We went out to lunch, 20 of us. I tried to sit at the kids’ table, but was asked to leave because Cassie wanted to sit with her cousin, Caroline.

There was plenty to discuss at the other end of the table. Jennie has completed her book and sent it to her publisher. Joe will graduate from St. Peter-Marian in a couple of weeks; he will go to Southern New Hampshire University in the fall.

After the lunch, we brought Marian back to the nursing home, noting that we’d be missing Mother’s Day celebration with Elvis.

Mother’s Day itself was a quiet day at the camp. In memory of Elvis, we had peanut butter and bananas for lunch.

We’re still settling in after last year’s wonderful renovations. Few things are where they were and lots of things aren’t there at all. My father kept puzzling quantities of unexpected parts, such as a jar full of 1/4″ brass screws, but we couldn’t find a single wingnut. We have long lengths of antique rubber extension cords, the type that don’t kink or get inflexible in the cold, and yet we found only one electrical wire cap, which is two fewer than what we needed.

Sunday we had sauna. The water is fresh but no longer cold, in spite of recent rain and no special warm spells. We have a good supply of leftover pine from the construction project. It’s dry and burns hot. Mix in a little oak and maple and you get a great fire.

From a time with crowds full of laughter and hope to a time sitting on the bench overlooking the cove, hearing the planes heading down Route 2 toward Boston, it’s how the days are now.

Read the rest at my new blog  Get Ready for the Software-Defined Network Revolution on our new site, Intelligent WAN..

Read the rest on my blog on The CMO Site: Social Review Sites Fall Short of Promise

If there is pressure to increase the productivity of human workers, the serious question to ask is, why can’t a machine do this? The fact that a task is routine enough to be measured suggests that it is routine enough to go to the robots. In my opinion, many of the jobs that are being fought over by unions today are jobs that will be outlawed within several generations as inhumane. (His emphasis)

Of course, robots in the workplace aren’t new. We’re seeing a lot of robot news stories. Increasingly, those stories are written by robots. (The stories are written by computer programs, which are not literally robots. See the next paragraph.) A Chicago company is using algorithms to write news stories, starting with the sports. It pretty much works, right up to and including the expected cliches. Read more (written by an alleged human) at Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?.

Robots are also reading and grading school papers. According to Michael Weinerip, in his NYT piece, Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously, these robotic reviews aren’t very good at picking up grammatically correct, but factually flawed sentences. Then again, neither is the typical George Will reader.

And, then, well, er, um, here’s this news: Researchers Claim Sex Robots Will Be Future Of Sex Tourism. The researchers are Australian, but the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas picked up the story. Dennis Hof, owner of the Bunny Ranch, doesn’t think that robots will put his employees out of business. He told the TV station,, that a man mostly wants attention from a woman. “He wants to tell her stories, wants her to listen, wants her to act like she cares – a robot’s not going to do that.”

Meanwhile, over on Shiny Shiny, we learn that Panasonic wants to replace your hairdresser with a robot:

This seems like a good time to be nearer the end of a career than the beginning. It’ll be good to get away from the increasingly robotic world and onto a retirement filled with hobbies and friends and memories and, oh, snap.

GeckoSystems CareBot™ helps to alleviate caregiver shortage for Japanese elderly.

Read the rest on my CMO Site blog: Ditch the Click: Study Says Clicks Don’t Correlate to Conversions

Read the rest on my Better Bank Systems blog post, Global Study: Banks Are Trying Too Hard

We just finished our WISE course on the future of the news business. For the last class, I made four predictions and told the class that we’d review them in April of next year.
Here they are:

• CNN is toast.
• One or more major magazines will cease print operations because of postal rate hikes. (Newsweek).
• One or more major daily newspapers in the Northeast will cease printing on one or more days per week.
• Worcester will have no local radio news and no one will notice.

I couldn’t remember my registration or if I’d even registered. So, I had to navigate the Rite-Aid web site on my phone to check a few things. The Rite Aid web site does not scale to the size of a phone’s display.

Click to enbiggen

We talked very little about doing business in the sense of trying to work out a deal. We talked about how we helped other people solve problems. I talked as much about my grandkids as I did about WordPress, Cat5 vs Cat5e vs Cat6 cabling, or state and federal trademark law. I talked with a nursing home administrator about the discussions she’d been having with an about-to-be college graduate, with a bank branch manager about how electronic banking was  giving him and his staff more time to spend on customer service, with a realtor about finding a volunteer opportunity for her teen-aged son. I had a good chat with a guy who called me Gary about the effect that the warm winter had on local businesses.

Toward the latter part of the gathering, I saw John DiPietro. John and I will be giving a LinkedIn workshop for the chamber in a couple of weeks. After talking about the workshop for a bit, John mentioned the interesting results he was getting from posting questions on LinkedIn. His most recent question, Going out for lunch vs eating at your desk, was bringing comments from around the world.

He then noted that, if you’re eating lunch at your desk, three bad things may happen: 1) you might spill food on your computer, 2) you’ll miss a chance for some exercise, and 3) you’ll miss a chance to talk with some. “Go out. Have a cup of soup. See what happens.”

In this world of virtual work, it’s easy to overlook the opportunities for face-to-face contact. Even if the people around town aren’t working on the same things that you are, they’re working on something interesting and living lives that offer something important.

I stayed for a while longer, talking with a web designer about developing sites for multiple platforms, particularly for the smaller screens on mobile devices.

When it was time to leave, I waved to the guy I’d seen earlier.

“Bye, Gary,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”