I get a pile of magazines every month.  When I first started in IT in 1997 I discovered the treasure chest of free magazines that were available by answering a few questions on website or response card.  I decided at that time to subscribe to as many as I came across.  Why not, they only cost me 5 minutes of time and I did not have to read them.  (note: if you want to get into IT ask some geeks you know for their extras.  I have a 2 foot stack on my shelf that made it through my first round of filters.  These magazines will help you get a feel for what is going on in the industry and they may just inspire you to create the new great solution.)

Well, I learned a lot from all those magazine articles.  Perhaps much of my view of IT has even been shaped by journalists.  I like to think it comes from experience and interaction with real-world problems.  I am now much more picky about the magazines I actively request.  Many still come even though I ignore the “This is your last issue” threats.  I actually pay for several magazines now because I have learned that 1 $30 subscription often leads me to solutions much faster than if I were left scouring Google all the time.  Plus no one has yet given me a device that I can take on the bus to and from work for reading online with comfort.  Don't even try to tell me a PDA is good for that.  I run 3 monitors on my desktop.  No way I want to read articles in thumbnail view all the time.

Enough rambling.  Lets get to the point. 

The lead article this week in InfoWorld is about how much Email sucks!  The cover states “Email is Broken.”  Thank you InfoWorld for putting it in print so clearly.  I have been saying the same thing myself for the last year or two.  I am tired of having to run several SPAM filters just to make my inbox tolerable.  Even with a clean Inbox the problem still exists of what to do with all these messages.  As much as I hate the telephone I do appreciate that after the conversation I have nothing to try and categorize and store.  Of course that is the beauty of Email and why I often prefer written communication.  I can refer back to it.  I can search it for things that were discussed years ago.  This leads to the second article I enjoyed this morning.

Innovate, or Take a Walk says Tom Yager, just inside the back cover.  Tom argues that innovation is the key to having a future in IT.  As a parent of young children I believe it is very important to their future that they be taught how to think creatively.  We all should try new ideas.  Challenge ourselves to do things differently.  Instead of merely thinking outside the box throw the box out altogether.  I will end with the last few lines of the article because they are fun and illustrate the point well.

Driving from a family trip to the zoo to an afternoon at the office won’t require a shift of mood or mind-set. When you see something at the zoo that makes you dream up a new line of business or a better approach to a project, you’ve made it. Go straight to your boss, tell her your idea and that you came up with it while looking at elephants. If she blows you off, set her outsourcing timer to 60 days, and decide what you want from her office.