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Proprietary web applications kill openess and standards development

At work, I use Flock like I do at home and before Flock I was using Firefox since I have a basic disdain for IE.  This is fine for my basic needs, but frequently – and I mean frequently I am forced to switch over the IE in order to use our world-wide extranet which is based on SharePoint.

It’s not worth reading a rant on SharePoint (I can assure you it would be long) but what I don’t get – is why (for legitimate reasons) I need to use IE.  If this is the era of Web 2.0 the browser of your choise (assuming it supports standards) should be more than acceptable for any mission you choose.  Instead, what I find is that browsers do not work, or don’t work well with quite a few sites.

CNet recently ran a story talking about job seekers running into company job application sites which won’t work on the Mac, again based on only working on Windows IE.  This would not only frustrate me (I ran into this myself in my last round of job seeking), but I just find it ignorant more than anything.

To me, and I’m not a developer, this is just laziness.  If I choose to login to my company webmail from home on one on my Macs, I have to enter my credentials at least 3 times sometimes 4 to have them accepted by Exchange.  If I use IE for Mac, it works on the first time.  Our time entry system is the same thing… if you use anything but IE, you don’t even see some of the menus – assuming you can successfully login.

I’m certainly not switching to IE for my main use, but find that I run it as if it’s Word or Excel in order to access certain things… instead of just opening another tab in my existing browser.  Gotta love how this forces addditional system resources to be deployed for a rather limited purpose.  I’d yet to run the task manager to compare, my dell crap-top certainly feels the pain when I start opening a second browser adding to it’s burden of trying to keep up with me.

I’d love to boycott systems and companies that force this type of usage, but instead it’s the developing community that needs the wake up.  This type of limiting work is a dead end in what should be the new, new world of Web 2.0.  The browser is a conduit and with simple standards, it would be accessible to anyone.  Let’s not mess that up more than we already have now.

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Flickr Prints!

Finally!!!

Flickr has implemented printing on an official basis — if you are in the US. For now, you can order prints and have them fulfilled through Target. You can either pick them up the store or have them delivered to your home.

The best part is that you can control who can order prints based on your contacts. My family and friends can finally get off my back on why I use Flickr when they can’t order any pics.

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Flock has landed!

Flock has landed here in blogland….  I am posting this with the built in blog editor which is a very cool thing.  I can see using this all the time.

Flock integrates with much of what you might already be dealing with which what really drives my interest.  It’s fast – seems stable and uses standard courtesy of the Mozilla team (some of who I believe now work on this).  Integrated del.icio.us, flickr and as mentioned blog editing all in the same place.  I love it.

Much more to play with – I’ve installed on both my PowerBook and work Dell craptop, so I’ll be testing and living on both platforms for comparison and consistency which is always nice.  With del.icio.us built in, I’ll be using it MUCH more as my bookmark engine (also posts my links on the sidebar of the blog and in my feed) which will keep things consistent. 

More to come… nice way to play online tonight.

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Ward Pound Ridge Reservation



Ward Pound Ridge Reservation

Originally uploaded by atmasphere.


Ashley hooked me up with a new Nikon D70S and I had my first real opportunity to explore with it today…

We had a nice family hike through Ward Pound Ridge Reservation and I snapped away while Hannah relaxed in the backpack.

I clearly have much to learn about both the camera and photography, but I am having a great time exploring the new potential. It’s by far the most powerful and advanced camera I’ve ever owned – my first SLR actually – and really enables an amazing amount of control compared to my historical point and shoot cameras.

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Moved!

Not the blog, but our home!

I stepped off the red eye Thursday and immediately got to moving. First 2 guys arrived to disassemble and reassemble a couch we had to have taken apart to initially fit in a room when we purchased it about 5 years ago. Soon thereafter our team of movers arrived to pack up our stuff. Having someone else pack was totally worth the extra cash and just made everything that much less stressful. Of course I say that and it was my wife who had to deal with most of the details while I was away on business, but still they just came in and simultaneously took care of all our rooms at once.

By the end of the day, we were mostly packed with the exception of our bed and the desk to allow fro some civilized internet access. We made a final stop at our storage unit and closed shop for the day. Friday started early again and by noon we were on the road to Westchester. It only took the team a few hours to move everything inside – though much of our stuff headed to the basement for future sorting and purging. We spent the whole day and well into the evening unboxing and getting things put away.

Saturday was more unpacking and dealing… fishing lines with the cable guy and getting settled with the grill. Sunday was more of the same with some local errands as well.

Amazing what can be done in a short time. I’d like to spend more time there this week but I am off to the other coast with more travel, so things will have to wait until the end of the week.

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Suburbia Prep

We are getting closer to the move “North” at the end of the month and have been enjoying getting out of the city the past few weekends as time has permitted.

This week, I feel like we covered some serious ground:
Stew Leonards – Check.
Costco – membership activated.

Last week we tracked down the mall and spent some time at the house dealing with closet people as well as just doing a walk through to sort out our punch list. We met our next-door neighbors which was good and it seems they will be good neighbors and possibly good friends as well. Our kids are close in age which never hurts…

We are amazingly close now, with the close set for either this Thursday or next Monday depending on schedules. My schedule actually only allows those two days and we’d like to try and move the last week days of the month… fingers crossed!

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Ch… Ch… Changes

I realize I have not posted in a while for real and thought perhaps now over the long (perhaps for you) weekend might be a good chance.

There have been quite a few changes in my life recently… new job and trying to buy a house and on top of that a car or two.

First, the job… I started a few weeks ago which is the real reason for the lack of posting. I’ve been slammed and actually not on my usual pace with personal email and posting which is actually quite cool for me given the new level of professional intensity. I think I’d been craving something like this change for a long time and feel good that even in the early days that I’ve made the right choice. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m a marketing guy and I’ve found my way into one of (if not) the largest technology global accounts. I’m very pleased with this and while it does mean my using Apple systems for work are over (ahem) it’s really all very good. I’ve also retired the Treo 650 for now and am using a new Blackberry 7100T which is far better than I would have ever thought. I’ll come back to the tech in a bit.

The house… My wife and I had been trying to find where we might consider digging in for some time and we’ve committed as I have done with the job to the NY Metro market. This left a few options from a commutation perspective, but we settled on Westchester County and are in the process of closing on our first home. It’s crazy actually but wonderful at the same time. The place is quite a few times larger than our apartment (obviously) and has a great piece of property.

As a result of the new home we need to get at least one car, though really probably two so that I can get to and from the train each day without interrupting my wife and daughter’s sleep patterns. The job has me on overdrive in a good way for now, but it makes normal hours something I can’t quite yet commit to with any sort of reliability. Since I began I’ve been operating in always-on mode spending a great deal of face time with clients locally and most recently on the west coast. Heading back again next week and a few trips are already lining up in the next few weeks… I think you probably get the idea.

Back to the tech for a sec… While I still eat, sleep and breathe the tech, I had to make a switch I figured was coming on the handheld side. The blackberry is something I ad previously scoffed at being such a long term palm user, but man it rocks. The Treo can certainly do more as far as applications and media consumption, but as good as Chatter is (and it is) the email connection from Blackberry to Exchange can’t be touched. I spend a great deal of my day away from my desk, and while there is WiFi pretty much everywhere I need to go, the battery in my current machine can’t keep up for the length of time I spend in meetings. The Blackberry goes all day and well into the night allowing constant access to messages, meetings and to-dos with ease. The keyboard, while initially a bit awkward (it’s compressed if you have not seen it) is simple to use and remarkably quick to type. The recognition capabilities are amazing and new words, whether initials, product names or people all get picked up after the first time and so the predictable filtering is just killer. Seriously, I am amazed at how easy it is to use. My recognition is far better than it was on either the Treo 600 or Treo 650 which both use a full keyboard.

Everything syncs over the air… Add a new number to an Outlook contact, save it and it’s in the Blackberry. Get a new meeting notice; accept it and it’s in your calendar without the computer live and in real-time. Beyond the basics, you can see why the Palm gets a great deal of credit. The blackberry is not perfect, but if you keep the focus on work communications (or personal I suppose) it can’t be beat. No camera and no MMS… but the Messages function maintains a single point for all SMS and emails (up to 10 accounts) allows for filing through exchange or IMAP folders and even shows you your sent messages. I was not that into the sent being there, but now really like having confirmation that I’ve dealt with things all right there.

There will be much more to discuss as I can get to it. I am psyched that I am living the tech lifestyle in my personal and professional life and have access to amazing information about what is coming down the pike. I’ll have to play it safe with what can be discussed but when it can I’ll share. For now I am focused on digital home technologies as well as mobility on the consumer side as well as a full roster of things on the business side. Enjoy the rest of your weekend… I’ll be in the office tomorrow as the ride continues!

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Norelco Promoting Distracted Driving?

NorelcoIn my search this morning for replacement razor blade heads I ran into an interesting product bundle at Norelco. They are actually throwing in a car adapter to keep your razor charged or active in the car!! Of course I ordered one right away, even though I don’t have a car. It’s actually the compatible part for my razor so there’s no option on the car adapter, but I suppose it might come in handy one day. I’ve actually shaved on the way to work in previous jobs… when I was driving to work and of course very late. I guess that’s part of the attraction of the electric for some people? Amazing there’s no warning anywhere in sight…

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Managing my compulsive desire to check email

I was reading a post the other day at 43 Folders and it really got me thinking about how I manage my email.

I currently have just under 2000 messages sitting in my inbox – unfiltered and waiting action (file or delete!). I also had Mail checking each minute, sound on and Mail Appetizer floating on top of things to let me see what mail was pumping in. Currently Mail checks 8 accounts as well.

I’ve since turned off the sound, hidden the dock and de-activated the mail appetizer plugin. I now manually switch to mail, which checks at 5 minute intervals (I like to reply immediately when possible). I am considering a longer interval – something I need to work on for sure. I seem to be switching over at a greater than 5 min interval so far which is good…

In addition, I’ve switched how I use email on my Treo from always on to poll each 30 min, with the obsessive manual check for good measure.

Today’s (minutes ago) wraps the second day of this usage pattern and I honestly feel that I was able to focus more on a few tasks rather than constantly switching over to mail. Man it’s distracting to do things the way I was and probably feeds my desire since it’s just always working on a loop.

Extra Bonus — I love the new found dock space. Maxing the screen space for windows is really nice and something I should have done a while back. I’ve got to get my inbox filtered down to a minimal number of messages as a priority to feel I’ve mastered this more… and it won’t hurt to get the withdrawal effect to go away from not seeing the second a new message arrives.

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Some Changes…

I’ve made a few small changes around the blog… A new header graphic and some links in the sidebar. I think for the time being, I’ll be using del.icio.us for links and smaller items rather than simply blogging a full post with basically just a link. I’m sure exceptions will follow, but we’ll see how this goes.

If you read this via newsreader and would like to update your subscription, now would be a great time! I’ve been using Feedburner for some time and would certainly love to know more about the people reading. As you might notice this is a non-commercial adventure so I am not looking to track you to serve contextual ads… though GoogleAd words may make a return this year at some point.

My Main Feed

My Links Feed … though I have the ability to include the links directly in the main feed thanks to Feedburner’s splicing. If that’s easier and people would prefer a single source for everything that eventually gets posted here, it’s easy enough to merge. Please let me know.

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Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2005!

2004 was a great year for me, though it marked the first time in my professional life I was not employed by someone else in a full-time manner. I consulted and did some contract work, but mainly spent a great deal of time with my family and really enjoyed being a dad for my daughter Hannah’s first year.

I am looking forward to what another year will bring.

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Thinking about iPhone

Simon Woodside at MobileWhack delivers some good thoughts on iPhone and is certainly worth a read. I can’t see UWB happening in the first edition only since they’ll be targeting the mid-line according the report at Forbes. Who knows, I am sure it will be full of surprises when iPhone arrives.

Timewise, iPhone could be out within a year or a month. All of the technology I’ve covered exists now. Margins in the phone business are totally different from Pods and PCs, but you can bet that Apple will get a good deal because of what their star power will do for whatever carrier they grace their first offering on. They’ll cut a surprising deal and could well change the way that handset makers and operators interact (much the way iTunes Music Store changed the online music business and forced the industry and other companies, like Microsoft, to respond).

does well, like the iPod, it will drive more people to Macs, which is a good thing for both Apple and its fans. [MobileWhack ]

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Getting it Done II

Recently, I’ve become pretty focused on Getting Things Done. I first heard of it via the Treonauts blog, which led me to 43 Folders. That was at least a month ago and I’ve been tracking not only what GTD is, but how I might be able to connect with a system that works for me.

In my quest for the perfect personal system, I’ve tried a few tools and think I am finally getting to where I feel comfortable. One of the lessons I took from the book is simplicity. Find a system, that is simple yet comprehensive and something that will also encourage you to use since it’s always handy and actually fun to use.

The initial thing I thought about while considering my options was how to best integrate my Treo into the mix… The Treo immediately became an always-with-me tool after my purchase. Since it’s there, I want to be able to review as well as add or revise items all the time. The initial trick with the GTD system to get things out of your head and into your system so you are free to think about other things, rather than stressing about what you need to do (mind like water anyone?).

For me, the search came down to two tools… I know there are many others to potentially review, but for me it was all about either Life Balance or Tasks. Life Balance is a very slick piece of software from Llamagraphics that runs on Mac, Windows and Palm. Tasks is a great system I’ve written about previously which runs on a web server (or your local machine if so inclined) of yours, or there’s even a hosted service if you like.

Life Balance on Palm Tasks Screen

They both can do the job and really it comes down to personal preference or perhaps price. I’ve already paid for Tasks which runs $30 while Life Balance costs about $80 for both a Mac and Palm version. I’ll let my previous post about Tasks, (which i titled Getting it Done well before I heard about the book) serve for usage and as my review.

I did spend some time reorienting my Tasks set-up to my new outline in Life Balance so things were similar and there are definitely things I like about Tasks — like hiding checked items and clearing them from view. Tasks maintains an archive of things so you can easily find past items via search. It also supports adding items to your datebook, but you can’t easily (enough) add things back upstream. Since it’s a connected application, you have to fire up Blazer or your mobile browser of choice to edit. I like the daily reminder over email, but wish I could create more custom alerts for individual items or trees.

Life Balance has really grabbed my attention for now as the central point of organization for my GTD system. There are overlaps in philosophies which make creating a system for yourself pretty nice. To start, you create an outline of ideas and projects. During setup you can import your current To Do and Datebook entries and assign them a home within your outline which is an added bonus. This outline defines the To Do list which can be sorted by Place if you’ve defined things in such detail. This is a great way to specify views of things to do if you divide your time in varying locations or simply if you break up how you want to be thinking about what you want to do. While It’s important to consider where you might be doing these activities, in my opinion that is not critical to success. More critical, is how you assign priority and whether you want a due date included in your calendar. Life Balance creates datebook entries (un-timed so they appear at the top of that day) for any item you assign to the datebook. You’ll need to edit the specific entry in the datebook if you want to create an alarm or reminder.

The nice thing about both the LB and GTD way of thinking is that it is not only OK but strongly suggested that you include as much if not all the things you want to do – regardless of timeframe. This lets you see what it is you want to achieve and set goals for yourself. Life Balance has a balance mode that shows graphs of how you are doing against these goals. I have not use that aspect of things too extensively, but I do revisit my outline with a pretty high degree of frequency and figure out what I have to add or revise.

I like the way this system of thinking works for me. It allows you to focus on smaller bite size chunks of information which is certainly easy to process and enabling… I’d suggest the book or audiobook if you are pressed for time 😉 I think you’ll find it a valuable experience and I’d definitely be interested in hearing what tools you find useful or ways you use the tools I’ve mentioned.

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Just Scratching the Surface

I’ve started reading Getting Things Done and feeling quite good about this approach to organization… I’ve also been playing with a copy of Life Balance on both Mac and Palm and this method seems to be very compelling for a total information view. I’ll have to write a more formal review of my system once I’ve got everything tweaked, but so far I like where it’s going.

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WP 1.3

I’ve been playing with Nightlies from the WordPress dev team for a while and have activated a new one tonight which enabled me to switch to the Kubrick theme which seems to work quite well.

I’ll let it stick for a bit and see how it goes. I’ve got my older template which while it had some quirks (my fault) also had a personal touch as well. Have to mess around and see about tweaking things.

I’m open to suggestions or comments if you’ve got them.

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Just Catching Up

I guess it might seem like I’ve neglected you recently dear reader… I apologize. I’ve been pretty caught up lately and have fallen behind in my reading of things let alone in my time to blog.

Should be back on track with the usual good stuff in the next day or so.

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Living in a Box

Growing up, I always remember The Who singing Eminence Front and thinking, what the hell do they mean living in a box… Give it a listen –

I learned long ago know it’s not living in a box, but rather Eminence Front. I’m not living in a box either, but sort of feel that way now that I’ve got my work area gated off as well as the home theater front. I simply could not stop thinking about this song… that and Less Nessman actually, now that my office has walls, though real structure rather than taped lines on the floor… 😉

No more access for you Hannah…It’s a put on.

Behind an eminence front
Eminence front, it’s a put on
It’s an eminence front
It’s an eminence front, it’s a put on
An eminence front
Eminence front, it’s a put on, eminence front
It’s an eminence front
It’s an eminence front, it’s a put on, it’s a put on, it’s a put on, it’s a put on