Category: Personal

Sure there’s a pub for everything, but I would not expect to find someone reading wrestling. This is WWE not NCAA.

A min ago this guy had the mag turned and was admiring some sort of centerfold-like thing…

Entertainment is entertainment I guess.

We regained power tonight at about 9 pm…

The power company and our electrician think that lightning actually had caused some damage a few weeks ago and only tonight finally flipped out the lines causing the final damage. We had a storm a few weeks back (when I was in London) which blew out the transformer, but tonight the lines fried the rest of the cables and actually blew out the ground as well. Apparently this is pretty bad and something the guys had not actually seen before. Fortunately, nothing caught fire and we’ve got power back without anyone getting hurt in the process.

We have lost power quite a few times and tonight the lines to our house actually burned through. NYSEG and an electrician arw on the case to restore matters … Hopefully for good this time!

Not sure what’s up, but man we’ve been suffering with horrible network connections lately… here’s my latest speedtest report:

Download Speed: 114 kbps (14.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 8807 kbps (1100.9 KB/sec transfer rate)

I’ve recently had the opportunity to take a few weeks from the office and it’s been an amazing mental experience. My first week was a family vacation – noted in the previous post – and as part of this trip I did a complete disconnect – no phone and no email. I had my phone with me and “damn you” T-Mobile, the two times I turned it on, I received a call within a few minutes! Week two was a business trip to Dublin Ireland for a leadership and management training which was a great experience. I work for in a major world wide agency and actually on a globally managed piece of business, but I had not yet had the opportunity to really understand what else was going on within the companies around me – at least from people who don’t also work on my account.

The most interesting thing I’ve taken away from the time is a sense of perspective and the relative importance of matters at hand. A simple difference in where I am today, vs. even a few months back.

When I took some time back in January, I remained connected and it only took until Tuesday for the calls to start. Once engaged, my vacation became more of a remote working environment. I worked far less than normal, and actually found the deluge of email to be crushing. I had hundreds of unread email and was never able to catch up reading them all – in many ways I really did not want to try and deal with it all, but still I felt the pressure.

During this last round of time out of the office, it finally occurred to me that it’s not only impossible to read eery single email, it’s not required. There are currently 314 unread emails in my archived inbox (5522 total still to be filed) and 133 unread messages in my online inbox (677 total waiting for action, filing or delete). This might freak a few people out – actually it does still make me uncomfortable, but there’s little I can do to prevent the daily deluge. What I can do is manage my time, focus and deal with prioritized pieces on various projects that require my attention. If it’s really that important people follow-up. Otherwise, it’s a search away when you are looking for something.

I am committed to working smarter, maintaining a perspective on the job at hand and most importantly sharing this with the people with whom I work. We’ve spent a great deal of time this past year (my time off corresponded nicely with my 1 year anniversary) running and reacting, rather than being able to stop, focus and plan.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Vacation, Work

I’ve been playing with some ways to auto-capture photos from Phone to Flickr and while there are certainly a few ways to do this, there are two applications, I’ve tried that are hands down killer apps.  Shozu works on phones other than Series 60 devices, while Meaning only works on the platform.

Shozu pops up right after you snap a picture and lets you save to web if you like right in the moment.  You have to have preset some basic tags for flickr which I’ve done and then the photo uploads in the background on your phone… in my case a shiny new Nokia N70.  Shozu is simple and very slick.   You can choose other photo services and even pick a service which includes video if you like.  Since flickr does not currently support video, Shozu can automatically email a captured video to an address of your choosing.

Meaning takes much of what I like about Shozu and adds an enhanced and on the fly tagging system as well as the addition of GPS!  That’s right if you use a GPS device as I am currently — the Nokia LD-1W — you can Geo Tag your images as you go and upload that data to Flickr as well.  If you don’t have a GPS, you can still tag your location by naming the cell you happen to be in.  As Meaning has a few more levels of detail it might be construed more difficult to use, but it’s the same deal.  After you snap a picture, you can add a description and title and the tags of your choosing… hit send and your phone uploads quietly in the background.

technorati tags: Nokia, N-Series, N70, Nokia LD-1W, GPS, Tag, Flickr, Moblog, Meaning, Shozu

As you might have noted in my last post, and lack of posts prior to that one last week, I’ve been extremely busy. I am crashing through an amazingly high profile and short term client project which will have quite a few of us cranking through the holidays. I am actually booked on it full-time which is funny considering my other projects make for a “full-time” job is well. Not exactly how I was allocated per our retainer, such is life. It’s all good – even though my wife thinks otherwise since the hours and recent and pending travel are nutty.

When I accepted this gig in May, I thought it was going to be what is actually starting to really become… patience young jedi. I am working on some very cool stuff (to a geek like me anyway) and dealing with some new and very smart people on the client side.

It’s nice that the significant uptick has taken place right after my switch over to the Powerbook since that is the best and most comfortable place for me to manage the unbelievable assault of email and information. I am accustomed to a lot of email, but I get an average of 150-200 work emails a day that all require a nice piece of my attention. That in addition to a constant flow of meetings and traveling between locations makes for interesting days and weeks. I’ve amazed myself at how much information it seems possible to manage though frankly it’s totally daunting all the same. I’ve been working through Kinkless GTD and OmniOutliner as my primary keeper of info and think it’s a solid combo. Mail is locked to Entourage, though Mail.app seems to connect nicely to Exchange. No chance being even more fringe than I already am as the only non-creative with a Mac.

Otherwise all is well here… Suburban life is excellent and we are enjoying the house beyond expectations. There are many projects here to complete to further enhance things, but it’s a complete quality of life improvement.

Technorati Tags: Personal

Andy hooked me up with a Nokia Europe link today that enabled a config for the N90 and made getting online (as I am now) via bluetooth quite simple.

I highly recommend this as a great way to gain access beyond Wifi. If I was on Cingular, I could be enjoying EDGE or better, but TMO currently only does GPRS. It still works well for email – even with my VPN active.

Here are the steps for anyone else looking to do this:

• Head to the Nokia Site for starters and follow the on-page wizard.
• Once you’ve received your configuration MMS messages and saved them you should have a config for your carrier (T-Mobile in my case) ready to rock on your phone. I was actually missing this step before and made an incorrect that the unlocked N90 knew anything about how to connect to my data service without this.
• Now that the N90 is ready to connect, you need to make sure that your computer is also ready. On my PowerBook, I opened Network Preferences and added a new connection entitled Bluetooth. While it’s not necessary to make a new connection, I find it easy to manage the litany of ports and VPN details I need by keeping things separate. In the Bluetooth network connection choose the second drop down which says Network Status by Default and seen here:

• From the Network Status menu, you want to choose Network Port Configurations and if you are following my plan to keep it simple and separate, you’ll want to uncheck all but Bluetooth and VPN if you need it.
• Assuming you have not done this before, you’ll need to make one more stop online before we can complete this process… Ross Barkman has created an amazing set of modem scripts for various phones. choose what you need and follow the simple installation (copy the files).
• Heading back to Network Preferences, you can now select, Bluetooth again from the second drop down menu. Add internet2.voicestream.com as your phone number in the PPP tab.
• In the Bluetooth tab, you need to pick a modem and courtesy of Ross Barkman, you now have quite a few new options. I am using the Nokia GPRS CID1 script and so far so good. Be sure to disable error correction and uncheck the wait for dial tone setting.
• Under TCP / IP make sure your configured for PPP.
• Hit Apply Now

You are basically done at this point. I leave the modem icon in my menu bar and have my connection set to connect as needed, though you can initiate manually as well. I just got this working today and was connected for the better part of my one hour commute home tonight on Metro North.

Technorati Tags: Commute, N90, Nokia, N-Series, DUN, T-Mobile, Mobile

Not really sure why this was on the Metro North train, but it was right next to me this am….

If you can’t recognize it, it’s a PSP not some kind of new lollipop.

Technorati Tags: Commute, Marketing, N-Series, N90, Nokia, PSP, Travel

I just love having a capable phone like the N90 handy for moments like this… no need to worry about whether the video camera is around, let alone charged with a clean tape.

Priceless…

Shot 12/3/2005 @ 7:48:08 PM

Technorati Tags: Home movie, N-Series, N90, Nokia, Personal

I woke up this Thanksgiving morning to the first snow of the year!

This is our very first snow here at the new house and we are probably due for quite a bit this year in Westchester County. It’s hard to tell exactly how much has fallen, but it’s definitely a few inches with some more snow still falling in the trees. One thing is for certain, it’s absolutely beautiful. Having just moved from the city, it’s nice to know we won’t be seeing any black soot collecting on the surface as the day goes one.

Happy Turkey Day Everyone!

Technorati Tags: Thanksgiving, Snow

Today I installed my first electrical work at home.  I had never had the opportunity to try or to really have an interest, but thanks to a tip from my dad, I checked into Home Depot and picked up a few new light switches so I could enable an auto-timer on some outside lights.

I was surprised by how easy the job was.  The only issue is the relative fear relating to whether in fact you have the power off as you reach grab hold of the wires in order to disconnect and re-attached the lines on the new switch.  All clear here and I now have 2 new switches installed and programmed for exterior lights!

Of course, now my wife looks around at all the light fixtures we have lying around waiting to be installed wondering whether I’ll be the one or whether our electrician will be coming back to handle… yeah I think it’s the electrician on the bigger stuff.  It’s in our contract from when we closed so at least I have a good excuse there.

technorati tags: home, home depot, lighting

So I have no idea what’s going on today, but we’ve been officially invaded by Ladybugs.  There are tons of them all over…

The morning was frosty, but it got up near 70 during the day and literally hundreds (perhaps more) ladybugs appeared all over the house, baking in the sun and climbing all around.

Technorati Tags: ladybugs, Westchester, Katonah

Right from my backyard dinner time tonight…