Year: 2010

My BlackBerry Software

I was exchanging messages with King and thought I’d post my thoughts on the software that I currently use on the BlackBerry.

Hey King,

I don’t use a lot of apps on my 9000 Bold BlackBerry, but I swear by Pocket Informant. It’s great for getting tasks on your calendar and I like its presentation for contacts as well.

I haven’t used the “keyboardless” version of it yet. I used to use it on my iPaq and the BlackBerry version is up to par.

I don’t have any recommendation for a calculator as I pretty much use only the 4 functions these days, but other software I use frequently:

– BerryWeather – my favorite feature is setting my “home” screen to my GPS coordinates so it is always showing me the current and forecast weather for wherever I happen to be. I keep 3 other permanent locations set as well so I can always check home, Toronto and my airport’s weather.

– Profile Scheduler – I use profiles heavily (along with filters) and the scheduler automatically puts it into phone only mode for night time. So I don’t get woken up when a friend sends me some funny message at 1 in the morning…

– I often have used google maps on my device – haven’t had much cause to lately since I’m always near a computer or my gps.

– Something that has potential but IMHO isn’t quite there yet is drivesafe.ly  (yep that’s spelled correctly). It can detect when you’re driving (by gps speed) and will auto respond to email and text if you wish and will read you your incoming email and texts. Pretty cool to know whether or not that new incoming message is something to deal with at the next light or not.

– Besides those products I regularly use the Blackberry Facebook App, Enterprise Messenger (with our corporate SameTime IM system), Viigo and UberTwitter. All are OK but none are drop dead gorgeous apps.

I synch wirelessly via BlackBerry Enterprise Server to my Lotus Notes for mail, calendar and journal/memo/notebook. But I synch manually to Lotus Notes at work and to Outlook at Home (outlook is my master) and am able to take advantage of outlook’s superior print and formatting capabilities with no major issues.

I have tried several flavors of synching contacts, calendars, etc. with google-centric products but I have found all of them lacking.

There is a product that you can search for that you would pay some modest monthly fee for that will wirelessly synch your outlook with the BlackBerry that I researched somewhat for one of our SLT folks who was leaving the company and I would definitely give it a try over any of the other solutions I’ve seen to date if I didn’t have a work-provided wireless solution.

Marc

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 7:43 PM, King wrote:

I have taken the plunge, and gone for the BB Storm 2.

Any recommendations for ‘must have’ software?
Particularly…..

a Calculator?  The one that comes with it is just basic +-*/ and I use the
more ‘impressive’ functions a fair bit on my treo.

A contact list?  I was able to import the contacts from my trio, but it
has not converted as cleanly as I would like.

Also, what do you use on the desktop to sync to, Outlook? Google service,
Lotus notes?  What I would really like is a full address book, from which
I could print mailing labels on the PC side as well as maintain all
contact info.

King

On Access Scanners Killing App Performance

At work I’m wrestling with McAfee’s on access scanner absolutely crippling Lotus Notes latest client R8.5.1.  By killing the mcshield process you can realize a dramatic improvement in the startup time and overall performance of the Lotus client. A side benefit is that the omnipresent crashes I was facing have virtually disappeared.

Also, if you use the designer client you will see at least one order of magnitude increase in performance. I went from being amazed that such a terrible designer client had been released to being horrified that a relatively capable designer client had been so crippled by on access anti malware software as to render it useless.

Obviously our security folks are not going to be satisfied with simply disabling the scanner so the challenge is now to find some way to make these crappy security products ignore the right files so that the business applications can get on with being useful.

Today I was working at home with Quicken 2010 and I was miffed by how sluggishly it was behaving. I’ve got an i7-920 computer chip overclocked to 3 GHz, 12 Gigabytes of RAM and 64-Bit Windows 7 Professional pushing Quicken along. In theory it should be screaming.  Pulling up the task manager, what do I see but for pretty much every mouse click the MsMpEng executable (Microsoft Security Essentials Anti Malware scanner) is sucking up 10-30 percent of my CPU.

I’ve tried configuring the scanner to ignore my executable (C:\Program Files (x86)\Quicken\qw.exe), the Quicken QDF data file type (QDF extension) and even the entire dedicated drive on which the Quicken data files reside. But nothing has any effect. I’m pretty sure that those options are provided for the same reason as “Close” buttons on elevators exist: to give you something to do while things proceed at their normal pace.

Now killing the MsMpEng process absolutely fixes the issue. Quicken takes off like there is no tomorrow. Again, this is not an appropriate answer. You need to have rather sophisticated protections in place to work in today’s sophisticated cyber world. But it does point a finger directly at the resource hogging culprit.

So tell me, why does our protection software have to be so crude and bloated that this is even an issue? Does anybody have any suggestions or alternatives that you are happy with? Until this issue I thought I was VERY happy with Microsoft Security Essentials. But I’ve never needed to tweak it before. Now I want something effective. Symantec’s products have proven themselves to be monstrous resource hogs in the past. My McAfee experience at work is leading me away from that direction. Suggestions are very welcome and even more so if you’ve worked with Quicken in a Windows 7 64 bit environment!

Staying Abreast of Latest Books

My taste in books spans from the serious (such as “The God Delusion”)  through to the fantastic (pick anything by “Peter F Hamilton” or “John Scalzi”)  through to comics (such as Dilbert, FoxTrot and XKCD).

An issue I’m facing right now is how to easily stay on top of new releases by authors that I favor.

For news and most notifications these days I can take advantage of RSS feeds and aggregate them in a single place – I use Google Reader – this lets me stay on top of the latest and greatest from a wide variety of sources without having to constantly be visiting and revisiting sites checking for changes.

I believe I now own every one of the non-anthology Dilbert books available (the anthologies IMHO are just a waste of time since they just rehash comics but collect them together in a theme). So I went to Amazon expecting to find some kind of Dilbert or Scott Adams RSS feed that I could just plug into my aggregator and when a new book becomes available it would pop up for me and then I could choose whether it was something I wanted to pick up or not.

Imagine my surprise to find that this kind of service is remarkably rarer than I thought. Amazon doesn’t appear to offer anything like this, although some older message board postings I saw indicate that you used to be able to subscribe to email alerts for new Author publications.

In the case of Dilbert, I went specifically to the website to see if something was available there. Scott Adam’s is a tech savvy kind of guy – he was publishing his email address and not-so-regular newsletters at a time when most authors were still viewing the internet with fear and suspicion. But even he doesn’t seem to have this seemingly obvious sales tool available.

Has anybody found a solution to this issue? I’d prefer to have some kind of consistent centralized solution rather than having to track  down every individual author’s web site and then try to fashion something from the content therein.

I *did* find this tracker based off the Amazon site which is exactly what I want but it doesn’t appear to be functional. Probably the API on which it depends is no longer functional / available? It’s a great idea though. Free for you and me, the provider gets a modest kickback from Amazon for directing book purchasing traffic to them.

Any ideas or suggestions would be welcome!

Karaoke Party Pictures

Karaoke Party 2010 0051Had a great time at Michelle’s office party on Saturday. We did a quasi-Karaoke theme this time. “Quasi” since we realized none of us could sing so we didn’t bother with the monitor with words or silencing the actual singing on the music tracks. This works out MUCH better than regular karaoke!

We even had an “American Idol” themed judge panel with past and present judges Simon, Randy, Kara, Ellen and Paula.

Special kudos to “Ellen” who bleached her hair and wore blue contact lenses to fit the bill.

Peruse through and enjoy!

iTunes 9.1 – Playlist Sort order fix

This solution was posted by Doug Hellmann and worked perfectly for me, even when I reintroduced using “Sort Artist” to more finely control my podcast play order.

To recap the issue check out this posting.

A little more detail on the solution:

Plug your iPod (presumably iPhone and any other iXXXX device) into your computer with iTunes running.

Click on it under “Devices”

Go to the “Podcasts” Tab

Make sure “Sync Podcasts” is checked

Make sure “Automatically Include” is checked

The default here is to include “All Unplayed” podcasts. Change this to “All”

Click “Apply” at the bottom and then check the results on your device.

This worked perfectly for me.

Back on the Grid – Post Bike Accident

PICT6710Sorry to have dropped of the grid like that for a few days.

I took this past Friday off for a “me” day and went cycling along the Silver Comet Trail near Hiram, Georgia.

Around 23 miles into a 31 mile cycle something, I have no idea what, happened and I found myself dazedly staggering around the trail with a couple of very nice ladies offering me antiseptic wipes. I have no idea what exchange occurred between us because when I had finally achieved some degree of coherence, I was alone on the trail. I assume I must have switched to automatic “guy mode” along the lines of “No problem.. I’m fine… Thanks for stopping but I’m OK”..

I got back on the bike to finish the last 8 or so miles of the cycle, fortunately it did not seem damaged at all except for some scrapes on the top of the aero bars. My bike was off to the side of the trail facing as if I was cycling AWAY from Hiram. Somehow I managed to figure out that this was incorrect.

I gave Michelle a call and told her to expect that I would not be looking too great.

After getting cleaned up and bandaged from my newly replenished medical kit (literally I’d refreshed all the old supplies in that kit a month prior) we then sat back for a while to make sure that there were no neurological issues (uneven pupils, slurred speech, that kind of thing).

The next morning I awoke to bed spins so we headed off to the Northside Urgent Care facility to get things checked out.

After a couple of mis-steps with the X-Rays (got a lot more than I wanted) it turned out that my concussion was not neurologically worrying. And my ribs appeared only to be bruised (no punctured lungs or any of that kind of excitement) and nothing broken in my hand (I was thinking that was only a mild sprain anyway).

But I’ve been out of it for several days now, mostly sleeping and staring vacantly at the TV (which is probably the normal way of watching it anyway, so no harm no foul :)).

Just yesterday (3 days after) I started feeling like my old self but I was tiring very easily. Today, very groggy but can still sense improvement and am remoting in to work to try to get back on top of things.

You can see my mildly cracked helmet (thank you helmet!!) and my “battle wounds” here. If you do not like the sight of blood, please don’t click through.

CyberPower Refund Finally Realized.

It took a while but I just wanted to wrap this up.

Yesterday (April 7, 2010) my credit card finally showed the refund! The amount was, as expected, the price I paid minus the shipping costs.

Here is the the final exchange we had in email leading up to the refund.

My follow up on April 2, 2010:

Hi,

Another week has passed. I’m not sure how you personally regard $2,500. But I regard this as a large sum of money.

It has now been 3 weeks (15 of your business days) since you have received the PC that I returned.

I elected to do business with Cyberpower on the strength of a friend’s recommendation in spite of your B+ rating with the Better Business Bureau ( http://www.la.bbb.org/Business-Report/Cyberpower-Inc-13080817 ).

Please respond to this email with your confirmation that the refund in full has been issued.

Marc

With the response being (April 5):

Dear Marc,

According record for RMA under 181144, refund was credited back to your account on 3/31/2010, bank or credit card company will take 2-3 business days to process, if you have any question please email or contact us.

Thank you.

RMA Status

Cyberpower Inc.(888) 900-5180 Ext. 151

I’m pleased that things have finally worked out. It was somewhat disconcerting to have to go around like this to elicit the refund. At the back of my mind I was still holding on to the option to dispute the credit card charge but – looking at the credit card fine print – this option is supposedly one that’s limited to businesses within my physical locale (within about 500 miles). But I imagine in this day of internet purchases, that that anachronism is one that is largely discounted and trotted out by the credit card folks only when they no longer wish to retain a particular customer.

iPAD killing our way of life?

Nope.

Some friends and I were having a discussion where one was lamenting the passing of local book stores and CD shops among other things. This partly in response to the hype regarding the iPad.

My take on this:

I miss record stores.
I miss having to go to the movies to see.. well movies.
I miss having to go to multiple stores to comparison shop.
I miss them all like I miss having a hole in my head 🙂

Gotta keep moving forward!

I LOVE buying my music a single track at a time! I fantasized about this from early high school.

I LOVE that I can see a movie within a month of its release in the comfort of my own home with absolutely wonderful fidelity.

I LOVE popping onto Amazon.com, browsing a few books and ordering one or two to read either physically or having them magically appear on my kindle within seconds.

I LOVE being able to easily compare dates and costs for different flights and then getting the best possible deal for my circumstances and then booking the flight and rental car immediately.

I LOVE that in less than 20 years, I’ll probably be able to book a sub-orbital flight on a Virgin spaceship and experience weightlessness.

I also disagree with the theme of the iPad sounding the death knell for libraries. Books and normal libraries will have a place in the mainstream for another few decades. The libraries especially will have to adapt as people gain more access to information from other sources but it will be their own fault if they, as an institution, fail.

It is valid to have the discussion regarding whether or not the iPad will usher in a new mode of information consumption but I think we’ll find that this is just another tiny, $600 step on an already lengthy road that began with PCs and has been landmarked by laptops, tablets, netbooks, eReaders and the like.

Nothing really new here folks. Very cool? You bet. New… not so much.

iTunes Auto Delete for Podcasts Gone?

Running iTunes 9.1.0.79 on my new Windows 7 64 bit box I noticed that none of my podcasts were auto deleting any more. So I checked iTunes on my recently replaced 32 bit XP box to see if I was imagining things. The Auto Delete was still on that one. So I upgraded it to 9.1.0.79 as well and, sure enough, auto delete disappeared.

I can only assume that Apple was finding too many people becoming confused by this feature and just did away with it completely. I am a little disappointed because I very much love systems that maintain themselves.

The workaround is simple, I listen to my podcasts using a smart playlist where the play count is less than 1 (yes the very same playlist that won’t sort correctly on the iPod because Apple’s iPod programmer’s don’t understand the concept of “Sort” columns as implemented by their iTunes programmers).

I have always maintained a smart playlist called “Obsolete podcasts” that just looks for podcasts with a play count > 0.  From there I could see when there was an issue with the auto delete or I could resurrect (’tis the season..) podcasts that needed repeating – such as “learning Spanish”.

Now I’ll just go into that “Obsolete Podcasts” playlist from time to time and wholesale delete everything in there. The Smart Playlists will ensure that the older podcasts won’t clutter up my day to day listening experience.