Year: 2007

Google, almost there, but not quite

One pet peeve that I have with Google is their seeming inability to actually finish stuff.

Maybe it’s the nature of the Internet or a web 2.0 thing, but it seems that so few of Google’s wonderful offerings develop to the point where you can finally commit to using them and get rid of other paradigms.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Google and what they’ve done for Search and email. Their Gmail product is the best on or offline interface that I’ve yet encountered, and I was a die-hard Outlook user before that. (MR/2 before that, Lotus Notes at work).

The problem is, I use a PDA when I’m away from home. An iPAQ 3955 ig you’re interested. And the best PIM for syncing this device is Outlook. So my calendaring is in Outlook, my tasks are in Outlook and my Contacts are all in Outlook.

I don’t know what world most of the wireless PDA aficionados live in today, but it isn’t mine. I do not have Wi-Fi access most places that I go and I haven’t found a PDA-based calendar that can hold a candle to “Pocket Informant” on my iPAQ (well, maybe DateBK4 but that was in the heyday of Palm devices..).
I also use a Blackberry since I support these devices at work, their calendaring is staid and reliable but not very good for planning.

Google has a great contacts scheme in Gmail. Why can I not sync them with Outlook? Heck, Google owns ORKUT, why can’t they sync with each other and THEN with Outlook?

I also am enamored of Google’s calendaring app, but I have no way of getting the information from it to my iPAQ. Again, Google has created a kick-ass interface and then does not provide sufficient functionality to allow me to take advantage of it. It has to sync with Outlook in order for my iPAQ to have it available for me. It’s been out there for over a year now (nearly 2??) and can do some spiffy things, but still cannot do something as basic as sync with Outlook.

I just tried using “Remote Calendars” and “Companionlink” over the weekend to see if either was up to the task. Never mind that Google is in perpetual Beta so neither of these offerings are able to guarantee that they will continue to work flawlessly as Google’s products are tweaked. At least they are trying to bridge the gap.
“Remote Calendars” simply doesn’t work on my system – I have the feeling it’s either a conflict with GDS (ironic) or an old plug-in called lookout that I used to use with Outlook. And the “Companionlink” offering, which installed and worked right out of the box (so to speak) started duplicating some (but not all) calendar entries with each sync. I really didn’t need to be walking around with 20 reminders of an impending doctor’s appointment waiting for me next month so, after trialing to satisfy myself of the current state of the situation, I uninstalled it and will check it out again in another quarter or so.

The same can be said for Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets app. I keep a list of movies that I want to see on a little excel spreadsheet on my iPAQ. I like to update it from a real keyboard if I’m at home and so I use Excel. I would be just as happy to use the Google offering, except the only way to see the spreadsheet is to access the web, which I’m not doing in my local Blockbuster. The same applies for my weight and balance spreadsheets for flying, my groceries-needed spreadsheet and a half dozen other little lists that spreadsheets are useful for. Again, the ability to sync the files out of Google is needed.

Perhaps I’m falling behind the times and I need to shell out for some kind of unlimited data plan and a WinCE-based phone. But the offerings out there seem to me to be prohibitively expensive. I do play somewhat with these services from my Blackberry as such access is included with the corporate plan that we use but most small-screen access of the web seems to me to be lacking. It’s not a very rich experience and it is so very, very slow. My plan is EVDO for those who know what that is, so it’s pretty much as fast as you can get on a Verizon wireless device.

So, as usual, my desires are about a decade ahead of what is being offered. I can certainly keep doing what I’m doing now, it’s worked for the past few years, I’m sure it will work for a few more. But I can’t help but wonder if I’m either too eager, too small a demographic for anybody to care about, or simply looking in the wrong direction for progress as these (to me) obvious gaps in application offerings hang out there well beyond the point where I’m willing to wait to use the associated products.

Marietta Clear Sky Clock

The “Clear Sky Clock” is a forecast that comes courtesy of the Canadian Meteorological Center and use useful for determining if viewing conditions will be good in a particular area at a particular time. If you don’t live in Marietta, don’t worry, there are over 3,000 other locations with associated clocks. Click on the image below for details regarding how to read it and to help you find other clocks that may be closer to you.

Check it out below, happy viewing!

Click here to see if image doesn't appear

Added new 250 Gigabyte hard drive

I recently purchased a Western Digital 250 Gigabyte hard drive that I was going to just add to my existing computer system to augment the existing 100 Gigabyte drive that came with the box. But when I opened the package I saw that they had included this cool utility that would copy everything over to the new drive and even make it the active partition.

Since it would leave everything intact on my existing drive I decided to give it a try. I’m from an era where such utilities seldom live up to their promises and so I tend to be pretty hands-on in these cases and do everything manually. But I have a full backup of my data on two separate physical devices over and above my current desktop so I thought I’d go for the gusto.

Electronics today are so forgiving, I originally didn’t bother to change the jumper settings on the new drive ’cause I wanted to see what would happen if I added it to the slave end of the HD controller ribbon cable. The original HD was set up as a master and I figured I would get a bit of grief from the system by not manually setting the jumpers but I was pleasantly surprised by when everything came up just fine.

I installed Western Digital’s “Data Lifeguard tools” and saw the option to copy the info over to the new drive.

It wasn’t 100% obvious to me from the wording what was going to happen, but with two or 3 simple clicks I initiated a process that would partition my drive (one big ol’ partition for me), Format it with NTFS, copy over my data and then set it up as a primary, bootable partition. It seemed a little too good to be true.

It took a while to copy over all my data, I had about 88 Gbytes of data on the existing drive, so I just let it go overnight and resumed work in the morning.

The next morning, I decided to do things right, powered off my machine, properly set the jumpers on both drives, plugged the correct drive to the correct part of the ribbon cable and turned the machine back on. It started flawlessly. Here I am a week or so later and I’m at the point where I’m just about willing to blow away all the data on the old drive and start using it for other purposes. Mind you, with an additional 150 Gbytes on the new drive, there isn’t overwhelming pressure to do so.

Since I don’t run with a swap file, there was no need to point it over to my newly underused 100 Gbyte drive, but I did decide to completely uninstall and re-install Google Desktop search and then put its index files on the lesser used drive.

Some caveats that bear mentioning. While everything supposedly came over to the new partition, and most of my applications work perfectly you should be aware of the following quirks that I’ve found so far.

Activewords, Roboform, and iTunes all required reactivation or reauthorization even though nothing had *really* changed on the machine. This did surprise me somewhat. Activewords was automated and straightforward. Roboform claimed that I had exceeded 3 computers (I only have/use it on 2) and would need to purchase additional licenses – a quick email to their tech support resolved this with no hassle at all. iTunes warned me that I was now authorized on 3 out of a possible 5 computers. Apparently there is no way to singularly deauthorize a computer I will have to wait until I hit 5 computers authorized and then a button is supposed to appear on my account page that allows me to deauthorize all computers and start again. Not esthetically my favorite solution but at least I know there is a way to clean things up eventually.

I use Activesync to keep my iPaq synchronized with Outlook. This suddenly stopped recognizing that Outlook was installed. I was using Activesync 3.7 and so decided to upgrade to the latest version (4.2) to see if that would help. Uninstalling the old activesync and installing the new one yielded the identical results. So I uninstalled Activesync, used a cleanup tool provided by MS that would wipe out the Office registry entries (figuring these must be somehow dependent on my physical disk) and “repaired” my MS Office Professional edition and then reinstalled activesync again. No dice.
The eventual solution was to uninstall Activesync, fully uninstall MS Office, then reinstall MS office being careful to install the collaboration tools for Outlook. Then open up Outlook to make sure that it was working properly (even with a full uninstall pretty much all of my office settings stuck around which made me wonder what you’d do if those were causing your problems) and then install Activesync. Then everything was fine.

Then, while using google to register an account I found that the Quicktime plugin was not working in Firefox. I tried to just install the standalone version when I found that the Apple updater actually had my version at 7.1.4 while that available on Apple’s website was only 7.1.3. Go figure. So a repair of Quicktime resolved this problem.

Finally, even though all of my shares showed up on the new drive and looked OK under properties, I could not access them from the other computers in my house. I’m using XP Home on this machine. All I needed to do there was to to open the folder’s properties, chose the “Sharing” tab, uncheck the “Share this folder on the network” checkbox and immediately recheck it and click the “apply” button and the system chugged through all the files and folders setting the appropriate security and they worked fine.

So, as usual, not exactly something that you want to tackle if you’re nervous or unsure about PCs but much less effort than was required even 5 or 10 years ago. My little system is up humming and working fine.

Minority Report becomes Reality

And without Tom Cruise, thankfully.

Check out this YouTube video of a prototype workstation. The way the guy is interacting with it is exactly the way we should be using computers… I’m very excited for the future.

I suspect that the real future for the keyboard for the foreseeable future will be one that is physically rendered in addition to being graphically rendered. By this I mean that you will be able to feel the keys, either through some localized stimulation or through gross alteration of the screen, so touch typing can remain a reality.

God would be an atheist: Why can’t we all be Japanese?

From “The Institute for Humanist Studies”, this article titled “God would be an atheist: Why can’t we all be Japanese?” is a rather scathing critique of the impact of religion on civilized nations.

I largely agree with the assessment presented with the reservation that there are many secular influences (historical government, societal and even religious practices) that have shaped those cultures and can bear at least some of the credit / fault for the way they function today.

The portrait of Japanese as being overall better off than Americans just due to religion ignores the cultural submission to authority that seems to be much more prevalent in the Asian world than here. Further, population densities and thousands of years of civilization have helped make these folks who they are. But it also has constrained them in many ways and I do not believe it is as easy to express oneself in these rigid cultures. Indeed, a lack of cultural inertia is one of the best things that the US has going for it. Without the hindrance of centuries of tradition we are freer to explore and elucidate the world around us.
Unfortunately, religion does crop up whenever there is uncertainty, and when you are not that thoroughly grounded (only a couple of hundred years hardly qualifies as a culture) then you are just a babe and perhaps still do need your all powerful fables to help you sleep at night..

Mail-in Rebates and other Crummy Marketing Practices – take a stand!

When mail-in rebates started becoming more popular I was stuck dealing with them along with everybody else. I have to admit that my success rate was pretty high. Now I didn’t buy a lot of stuff that had these rebates associated with them but, in the beginning, I would get back a check for every single one that I submitted.

Then, last year, Symantec decided to decline a legitimate mail-in rebate due to “insufficient proof of existing product”, this after I had mailed in the first CD from exactly one of the products that they listed as a legitimate upgrade. Since then, life has become.. well.. busy. And I’ve noticed that the timeframe for submitting these rebates has decreased substantially, often to only about 15 days after purchase. Personally, I like to know I’m going to keep a product before submitting the rebate. I haven’t tried to return a product with the UPC symbol carved out of the box but I imagine that it doesn’t go over very well.
So I’ve missed some pretty hefty rebates recently, one for a laptop that we purchased, another for my Bellsouth DSL modem.

So I’ve decided that I’m fed up with them and now completely do not consider the value of a mail-in rebate when making my purchasing decision.

I recently purchased a 250 Gigabyte hard drive, it “retails” for $130 and I was able to pick it up for either $90 right then and there or to wait for a few days when they would have a mail-in rebate for $70 (making it a $60 purchase – pretty sweet). When I look at that choice I see a $90 drive or a $130 drive. So I went for the $90 drive. No fiddling around like an idiot cutting things off of boxes, no filling out little questionnaires, no printing neatly so they’ll be able to mail something back to me, and no waiting 8-12 weeks for them to maybe send me a check that can easily be mistaken for more junk mail. No, I haven’t done this yet, but I imagine that larger families must do this all the time.

The other thing that skews my buying choices nowadays is the digit “9”. I understand that human psychology views $29.99 to be a much better deal than $30.00 but it’s pretty brazen of companies to be using this on every product they sell all the time. How many times have you seen adverts indicating that this $99.99 puts this product in your house for under a hundred dollars (apparently there is no sales tax in those areas)?

I absolutely love, and go out of my way to patronize places that round prices to the nearest dollar. If they can include those insulting sales taxes in the prices too, I’m all for that. There is a local golf club that does this and, though it’s not the closest one to me, it’s one reason why I go there. Treat me like a reasonable adult, not a moron who needs to be misdirected, cajoled and fooled into making my purchasing decisions. If I want that, I’ll go see a magic show.

OK, rant mode off. I *am* a little curious if anybody who sees this feels at all the same way as I do about these things…