Gull-wing, of course

Oh, and thanks for asking…Yes, it does come in electric!  In the form of four nearly-100-kw electric motors for combined power of over 500 hp.

Crunchgear has all the info.  Sorry about the off-topic post, but electric propulsion is a bit of an interest of mine. эротические лесбиянок мой муж занимается анальной мастурбацией

In other news, my birthday’s in December…

окончил волгоградский государственный педагогический институт

So my hard drive was dead.  Sixty Gigabytes of data gone in the span of a few short “clicks”.  Catastrophe?  Not at all.  I had started backing up with Time Machine a few weeks ago, and just last week I attached my backup drive to the network (using Airdisk on an AEBS).  I knew I had a full backup, and more importantly a recent full backup.  How recent?  I didn’t know yet.  But I slept well.  

Fast forward to Sunday.  My options were to take the whole kit to the Mac store or to get a new drive and go to town.  I dismissed the former option: first, I was out of warranty.  Second, there’s a tiny hairline crack …

which Apple would almost certainly claim voids my warranty.  Third, it would take 3 days to get the thing back.  A ring to Micro Center verified that they had compatible drives in stock.  At a 45 minute drive, it’s a bit of a fetch for us city-dwellers, but my friend Sage lives nearby and I heard they had a beer tasting scheduled for the evening.  Now that’s what I call a win-win situation.  So…I get a hard drive ($70), taste a couple of Belgian ales, play some Wii, and head home.  Replaced the drive, booted from CD. 

Time: about 1830 EDT.

Under the Utilities menu, there’s a very hopeful-sounding option: “restore from backup”. I select that, go through a few screens, and I end up with this screen.  Well, almost this screen.  The “Destination” area was empty.  It took about a half hour to calculate the size, and when it was done, the Destinations area was _still_ empty.  *grumble*  Go back. Open Disk Utility.  Format the drive.  Wait another half hour.  In the meantime, I took the old drive apart. then I got that screen.  A few more clicks and the restore process has started.

Time: about 1930 EDT.  It now tells me it will take about 23 hours to restore.  Actually around this time the longest it said was about 25 hours! Yipes.  Shower, Shave, Eat.  Move the computer closer to the wireless router.  Time estimate by about 10pm was down to 5-6 hours.   A little more respectable.  Time to go grab a beer.  Ride down to the local, get back around 0130 EDT Monday.  Lo and Behold: It’s done!

All in all, not a very painful process at all.   

Summary

The good

The process was simple, effective, and efficient.  The latest backup I had was from 1205 EDT Sunday—only an hour or two before the crash.  That means I lost practically no data.  Also, Time Machine backups up the entire drive…which means it’s pretty much restore-and-go. If I had to do it myself I’d have backed up only my home directory, which means I would have had to reinstall the OS, all the updates, all software, all software updates, and then restore my home directory.   I was able to replace the hard drive, restore in a few hours, and be back up and running without skipping a beat the next day. Who can argue with that?  Kudos to Apple and Time Machine for making the backup process practically invisible to the user, and the restore process intuitive.  Most importantly, my billable-hours log didn’t miss a thing!

The bad

I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth here, but…why didn’t the “restore from backup” option recognize a new, unformatted drive?  Sure I”m a geek, and I know how to Disk Utility and check the drive, format it, etc.  But this is the only sticking point where the “intuitive” nature of the backup fails.  Of course, one would assume that if you’re opening up the machine to replace the hard drive, you would also have the expertise to format before you do anything else.  Still and all…

The ugly

And now I’m nitpicking.  A few things were weird after the restore.  Sure, no data was lost.  But Caches and temporary files were, of course, not backed up.  Why backup the cache? Right?  

Well, let’s start with the first image post-restore: my desktop background.  Gone.  I keep my media files on a network drive.  The desktop background was selected through my photo library.  My iPhoto cache or whatever was gone so iPhoto did not know where I kept my library now.   Next, all my RSS feeds’ Read/Unread counts were wrong.  Similarly, all my web browser cache was gone, but the history was not.

Perhaps more annoying is that my Spotlight index was gone so I had to wait for the system re-index everything from scratch.  Also gone, strangely,  seemed to be the time machine index.  Although I could see my old backups, the next scheduled backup was a full, not differential.  Although both of these tasks are minor nuisances and were done in the background, they still affect system performance and could easily have been avoided by…oh yea…

So why back up the cache?  A better question would be, why not?  Sure you can recreate it, re-download stuff, etc. But you can re-install applications and the OS, so why back u the OS and applications?  You can quite easily backup the cache without taking up any extra space: just don’t archive it.  Every time you back it up, overwrite or erase any old files.

Also annoying was that Micro Center carried a variety of drive sizes (120GB – 250GB I believe) but all the same 5400 speed.  I would have liked to upgrade to 7200 or better while I was at it.

Speaking of ugly,

How are your

 backups doing lately?  How would you fare if your hard disk went bad today?  My computer, just barely over a year old, gave me no indication that the hard drive was failing.  Not more than two weeks earlier I had checked the SMART status and all was fine as frog hair.  If you have a mac, get yourself a backup drive: my WD 500GB drive was about $120 at Best Buy.  Time Machine comes free with 10.5.  So what’s keeping you?  If you’re on a PC, I’m sure good backup solutions exist for that market as well.  

Well, that’s all I got.  Check out almost-all the pictures, including the old drive taken apart, from the adventure and leave any questions or comments!

As always, happy to be your guinea pig,

mickey

Has that happen to you?

I signed up with Gubb to manage my grocery list and now there’s no more missing gorcery list problems. There’s no more list problems, period.

Yeah, but I have room for one more overly feature rich, complex program to help manage my life and business like I have room for another set of in-laws, why should I use this thing?

I found this little “web 2″ gem to be just about perfect. You can definitely squeeze this one in. Gubb.net lets you make, lists, that’s it. Simple. And you can access them through your web enabled cell phone. The sign up, setup, all of it, was a breeze and I got right into using it in about 10 seconds. They strictly follow the “don’t make me think” rules of engagement. It’s just absolutely useful.

Great, now the in-laws want us to vacation with them. They’re talking about camping and they want my wife and I to bring… everything. I don’t want to get swamped with email requests for BBQ chips, how do I get this organized between us all without losing it?

First take a deep breath. No worries, mate. Just share your list with your in-laws, or whoever you want to help your get organized. You just add their email address and your off to the races, or camping, or whatever you do with your in-laws. Its one of the best list sharing tools I have come across.

Wow. Well, the in-laws just called and they said they liked this thing so much that they were wondering if they can post the list to their blog. Yes, they’re bloggers, and apparently somewhat famous, probably writing about how much they enjoy bugging me.

Common, this is web 2.0 stuff. There’s always an RSS feed. Simply click under options and find the Feed that’s associated with with the list, copy, paste into your favorite news reader or blog tool, and that’s it! You can attach your list anywhere frankly, with anything that understands RSS technology. For your privacy, your feed reader should support “authenticated feeds”, which simply means you need to enter a username and password to access the feed the first time. You can turn this authentication off if need be.

What else can this baby do?

Check out iCal. If you have Outlook 2007, this feed type integrates with your Outlook Calendar really well. So for example, you can track a list of appointments on Gubb that will appear as a calendar in your Outlook and you’ll be able to identify any conflicts that you may come across your other calendars (use Outlooks Overlay feature). Very easy to use together.

I love it and I love you.

I know bro. I know.

iColorFolder brings you an extra set of folder images that allows you quickly colorize some of the desktop mess you may have. If you have more than 10 folder items on your desktop or in your My Documents folder, they can all start to look the same. You end up straining your eyes looking at each label until you find that important folder your looking for.

This little tool helps you distinguish them by quickly letting you select a color with use of a right-click of your mouse.

The first thing it does is replace your standard windows folder with one of their base folders. As with most software in general, that comes with a quirk. The first time you do this, your desktop icons are likely to get moved around. But this affect should go away (once you reorganize your desktop like you had before) and that’s about the worst of it.

You can select several folder skins, so you can make you base folders look different from your standard system if you care to “individualize” your desktop, or you stick to your XP or Vista style folders, they provide both.

Note: Make sure to check off “Use generic folder icon defined in the skin”. Not sure why this isn’t checked off as the default but it should be unless you plan on create a custom set of folders icons yourself. I suspect we all have better things to do with our time, don’t we?

After this initial setup, the rest is cake. When you create a new folder, that you prefer to colorize to distinguish it from the rest, just right-click and select Color Label. You’ll get get pull down menu of your available color options. You even get some extra folder images (click on Custom) that you can use to define folder that contain videos, pictures and other miscellaneous ones.

Now you’ll be able to identify and find important directories quickly and with less strain on your eyes. You’ll be glad to be using this little application.

BTW, you can download extra skins from their site as well. I found the base set of skins was sufficient enough for me. buy brahmi

Jott.com is one of the best new services I have come across recently. If you’re a web marketing or technology consultant like me, you probably find yourself driving to and from client locations a good deal part of your working week. The time I have then lets me collect my thoughts about the meeting I just had or the next steps on a project that I am working on. For whatever reason, it tends to be a particularly productive time to brainstorm for SEO phrases and content ideas.

Unfortunately, these productive brainstorming sessions leave me with thoughts that I need to annotate somewhere, but wait a second, what am I crazy, I’m driving! I need to keep both hands on the wheel. Oh and how temping it is to grab my Moto Q, usually charging in the seat over. It almost seems too easy to just pick it up and attempt to type a note to myself.

Yeah, I know, bad idea.

Thankfully, Jott can save my ideas and my life, by transcribing my voice instructs into my email, while I keep my hands on the wheel.

What’s Jott about?

“Jott™ is a revolutionary new service that automatically converts your voice into e-mail and text messages—anytime, anywhere, with any cell phone. Jott™ makes you more productive and efficient by capturing your ideas, notes to self, tasks, and more without using your keypad.”

- Jott.com

For road warriors, here’s four easy steps to setup Jott on your phone.

Step 1
First, sign up with an account on Jott.com. They will send you a typical email with a link to verify your account. Then fill out a couple of questions to let them know what type of cell phone service you have and whether or not you want Jott to email you, text message you, or both.

Step 2
What you to do next is add 1866-Jott-123 in your contacts list and then save it as one of your quick dial numbers. Mine is #5. If I press and hold 5 on my cell phone, it automatically dials and connects to Jott’s service. By reading the caller id, Jott knows I’m the one calling, and presto, you get the pleasant,”Who do you want to jott?” question. Setting up quick dial depends what type of phone you have, but most modern cell phones work roughly the same.

“Ok, but your still picking up your cell phone while your driving to press 5, that’s not quiet safe is it?”

Step 3
The next step is to get familiarize yourself with your voice-activation services. Again, this depends in large part to the type of phone and/or type of service you may have. Moto Q’s have built in voice-activation in the phone itself. My hands free device allows me to voice-activate Jott’s service with a quick press of button, nothing more complicated than turning the radio in your car.

Step 4
Use it. I have all my voice notes sent to my inbox for future reference and processing. But I also like getting them sent to my cell phone via SMS. By asking Jott for a “Reminder”, I can set Jott to send me a note at a future time and date. If I happen to be in a meeting or in an environment where I can’t leave my cell phone ringer on, I will be get a transcribed version of my note via SMS Text*.

There are a number of uses for Jott but collecting my thoughts on the go and sending myself reminders, I have found to be what I use it for most frequently. It’s quiet remarkable how easy it is to use and how sophisticated it’s transcribing technology has to be to make this magic happen so accurately. I haven’t tried blogging with it, but I am told it does a pretty good job as well. I will have to try that sometime soon.

Right now Jott.com is free, in beta, I suspect it will have some nominal fee associated with it when it’s ready for primetime.

*Note: Make sure you have an adequate plan for SMS. Overage charges are very expansive so keep an eye on your phone bill and make sure you have enough service cover your typical usage.

Today’s article in the post featured the high profile arrest of spammer Robert A. Soloway. This is good sign that legislatively some are trying to criminalize spam.

A couple of facts are needed to put this in context:

1) His arrest is in no way going to stop spam, it’s a drop in a bucket, oh size of Lake Michigan

2) We don’t sweat spam.

We recently launched a hosted email Outlook/Exchange solution that brings the glorious benefit of seriously curbing spam, so your Inbox doesn’t flood with messages.

Have a personal email address for over 8 years, so trust that I get a lot of spam. Approximately 300+ spam messages a day. Ever since switching over to our new email system, I have seen perhaps one or two sneak into my inbox, the rest junked into a folder to be trashed a couple of weeks later. This is one of the several nice benefits of this hosted Outlook/Exchange service (i.e. my Blackberry, which wirelessly synches to with my Outlook/Exchange hasn’t downloaded one spam message).

Here’s a screenshot of my Junk folder where all my spam gets thrown in with no problem.

On average, studies are indicating that the average professional is interrupted every three minutes with email, answering calls, chat requests, etc. This apparently is costing us all about 2 hours out of each day, just trying to get back to completing our primary work.

How does anyone is actually anything done?
When I consult professionals about their communications, one of the usual “ah ha!” moments I get is when we get around to talking about it means to be mobile, starting with their cell phones.

I usually ask a few questions:

at your office
Do you get a lot of calls during the day?
Do you have to stop your work to answer them?
Have you ever considered using an office assistant to handle your calls?

outside of your office
Do you have to call your office voicemail to check your voice messages?
If you are able to forward office calls to your cell phone, do you often forget to do so?
Do you use your voicemail to screen your calls?

If you answered “Yes” to any of these, read on.

Setting up your cell phone as your single source of voice communications is the one the first basic steps to going fully mobile as well as maintaining your sanity.

I tried that already, but I couldn’t screen my calls on my cell phone like I can with my office

line.

With Callwave, now you can, and far better than what your office line could ever do.

Callwave is another free service that I consider a must-have for professional or small business. At its core service, it is a Voicemail-to-Text transcription service* (a-la-Jott.com’s voice-to-text transcription service). By enabling certain Callwave features, it can help you gain serious productivity and allow you to be completely mobile.

If you’re like me, most of your calls tend to be urgent but very few of them are not drop-everything-right-now type of emergencies. So, I have to be able to screen these calls, at the same time I have to maintain my interruptions to a minimum if I’m expected to get anything done.

Here’s how I recommend setting things up

Step 1
Forward all calls to Callwave’s voicemail. buy aricept Whenever I don’t pick a call or I have my cell phone turned off, all my callers are sent to voicemail on Callwave’s service. In order to make that work, you have to use what most major cell phone carriers call Busy Call Forwarding (Verizon is *71). What this does is send the caller to Callwave’s Vtxt enabled voicemail instead of your carrier’s default voicemail.

Step 2
Have Callwave send voicemail transcriptions to your cell phone’s SMS. As soon as my callers are done leaving a voicemail, Callwave sends a txt message to my cell phone with the transcribed voicemail. This feature comes in very handy whenever I happen to be somewhere that I can’t take calls but I can read txt messages.

Step 3
Make sure Callwave sends an email message with the full audio to your email account. Callwave then sends an email of this message to my Outlook Hosted Exchange service. I filter them into an Outlook folder that archives them. This enables me to store the audio of every message I ever received, with searchable transcribed text as record of my messages. No more full voicemail boxes or lost messages.

Step 4
Install Callwave’s Internet Answering Machine to screen your calls at your office (or laptop). Last but not least, when I am my office, it plays voicemail audio through my speakers with the use of Callwave’s Internet Answering Machine. This lets me screen the calls for emergencies, without having to stop whatever it is that I’m doing.

The last tip I recommend is setting up twice day to return calls, once in the morning, and once before COB. With Callwave, you definitely rely on your cell phone as the single communications point, while keeping the interruptions to a minimum, but allow for truly important emergencies to get through.

This agrees entirely with the principal of centralizing your information storage, while distributing access across various mediums. A topic I will be coming back to from time to time.

*These transcriptions are sophisticated automated transcribers. While not entirely accurate, it helps you get to the gist of the call without having to pay for expensive human transcribers. But trust me, it’s pretty darn good.

BTW, this post falls under a new category, Total Mobility. This is category will cover services and gear that I use that keep things going smooth, wherever I happen to be.

Moore then put up some IDC research numbers showing that 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.

That’s a significant numbers using RSS and and wikis such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint that we offer at IGT. It’s quiet astounding to see the rate of adoption of these technologies, particularly RSS feeds. Google, Microsoft, Apple have brough RSS into the mainstream fold. My Outlook 2007, which comes included with IGT’s email service, allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds of your favorite weblogs and websites.

Its an option located between your Outbox and your Sent Items. Look for the orange RSS logo. From here you can some of the blogs I subscribe to. Any ones in bold means there are new published entries for me to read.

This also synches with my Moto Q, through our new wireless synching service. What’s so great about RSS is that I do not have to remember to go visit some of the weblogs to see if there’s anything new, this system keeps track and notifies of new enteries.

Most of the time I don’t even go to the website to view the entry, I can read it right in my Outlook (or PDA).

Once you click on article it, unbolds it to marking it as having read it. Just like an email message only it’s syndicated feed and the best part, you don’t have to subscribe by giving email address. You just need to come a webpage that has the RSS logo on it.

This URL (page) has an RSS feed attached to it. To subscribe to our weblog, it’s really simple.

All you need to do is copy the URL, right click on “RSS Feeds” folder your Outlook 2007.

Copy and Paste and your done! You’re a new subscriber.

Its that easy and that’s why RSS is fast become mainstream and why every business must get into the business of publishing news.