and are small enough to carry in my cargo pants”. So I bought a few, and have been using them ever since. I recently filled one up completely, something I feel very accomplished about – it’s the first time in my life I’ve filled an entire bound notebook of ANY kind.

So my Moleskine began to be an indispensable companion, with my co-workers fondly remembering how at a meeting in January I could look up notes from July, and quote them humorous anecdotes from said meeting (I have a habit of writing down funny ‘quotes’ people let out during meetings). This week I was happy to find that a case I had from my old iPaq h6315 fit my current Moleskine exactly, and thus it could be clipped to my belt instead of wasting pocket space.

But let’s return to the usage scenarios for the Moleskine in general. To whip out the notebook, the following criteria must be met:

• Small-group meeting (less than 20 people) where laptops are not present.
• Need to write down actionable points to follow up with later.
• Need to reference material later, however generally this material is a 1-liner or something that would never require a whole sheet of paper devoted to it.

The meetings I generally end up using the Moleskine for include things like lab meetings, meetings with colleagues and advisors, personnel interviews, anecdotal mentions (e.g., Hey, check out this website…), etc… And it just so happened that this week, I had none of these to attend! While I was at work 3 days this week (I passed up the chance to go in on Wednesday and hang with the drunks in NYC), most of Columbia was on spring break, so many of my meetings took place via e-mail conversations, something already documented. I didn’t take the Moleskine out once, and I felt really annoyed that I carried it back and forth. It could have sat in my desk drawer all week, which leads me to think that in the future, that’s possibly what I’ll do.

But this doesn’t mean I’ll ditch it entirely, I’ll just see how it goes trying to convert my analog notes to digitally recordable and backup-able notes via Evernote. I plan on taking notes like I always did, but then allocating 10-15 minutes daily to scanning them (Using my cell phone’s 5 MP camera) and saving them to my Evernote notebook. Evernote can search written notes, so hopefully this will give me the best of both worlds – analog text, and digital omnipresence. I just bought a $45 Evernote premium subscription so  I’d be set to try this, and I’m sure paying $45 a year will motivate me a bit (at least it should – it has in the past!). And with a bit of luck, I’ll be down one more thing to carry on a daily basis! I already ditched the iPod thanks to the Nexus One, but since it’s only been 1 day so far doing such, we’ll have to see if that holds.

I plan on posting updates from time to time, so if you’re curious how I’m doing, feel free to check in here.

“We’ve had it up here with these shenanigans. You’re jerking us around, and we’re sick of it. We get it, you have a very particular concept of what sort of phones you want running your new Windows Phone 7 Series OS. Not only do we get it, but we’re kind of proud of you for sticking up for yourself for once and ensuring some sort of sameness across your platform. Unfortunately, it’s not the holiday season yet, so we can’t buy one of these fancy WP7S phones yet. Meanwhile, on the other end of town, HTC is bringing the HD2 to T-Mobile in the US this month. Sure, it runs your soon-to-be-outdated Windows Mobile 6.5 OS which nobody wants, but it’s also pretty much the best hardware we’ve ever seen. Bar none.”

Paul Miller published an editorial at Engadget yesterday that made me think about the consequences of corporate secrecy and policy when it comes to the geek community. Even as someone willing to play by these rules (as evidenced by my own NDA with Microsoft), I still long for a time where geeks can have what they want, and companies can keep mainstream customers happy. Unfortunately I don’t see that happening any time soon for some very practical reasons. And in the end, as frustrating as it is, I think it is for the better.

We’re Geeks: Just Let Us Play

This is the mantra that I think resonates with us, and where Paul is coming from in his editorial. We’re geeks, we know that there is a high degree of likelihood that Windows Phone 7 can run on the HD2′s fantastic hardware, so let us have an upgrade. After all, as geeks, first adopters, and hardcore’ers, we’re cool with the fact that it doesn’t run 100%. Haven’t we all experienced the surprise of having a piece of technology we assumed would have bugs run better than we expected (or flawlessly?). Geeks already anticipate problems since we’re used to pushing the bounds.

However regular users are not. Believe it or not, most people who buy a phone expect it to work 100% of the time. They give no slack to the vendors involved when it comes to bugs, errors, acts of god, or any combination of the three. And unfortunately again, they outnumber us! Which means that even if we all go out and buy 5 Windows Phone 7 series devices at launch, we still wouldn’t have the same consumer power as regular users. So why can’t we just keep them away from our “secret” ROMs and such? Well if you’ve ever been over at the dark side of the force you know that this is impossible. Just look through the forums there and you’ll find many non-geeks who saw cool features they wanted for their phones, and ended up doing horrendous things to their devices because they skipped a step, or didn’t see something, or didn’t do something we all take for granted. Regular users shouldn’t be expected to act like geeks, and because of that, companies can’t give us half-baked un-intended ROMs and still deliver an exceptional product.

But Since Regular Users Won’t Use It, a Half-Bake Can’t Cause a Negative Perception!

So who am I? I’m a geek and a contributing editor. This means that I both push and write about the limits and the mainstream. And while some of the old media types aren’t geeks, most of the new media (where you’ll get your first impressions of Windows Phone 7 Series, most likely) are. This means that it’s tremendously important for the success of WP7S to make a good first impression on users and media members alike. Would a good first impression best be served by the HD2 running a half-baked ROM or by a device built with the OS in mind? The latter. The most available to media geeks? The former. Therein lies the problem. If I buy an HD2 (which I will…) and I put a ROM on it that isn’t built for it (which I might…), I may be biased toward the final product remembering bugs that I saw with my unintended preview. It sounds crazy, but as a psychologist, I’ve actually thought of this (which is why it’s unlikely that I would flash a Windows Phone 7 ROM onto my HD2 – I don’t want to judge a new OS by a flawed implementation).

What if Microsoft Just Releases a Win 7 ROM That Isn’t Half-Baked?

That’s awesome, if it happens. I personally doubt it will happen (and honestly have no clue from any source, NDA-covered or otherwise), but if it does, it would likely be a good thing, speeding up adoption rates of the new platform. As for myself, I may want to keep my HD2 running 6.5 though – after all, it’s the last great device of a great operating system (that unfortunately outlived it’s greatness in many ways).

There you have it, my own editorial. I agree with Paul at Engadget though – Microsoft should come out and say yes or no on the issue. But to address Paul’s last line, I doubt Microsoft would ever release a half-baked ROM with a non-preferred caveat – it would only hurt their efforts to rejuvenate their mobile phone business in the end.

Jon Westfall is a geek psychologist decision making researcher working in New York City. His average day includes server maintenance, manuscript revisions, statistical data analysis, and reading a myriad of tech and psych blogs. You can learn more about him at JonWestfall.Com.

This was originally posted at Windows Phone Thoughts, check out the the source for discussion.

Welcome to Jon Westfall’s Software Based Experiment Resource site. This site will begin it’s life to serve as a supplement to my contribution to the SJDM Computing Symposium, and continue on as a resource to other social scientists that seek simple solutions to building software. (Whoa, Holy Alliteration Batman!) If you have any questions, feel free to contact me for more information.

SK3 : An example of using Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Internet Information Server, and Microsoft Frontpage extensions to build rich web-delivered data collection software. SK3 is a multi-stage escalation of commiment / Sunk Cost problem that presents the user various pieces of information and tracks what they look at, how long they look, and in what order they look before making a decision to continue to the next part or terminate the project. The problem used in SK3 is adapted from Schmidt & Calantone, “Escalation of commitment during new product development”, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 30(2), 103-118

The source code provided here is licensed under the GPL. You are free to modify the work, however I do ask that you let me know of any modifications or revisions

SK3 is written in VB.NET, Visual Studio 2005

Pebl: The Psychology Experiment Based Language

LimeSurvey

Microsoft Dreamspark Program (Provides free versions of Microsoft development tools to undergraduate and graduate students at colleges or universities around the world)