Rosabeth Moss Kanter makes an interesting point on her blog at The Harvard Business Review when she writes about a successful legal action brought by Mattel, owner of the Barbie brand against MGA Entertainment Inc which owns Bratz.

Former Mattel designer Carter Bryant was charged with intellectual property theft because the company said he had the idea for Bratz while working for Mattel. The company’s contracts make it clear inventions made while working for the company become its property.

So, if your current employer does things badly and you know a way to do them better, you now need to halt your thinking processes while you serve out your notice or you could find yourself on the nasty end of a writ. It’s a twist on the idea an knowledge worker is someone who is paid to think for a living.

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Scanning and stitching pages and stories from old broadsheet newspapers has long been a problem.

I’ve been a newspaper journalist for most of the past 30 years. My story portfolio is largely a pile of yellowing paper, that is now fraying around the edges. There’s enough to fill three filing cabinet drawers.

Clearly my hoard is a prime candidate for scanning and digital storage. Yet it’s not easy turning broadsheet newspaper pages into .pdfs or .jpgs. Most home office flatbed scanners are A4 size or maybe fractionally larger. They rarely scan a whole newspaper story in a single go and full pages are out of the question.

You can scan and store pages in sections, but converting from, say, The Sydney Morning Herald, into six overlapping A4 pdfs is clumsy.

And the saved documents aren’t much use for anything.

Software stitching

It’s possible to use applications like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp to stitch photographs together, so in theory they should do the same with newspaper pages. In practice the job is tricky, although I’m told recent versions of Photoshop do a better job.

There are specialist programs able to piece together overlapping images to form bigger documents. Photographers use them to create panoramas. Most are optimised for photos not printed pages, but I came across ArcSoft’s Scan n Stich which automates the task making it easy.

I’d give ArcSoft 9 our of ten for ease of use and practicality. There are two versions of the program. I’ve previously used the US$20 Standard Edition to deal with magazine and tabloid newspaper pages in my portfolio. The program whizzed through the task producing stunning results. I also use Nuance’s PaperPort to organise scanned documents and the same company’s OmniPage to handle optical character recognition so I have both text documents of my old stories and facsimile pdfs.

To scan my broadsheet pages, I’d need to shell out a further US$40 to ArcSoft for its Scan n Stich Deluxe version. I’ve no philosophical objections to paying for software to do this kind of job, but a very practical one; I don’t use credit cards making it hard for me to buy software online.

Free alternative

So I needed to cast around for either something available from local retailers or a free downloadable alternative. I wasn’t too optimistic and started bracing myself for a lot

of Photoshop work. On the other hand, I could just hang on to the paper.

Luckily a friend told me about Image Composite Editor (also known as ICE) from Microsoft Research. It’s a free downloadable program which appears designed for photographic images but brilliantly melded six A4 scans into a single broadsheet-sized document.

ICE is on version 1.2r1 and has been since November 2008, so it’s clearly not a priority for the world’s largest software company. There are a few rough edges and barely anything in the way of documentation, but hey, it not only gets the job done, it does things quickly.

Best of all the application is simple to use. You simply drag and drop images in any order on the main Window and let the program do its stuff. One complication is that you’ll need to have roughly 20 percent overlap between the various pages – but this would be standard in any stitching application.

When you’ve finished there’s a basic crop tool and the option to export the completed image in a several formats.

I had to play around a little with the images to get the best output. My scans were initially black and whites – it was hard to get the contrast level right and some text was always left unread. My scanner software has an enhanced text mode, but I didn’t use this for the composite image instead opting for greyscale images captured at a potentially unnecessarily high 400 dots per inch resolution. The results looked more like photo images, which seemed to help with the stitching.

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From the New Zealand Herald January 26, 2010:

At the peak of the power cut, more than 50,000 homes in the city were without power and traffic ground to a halt, rail services were delayed and some businesses were forced to close.

And

Aucklanders had no disruption to hot water this morning after lines company Vector warned of possible hot water cuts.

Oh, the irony. This Friday will see the deadline for company’s wanting a slice of the action in New Zealand proposed government subsidised ultrafast broadband network project. Taxpayers will be stumping up NZ$1.5 to build a fibre network.

It’s ironic, because Vector is one of the companies expected to bid for this 21st century infrastructure project. And yet yesterday, Auckland, the nation’s largest city and commercial powerhouse was dark after the third major power outage in the last five years.

The lights and power were off from around 4pm to 8pm. Thankfully it’s summer, so the consequences aren’t quite as drastic as in earlier outages. There’s daylight until 8:30 pm, heating isn’t necessary, schools are closed and many workers are still on holiday.

But nevertheless, there was traffic chaos and companies had to send staff home – yet another unproductive day thanks to a third world infrastructure. Many believe the problems stem from earlier industry ‘reforms’ and deregulation.

And here’s the biggest irony of them all. New Zealand’s government wants lines companies and others to help build a world-class internet that should already be in place. The only reason it isn’t is because of historic regulatory failure in the telecommunications industry. But the likely winners of contracts to build the next generation internet are companies that wax fat and lazy as a result of regulatory failure in the electricity industry.

You may be interested to read my earlier post about the urgent need to fix Auckland’s power problems.

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Giving old stuff away on Freecycle is more trouble than simply tossing it in a landfill (see Frustrating Freecycle). Taking it to an op shop isn’t always trouble-free either. But I’m not happy chucking out perfectly usable hardware and other items with plenty of life left in them. In my case this is a mixture of greenery, plain old-fashioned protestant hatred of waste and memories of hard times.

One alternative is to list unwanted items on TradeMe, but with a $1 reserve – for overseas readers TradeMe is New Zealand’s home-grown equivalent of eBay, which is in many ways superior to the well-known international auction site.

Listing an item for sale on TradeMe is free. If the item sells, there’s a 6.9 percent commission fee. So if the item sells for $1, I’m 7 cents out-of-pocket. Or, more accurately, I’m 93 cents richer as it is something I’m ready to give away. These numbers are so small they are negligible. In effect, there’s no discernible cost difference  between selling on TradeMe and giving things away on Freecycle.

Yet the cash element involved seems to oil away some of the friction associated with Freecycle.

As mentioned in Frustrating Freecycle, Freecycle transactions don’t always go smoothly. In my experience more than half the transactions fall through. While many are perfect fine, some Freecycle people are a pain to deal with.

On the other hand, when someone pays for an item on TradeMe, no matter how small the price, the nature of the deal is different. People turn up as promised.

I suspect the reason for this is people don’t put a value on things they get free, so they don’t value my time and effort at the other end of a Freecycle transaction and feel comfortable stuffing me around. When they pay, the transaction has a value to them and they act accordingly.

Thanks to Parsley72 who pre-empted this post in a comment on Frustrating Freecycle.

Your view may differ.

Benefits of TradeMe over Freecycle:

• Money oils away transaction friction
• Feedback scores show good people to deal with
• There’s a legitimacy with TradeMe
• Questions and answers get dealt with in a single, visible place
• Efficient, no need to deal with tons of emails after items are taken
• Less email aggravation, less rudeness for disappointed recipients
• TradeMe has wider reach

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File compression works because the data in many everyday document files is usually stored quickly and inefficiently – a bit like someone carelessly throwing their clothes in a suitcase before a trip.Taking more time and care makes it possible to pack more in the case.

File compression tools are like vacuum luggage packs that squeeze half as much again into your bag.

You could be forgiven for thinking file compression is past its sell-by date in this era of huge hard drives and broadband. It’s still useful because broadband speeds are still not spectacular and anyway modern multimedia files can be enormous.

You probably use compression all the time without thinking about it because it is often is hidden from sight.

Take, for example, audio files. If you look at a file on a standard music CD, you’ll notice it is many tens of megabytes in size – a typically 50 MB. The same song stored as an MP3 file might be only 4MB. That’s because MP3 is a compressed data format – in effect it squeezes out all the blanks between sounds.

If music wasn’t compressed, you wouldn’t be able to get many songs on a standard iPod and it would take forever to download them from iTunes. Music compression also removes some of the music information along the way – that’s why MP3s rarely sound as good as the original audio files.

In a similar way jpeg compresses pictures and movies are compressed with a range of different formats.

Compression technology is not usually built-in to office applications like word processors, spreadsheets and presentation programs. However, there are third-party compression tools to fill the gap.

Zip is the best known file compression format. Another popular format is .rar, there’s a good chance you’ll come across other formats.

These days Windows has built-in support for Zip files. You can create a new compressed folder or create a new one directly in Windows explorer. Dealing with other formats requires a compression application – most, including some of the best are free. My favourite is jZip (www.jzip.com) it’s a fast tool that handles most of the formats you’ll encounter in day-to-day computing.

You don’t need to overdo compression. In many cases it is more trouble than it’s worth because it slows things down. Be selective about what you compress.

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In 1982 management scientist Peter Drucker said no executive should make more than 20 times the pay of a company’s workers. He was spot on then and his point stands today. However, I’d phrase things slightly differently:

No executive is worth 20 times the pay of an ordinary worker.

So why are companies willing to pay some executives many hundreds times the pay of ordinary workers?

It;s not because they deliver ’shareholder value’ because its been shown repeatedly there’s almost no correlation between company performance and executive pay.

John Mackey at the Harvard Business Review blog has an interesting perspective on this issue:

If CEO compensation is primarily driven by competitive markets, then how come the ratio was only 24 to 1 back in 1965 and is about 300 to 1 today? Surely the market demand for good CEOs is no greater today than it was 45 years ago or 25 years ago. Are CEOs today really worth that much more than their comparable peers were worth just a few decades ago?

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Just a quick observation. Five years ago when we moved into Balmain Road in Chatswood, our house had reasonable, although not great, reception on the Vodafone New Zealand network.

When my employer changed mobile provider to Telecom, my home coverage dropped from three or four bars to just one or two – albeit on a different phone. Often I would miss incoming calls, only to find a stack of voicemail messages when I walked up the road.

A year ago, I left my job and switched back to Vodafone hoping to see better reception. If anything, Vodafone’s coverage was worse than Telecom’s. Something happened in the intervening time – the arrival of 3G networks. Incidentally my house is not in the coverage area. And curiously, when there is reception my phone is serviced by Te Atatu about 5km across the harbour.

Shortly before Christmas I tried a 2degrees sim card in my phone. The reception is perfect. Five bars on the handset display and crisp, clear reception.

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New PCs are thick on the ground at this time of year and so are new PC problems. Customer support teams are often deluged with enquiries as people struggle to get to grips with recently acquired machines.

While there are rogue computers, many problems are less about faulty or difficult to use hardware and more about the marketing choices made by PC makers.

For example, laptop makers keen to keep their products below certain key price points have shipped models without enough ram. That’s dumb. Microsoft says Windows 7  (installed on most new machines) requires a minimum of 1GB to run in 32-bit mode or 2GB in 64-bit mode.

Realistically 2GB is the bare minimum and you ought to have 4GB or more. Otherwise your computer experience will be somewhere between sluggish and barely functional.

If you find yourself struggling to squeeze performance out of a new laptop in these circumstances you have two realistic options: buy extra ram or dump Windows and install Windows XP (or if you’re brave, Ubuntu) instead.

Either way you’ll be in for some extra cost and a degree of fiddling around before you have a practical computer – which may not leave you feeling well-disposed towards your laptop maker.

Another problem area is the bundled software loaded by the manufacturer. A lot of it is rubbish. No, scrub that. Almost all of it is rubbish.

You may find programs you’ll never use automatically loading themselves into memory each time you boot. They can slow your computer down or interfere with other programs causing glitches or even crashes.

Alternatively you may find yourself connected to registration sites and badgered for personal information. Some preloaded applications are spyware – secretly reporting your computing activity to people whether you like it or not.

If this worries you – and it should – the best strategy is to start by making sure you have antivirus software and firewall installed and switched on. Then install an anti-spyware program like Microsoft’s Windows Defender (download from www.microsoft.com). Finally using the Add or Remove Programs panel in Windows Control Panel, systematically work through the pre-installed applications deciding what, if anything, is worth keeping and dumping anything else.

An alternative is to use CCleaner a tool to automatically get rid of the crud choking a PC. But however you get the job done, make sure you give your PC a good clean – even if it is brand new.

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