iPhone

Twitter

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About a month or two ago I signed up for Twitter. I thought it was a cool idea, but as usual most of my friends aren’t using the system so I didn’t do anything with it. About two weeks ago I had second thoughts about the system and started Tweeting anyway. I plugged in Twitter to Facebook so now whenever I Tweet my Facebook status is updated. I thought that was a cool idea. Last week I added a Twitter plugin to Typepad so my latest Tweets are now in one of the colums on my blog.

I find it cool that I can blast out a quick Twitter message from my iPhone when I am bored somewhere!

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Black Friday

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Yesterday I was really stupid and did what everyone else did the day after Thanksgiving. I went shopping. I know, I always say I avoid all stores between Thanksgiving & New Years. Especially on Black Friday, but I wanted a deal on a computer monitor. Since I have been working remotely from home periodically I wanted a nicer monitor for my work laptop. Going from my 23″ Cinema Display on my mac to a 19″ boxy monitor on my Thinkpad just wasn’t cutting it. I went to Best Buy to look at a 22″ or 24″ HP LCD. Turned out I thought the 22″ was too small, and the 24″ was too expensive. After some quick price comparison on my iPhone I realized that I could get a better deal online so I passed on buying anything.

After my failed attempt at shopping I meet up with Danny and we headed over to Stout for a few drinks and dinner. It was cold walking to Stout but it was a nice to get out!

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iPhone 2.2

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I upgraded today to the iPhone latest version of the iPhone software, 2.2. On the off chance that the problem I had last week with my iphone not syncing with my computer was related to the phone and not the computer I am updating the software right away. So far I don’t see any major features stand out. I am happier that my Apple TV has a new OS version on it so I can control the volume of the Apple TV using my remote software on the iPhone! Now that is functional!

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The Weirdest Technial Problem

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On 2nd I wrote about a weird issue regarding my iPhone resetting. Unfortunately since then the issue happened on two other occasions. By the 3rd issue I decided to call Apple and open a ticket on my problem. They couldn’t help me much on the phone so they wanted me to bring the phone in and see someone at a local Apple Store. This is when things get interesting.

A few days before the 3rd incident with my iPhone I noticed that one of the external USB drives I have threw an error when I booted up the Macbook. I was bad and kind of ignored the error since I could see the drive mount and didn’t appear to have any issues. After a few reboots with the sam error I actually read the error and noticed it was warning about a corrput file system. Since this drive was a backup drive and only used as an archived copy of data I didn’t need the data I decided to pull the drive and use a spare I had. The next time I rebooted my computer Sunday night I got the same error, but this time it was on another 750 gig USB drive I had plugged into my Macbook. This time the error was on a drive that I do use and have critical data on. I was not hugely worried since I could still read the data on the drive. I decided to copy the critical data off onto another 750 gig drive that I decided to use as a mirrored copy of the data on the first drive.

Once I moved all the data off of the damaged drive, I formatted it and prepared to mirror all the data on the 2nd drive back over to it. I started off a replication of the good drive using Synk and then went to bed. This was the same night I called in the iPhone for support. I woke up the next morning to find that my Mac had crashed and never copied very much data. Once I rebooted my Macbook I noticed that the one good drive I had was now not visible in OSX. I checked the disk utility and I saw the drive but it was not available. A verify failed telling me the file system was messed up. I began to panic a bit. All my efforts to create a good backup process ruined by some weird fluke issue. At this point I had to take my Macbook and goto work.

After work I went to the Apple Store on 5th Ave and told the Genius Bar guy my woes. He looked over my iPhone and then my Macbook. After explaining what happened to my USB drives they decided that I can hold onto my iPhone but that they want to take my Macbook in to run some tests on.

Now I am without my Macbook, my iPhone works but has no media on it. I was instructed to reset it again, but not restore it. I am waiting to do that when I get my Macbook back. I can’t install anything without all the data on it. After a bit more panicking about the lost data on my hard drives I am feeling a bit more optimistic. I am using Data Rescue II to pull the data off my bad drive. It is taking ages to copy but so far I have been successful. I am about 70% done with my restore. I think the most critical data is already restored onto my good drive. Once I am done I will format the bad drive and mirror the data back over to it. I will then do what Jayson does and physically unplug the backup drive and sync it every week or every other week. Longer term I am looking to get another Drobo or some sort of other solution that does some sort of RAID.

While I wait for my Macbook to return I am not off the Grid. I am using my iMac I typically use for TV, and I have my work Thinkpad.

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Google To Zimbra Update

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So far I am liking Zimbra, but I do have a few features that I miss from Google Apps. I miss the ability to search and apply tags to everything that is already in my account. Zimbra cannot do that, but version 6 should be able to fix that. I miss the linking of messages to one thread in Google, but on the other hand I don't miss it sometimes. That was a controversial function for me.

I miss the extra drive space. My current Zimbra account only gives me 2 gigs. When I am done uploading all my mail I will need closer to 4gig, and Google apps gave me around 7. I knew this going into the Zimbra, but more space would be nice!

I am liking the syncing to my iPhone. The only quirk is that the photo caller id pictures I have on my Mac address book won't sync with the iPhone anymore but they will sync with the Zimbra server. Weird. I am also having issues with getting the calendar on my mac to sync with Zimbra. I was able to do a one way import to the server but getting it back down to my iCal has been a problem. It hasn't bothered me yet since I don't really use iCal as much as I used to now that my work world lives in Exchange.

I have had a few other odd issues with mail not replicating to Outlook using the Zimbra plug in, but I haven't gone crazy over it yet. Overall Google Apps was a good solid web app, so change is difficult. That being said I am happier that I have a bit more control over my most sensitive data. Sorry Google, I love you in many ways but I am still a bit skeptical about your privacy and data retention policies. And in a nutshell that is the final reason I moved to Zimbra. I still use my Gmail account as a backup, but I haven't logged into my Google Apps account all week.

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iPhone 3G Reset

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My afternoon today was thrown for a bit of a loop when I tried to go out today and tried to play some music on my iPod. There wasn’t any. That was odd since I always have about 8gigs of music on it. I then went to sync it up again with my Macbook. That is when things got interesting. I kept getting an error saying the phone couldn’t sync and I had to reset it. I figured a quick reset and I should be good to go. Well that didn’t work either. I reset the phone and then it kept giving me an error. I couldn’t sync it, or boot it up. An Apple KB article said to reboot the computer so I did that. After about 3 more tries the phone reset and started restoring.

This is the problem with one converged device. I almost can’t go anywhere without it. It is my phone (only one except Skype until I get my blackberry from work). It is also my music player, and PDA. I am sunk if it doesn’t work. Today was a perfect example of that. 3 hours later I am back and semi running with the phone. My only lingering issue that I know of is my icon’s are all in the wrong order. I am more concerned with the fact that I don’t know if this will happen again, and I have no backup plan. I guess that is my operations mindset going. I always need a “plan B”. I am thinking about that, but for now I am just happy things turned out as well as they did. It could have been allot worse!

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Free Google Apps, to Paid Zimbra!

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My brother in law reminded me that he lost everything in his Gmail inbox a few months ago. He can’t recall how that happened, and there is no way to get the data back. Knowing him, I don’t think he did something to delete it. This story on top of several people I have spoken to about percieved issues with Googles privacy policy has got me wondering if I should be relying on Google Apps for my mail. To be truthful I was originally a skeptic of Gmail but I have been using Google Apps for about a year with no major issues. That being said hearing horror stories about lack of support or loss of mail (or loss of access to mail), hijacking of accounts, etc got me thinking. I am willing to pay for rock solid service from a mail provider, but even paying for Google Apps doesn’t (in my eyes) solve the security and privacy issues with Googles terms of service.

All these concerns got to seriously look at using Zimbra again. Earlier this year I had tried out 01.com‘s personal Zimbra hosting but ended up sticking to Google Apps. What has changed? The iPhone for one. The need in my opinion to have my contacts synced with my mail system. The fact that I have an iPhone so I switched to Remember The Milk for task management. One major reason I didn’t keep using Zimbra was it didn’t sync tasks to the Mac and at the time that was a requirement. With me using RTM that isn’t an issue anymore. I could have used my existing hosting provider and used simple IMAP mail like I did for years, but I grew attached to a nice web UI. The ability to have the same mail experience on any computer became very compelling, so going back to simple IMAP mail wasn’t going to cut it.

Last week I signed up for a business account with 01.com (biz account offers me more features over the personal one I previously tried). I have already moved the majority of my mail from Google Apps over to Zimbra. The moving of mail was slow since I was just coping messages between the two services using IMAP. Getting my contacts and calendar into Zimbra was easy with the import functionality as well as the iSync connector. I am having issues sync’ing my calendar back with my Mac, but everything syncs up perfectly with my iPhone. If I realized Zimbra would work so well syncing with the iPhone I would never have renewed .mac (mobileme). I would have been better served just using sugarsync and Zimbra, but I didn’t know about sugarsync in July. I know for next year not to renew mobileme!

Now all I need to do is sort out a few minor glitches with my Zimbra experience and I will be happy to stop using Google Apps.

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My Crazy Week

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I have been off the grid so to speak for a week. It was a really not fun week. I want to write about it a little, but I also need to keep in mind this is a publicly visible site. Lets just say I had the biggest medical scare in my entire life. I am fine, really but if what happened to me happened to a friend I wouldn’t believe them. It all started with some dizziness, and ended with a hospital stay. All I can say is you cannot get any sleep in a hospital. I felt worse when I left than when I got there.

I really want to write more about what is going on, but reality is I have said enough publicly. This is the perfect example of this blog not being an accurate representation of my life since I almost didn’t mention this key event at all. I would rather stick to more uplifting topics. On the possitive note I would have gone crazy without my iPhone to read stuff and listen to music while I was away from home. I guess that means I wasn’t really off the grid, but I didn’t check work email for a full week so maybe it does count.

Highlights from the week, and observations:

• ER the show might not be that accurate about the medical procedures they perform (or so my dad says) but the controlled chaos of the ER is well portrayed. While I was in the ER a fight broke out between two patients. It was interesting to say the least.

• Do they really have to wake you every few hours to take your temp and blood pressure? Probably yes, but it really sucks when you are trying to sleep.

• MRI’s are really loud even when you have ear plugs and head phones for music in your ears

• Some of the die they gave me for a scan made me feel like my hands were on fire.

• The entire hospital is dependent on the transport staff to move people around. The reason things take so long is because said staff is really slow either because they are slow or overworked. The operations side of me observed that. Also you don’t hold staff meetings for an entire shift that everyone depends on at the same time. You break it up. Again my ops side talking.

I am off to continue my resting before I am back to work tomorrow.

My Mediawiki

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I have been using VoodooPad for a few months (actually pushing a year now, wow) and it has been a great product. With me at a new job that requires me to use a company issued computer having all my wiki information on my Mac is not the most functional setup. If I am at work our out and about I cannot access my data. Because of that I have been trying out Google App’s Sites. It is a decent wiki like application, but I don’t like the fact that I cannot export my data easily. I am also becoming more and more wary about Google’s privacy and security policies. I tried to setup PHPWiki on my web hosting account, but ran into issues with it. I used PHPwiki at Partsearch and we had all of our department documentation on it and I loved it. More recently however I have been liking Mediawiki.

I finally sat down and tinkered around with my hosting account and got Mediawiki installed. Because this is a private wiki, I had to password protect the directory that the wiki resides in on my hosting server, but otherwise the install wasn’t so bad. I have to get used to formatting my pages for the wiki. Voodoopad spoiled me in that way. It was like writting in word when you wanted to format text in Voodoopad, but this is the price I pay for having my data availible to me anywhere I have an internet connection. I have already leaveraged that benifit of my new site by accessing it on my iPhone. I also like the fact that I can backup the DB and port it to another Mediawiki install if I ever have to. Overall I have been happy with my experience!

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Task Management

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For the past few years I have been trying to find the perfect solution for task management. I try to follow the Getting Things Done model for organizing my “stuff”. Even before I followed GTD I tried different tools for task management. For years that simply meant using the built in task functions in Outlook. When I switched to a Mac I continued to use Outlook for about a year or so for mail and tasks since I wasn’t comforatable enough with iCal, Address Book, and Mail. By 10.3 or so I switched over and began using iCal for task management. iCal is a good calendar program, but it isn’t so hot for tasks (in my opinion). I used it since it was what worked when syncing my Treo’s. I wanted to have the categories stay intact so I had problems with Entourage. That left me stuck with iCal. I tried Market Circles’s Daylite for a while. In the version 1.x days or even the early 3.x days it wasn’t the best with syncing with the Palm so I used it on and off again but I always ended up back with iCal. It wasn’t the best solution, but it was the one that worked for most of the basic functions. When Daylite 3.5/3.6 came out last summer with Sync Services support I switched back to Daylite. I had problems with my computer that forced me again back to iCal. By the time I got my iphone I knew I needed to find a new solution for task management, since the iphone didn’t support iCal tasks. Daylite is coming out with an iphone product that looked perfect, and there were a few other products out there that did similar functions, but my new job threw a kink in my plans. See next paragraph!

During this entire time using a Mac based program was not an issue since the two companies that I worked at didn’t care if I used my own Macbook. My boss at Partsearch at one point allowed my tech team to buy Mac’s when we wanted to. He even got one. My current job however requires me to use a windows PC exclusively. This poses a problem for me. If I used a desktop program to manage tasks I would have to choose between data I can only access at work or via my work laptop or data that I can access only at home or via a PDA. Neither option was appealing to me. For the first 3 weeks at my new job I was using outlook for work tasks, and continued to use iCal for personal ones. It was becoming apparent that I needed to take the plunge and choose one. I couldn’t decide! Then I remembered I signed up for Hiveminder. It is a web based task tool by Best Practical. They are the guys that make Request Tracker, a favorite issue tracking tool I have used at a few companies. I started using that site for my new tasks. It was an ok experience. I had some issues with the usability of the site so I wasn’t sure if I would continue using it.

The overall idea of a web based tool did have my curiosity. In the past I had discounted a web based tool since I wanted a full featured client. Now I needed the flexibility of accessing my data anywhere. I went to Lifehacker to see what reviews they had for web based task management or GTD tools. I found a few that looked promising. That was when I came accross Remember The Milk. I remembered reading reviews about RTM a while ago, and every review was positive. So after signing up and playing with 2 or 3 other services I signed up for an account with RTM. It has only been a few days, but I have all my active tasks in RTM. So far I have found it to offer most of what I am looking for. I can have lists, tags, due dates, & reminders. It has a good search function. Adding of notes isn’t so hard. It also has a quick entry for for tasks (Hiveminder’s is better, but you can’t have everything). I also like that I can access an iPhone optimized version of the site. It isn’t an offline client, but it is close enough. I can also view (unfortunately not edit) my tasks in iCal. I just downloaded the gmail plugin for RTM that allows me to manage my tasks in my Google Apps account. That looks very promising also. The other major feature I love is the offline mode thanks to Google Gears. If I had any doubt that I would be trying this service for a while it went out the window with the offline mode option.

Remember The Milk

For now I am exploring what I can do with RTM. As it stands now task management is now another function I can perform via a web app, and not an installed application. More about that in a later post.

So why am I rambling on for paragraphs about task management? There are a few tools (hardware or software) that I live and die by. Managing tasks is one of those critical tools and I have been in limbo for ages with mediocre options (Daylite excluded, it rocked but I was never 100% right for my situation). With Remember The Milk, it looks like I have a great tool, and I have options with how I access it. I like that. I know I am fickle. In two weeks I might be writing about some fatal flaw I found in this service that makes it not right for me, but for now this is the way to go for me!

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