The move from a stable corporate job to a self-employed new career is complex both practically and emotionally, and when seen from the comfort of a cubicle can seem forbidding indeed; yet I’ve taken that step five years ago – and what a fascinating adventure it’s been! I experimented in many directions, won some, lost some, and figured out how to create value and deliver it for the benefit of my clients. My recent insight article, How to Leave the Cube Farm and Go it Solo, shares some advice, caveats and observations from these five amazing years. If you plan.. Read more

We often comment on how attached we’ve become to computing technology,  how we’ve made it play a central role in our life – like electricity, like fire, like stone tools in earlier eras. One way to think of it is how lost we’d be without the technology; but another is to consider how resolutely we refuse to have it taken from us. Last month I had a glimpse into that… This December we had a major snowstorm that caused massive infrastructure damage leaving my home without electrical power for a few days and without our telephone and internet lines for.. Read more

So we’ve made the switch back from Daylight Saving Time yesterday at 2AM, and like every year I got up in the morning and made the round of the house to set all clocks, watches, computers and other devices one hour back. This is always a bore – there are so many time-aware contraptions in a typical home… But this time I noticed one new thing – about half of these contraptions did not need resetting. The computers changed their time on their own (seems trivial to you folks elsewhere, but in Israel the changeover date follows the Jewish calendar.. Read more

I was entering a parking lot at Bar Ilan university near Tel Aviv and noticed a brand new sign near the pay booth (left photo). I couldn’t believe my eyes… the sign says, in case Hebrew is Greek to you: “Parking for electric cars. Better place“. Of course we’ve all read about Better Place, Shai Agassi’s start-up company that is planning to convert the entire state of Israel to electric cars, by providing a nationwide infrastructure of charging points and by adding to gas stations robotic systems that will replace spent batteries with fully charged ones in less time than.. Read more

I was at the World Usability Day 2010 conference, held in a beautiful auditorium in the Open University at Raanana (more on what I lectured about in coming posts), and I made a discovery that I just have to share with you: Hot air rises; cold air falls! Of course I knew this; I’d graduated in Physics, after all. But I failed to make the connection at first. I  was sitting there near the front of the hall and slowly freezing from the air conditioning, until pubic protest made the powers that be turn off the A/C. Later they turned.. Read more