Category — Productivity

I run my email for this domain through Google Apps for domains. I like the GMail web interface, plus the huge IMAP accessable mailbox I get with it.  The only challenge has been I also have a Google Account under the same email address.  The biggest challenge is that means there are two Google Document repositories.  As we’ve been collaborating on getting sponsorship for upcoming PhotoCamp here in Milwaukee I’ve run into issues where I can get to the document.

After some digging I found something on the "Settings" page of my Google Apps Documents page that allows you to move your documents over.  I clicked on this and after some time got the following:

Am I to truely believe that Google is investigating this "immediately"?  Did someone’s screen at the Googleplex light up and the war room spring into action?  I don’t work there, so I can tell, but I’m not holding my breath that they are fixing this "immediately."

A got this link via Twitter today and took a second to read it:

Worldchanging: Peak Population and Generation X

There is an interesting theory presented that we (those of Generation X) will see the world’s population peak this century.  For all the stuff in the article, I share the link for one quote that struck a chord with me:

“…though times are tough and the planet demands our hard work, it also needs people who are happy, healthy and creatively energetic. The world needs our best-lived lives, not our martyrdom.”

The way I see it, yes there is a lot of hard times ahead of us that are going to require work, but if we let that consume us, our lives will really be for naught, or at least not very fun.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I got laid off from my ASP.NET developer job last week.  Thanks you everyone who has reached out to me.  I never knew I had as strong of a network as I did. I guess the big lesson I’ve learned (and not the hard way) is always be maintaining your professional network.  You’ll never know when you might need it. I’ll probably post on my post Northwoods life soon enough, but I’m waiting for a few things to shake out. 

My big obstacle right now is I’m losing my main Exchange account that I used for my Mail/Calendar/Contacts sync for my Windows Mobile Device (first generation Samsung Blackjack).   Mail I’ve got covered via IMAP access to my Google Apps for Domains.  What I’m really looking for is an over-the-air solution for Calendar and Contacts. Since it integrates nicely with my email, I’d like to use Google Calendar, but haven’t seen too many options on the Contacts front.

For calendar, there seem to be a few options, including an official one from Google, but it syncs with Outlook, then I’d be syncing my device with my desktop. After living the sweet life that is OTA sync, I don’t know if that an option.  There are a few others I’ll try out.  If you’ve got some solutions that you’ve had success with, leave it in the comments below.

[Update 10/6/2008] I’ve had a couple people mention hosted exchange solutions, which might indeed be right up my ally.  It costs a little more (especially since Google Apps is free) but it isn’t horrible.

I just finished up another presentation by Clay Shirky, this time at last week’s Web 2.0 expo. If this is his presentation at a conference, I can only imagine what his lectures at NYU are like.

This guy really seems to have a grasp on the future. Not so much from that standpoint of “this is what the future will be,” but more from a standpoint of “this is why the future looks strange to us – and that’s ok. As a society we’ve been through this sort of change before.”

[via Lifehacker]

I subscribe to a number of life hack/productivity blogs, including the usually good Zen Habits, published by Leo Babauta. Leo is the master of the link bait headline, and recently put out a post entitled "Everything You Wanted to Know About Simplifying Your Life, and Way More" which goes on to list 28 previous posts on simplifying your life.  Of those posts, 9 of them have the classic headline formula of some number of things to do X (like my headline here or ‘Top 12 ways to get people to click on your links’).

Assuming Leo only has one idea in the non-numeric headlined articles (doubtful), I add up 295 ways to simply your life.  Let me give you a hint.  If you need 295 ways to simplify your life, I’d start by cutting down on reading about simplifying your life.

Like I said, Leo usually writes good stuff, but he might as well have linked to his archive page. Granted he warns you don’t need to read everything he links to, but if that sort of warning is needed, it should be enough warning to the author that the article needs some simplification.

[photo by nerovivo]

Lawrence Lessig has a great op-ed piece in the New Your times today on Orphan Works. His solution to the problem is one he has suggested many times before (I think I first read it in his Wired Magazine column several years back) – move to a system similar to patents.  The initial copyright period would be shortened and extensions would not be automatic. If the original owner still thought there was value in the work, they could extend there copyright for a small fee (he suggests $1).

A hired expert shouldn’t be required for an orchestra to know if it can perform a work composed during World War II or for a small museum to know whether it can put a photograph from the New Deal on its Web site. In a digital age, knowing the law should be simple and cheap. Congress should be pushing for rules that encourage clarity, not more work for copyright experts.

The current iteration of Lessig’s argument is framed from the standpoint of small public institutions like orchestras or museums wanting to display or perform certain works, but I’ve also seen it framed from standpoint of the mashup/remix culture.  From using samples in music to combining various prior works into something new.  If a work had no more value on its own and the author let it fall into the public domain, it is available sooner to those artists that could give it a new lease on life.

Mashups!?! Think this is just for people looking to steal some artwork?  Walt Disney built his empire on works in the public domain – all of the early animation masterpieces came from fairy tales in the public domain. If you’ve got a school-age daughter, you know how big Disney’s "Princesses" are, including Cinderella.

If you’re a Wisconsinite like myself, you’ve got a double chance to do something – both Senators Kohl and Feingold sit of the judiciary committee.  Take a moment to let them know your thoughts on the matter. You’ll have to use the contact forms on their respective sites, neither take direct emails.

See also previous post:
Great Analysis of Pending Orphan Works Legislation

Clay Shirky gives a talk at the recent Web 2.0 conference talking about where people find the time to do activities on line.  After you get done wincing at the "Web 2.0" part, take a look. He draws a correlation between the shift to an industrial society and the shift to an online society. At the turn of the last century, the cultural shift was so great that society numbed itself with gin.  He maintains that for the past 50 years, they big cultural shock was this amazing amount of free time.  Post World War II, people started working more and more five day work weeks and didn’t know what to do with the free time.  Society numbed itself this time with TV.

It is an interesting talk.  Most folks I know that are hardcore "online people" watch little to no TV. Those that do bought TiVo years ago to compress what they do watch ("TV on your schedule" was an early tag line.) They usually view TV as an another information source and loop it in with others in their life.

Props to Lifehacker for linking to the video.  A transcript of the talk is on Clay’s website.

Say it ain’t so!  Just now I started getting the following on all my domains hosted on Google Apps:

I logged into the web interface for all my mail account, including a generic GMail account and all mentions of IMAP are gone from the settings page.

Did Google just shut of IMAP, or am I missing something?

Update: Seems to be quite a bit of noise on the Google Apps Google Group (say that ten times fast)

Update #2:  IMAP seems to be coming back.  Google evidentally lost their IMAP servers and instantly got 1000′s of support calls on it.  Nothing like crowd-sourcing uptime monitoring.

I’ve been gradually whittling down my feed list in Google Reader and am actually up to articles posted this week.  I mentioned before how much I didn’t like Apple trying to shove Safari down my throat, turns out I’m not alone. According to ComputerWorld, a lot of corporations aren’t happy, then again I’m not surprised. 

During the time I spent in Premier Support at Microsoft, I got the sense that most IT Administrators at huge corporations idea of a “perfect world” would be one where none of the employees had a computer and no one accessed any of the servers.  Anytime Microsoft had some sort of “update” there were immediate cries on ways to block it. After my initial thought of, “No. I do not want Safari” I immediately thought, “I wonder how many companies are going to be mad at this one.”  Question answered.

FWIW (and this is documented elsewhere) If you keep getting nagged about the Safari “update” the solution is pretty simple, in the Apple Software Update Window, pick the “Tools” menu, then “Ignore Selected Updates”

Even though I’ve told multiple people my next PC will probably be a Mac (the 24″ iMac quite the seductress), Apple’s software seems to leave a lot to be desired. When I came into work this morning I was greeted with this on my desktop:

My first thought was, “I sure don’t remember installing Safari…  but, did I?” So I looked through was was installed on my PC and, no, it’s not there. Apple is seeing fit to leverage its position on my PC this it has with iTunes into being my browser. Too bad every Mac user I know has told me when I get the above described Mac to immediately install Firefox since Safari is teh $uX.

Microsoft took it up the poop chute when they forced IE7 out to everyone, yet this is somehow acceptable? I could see getting prompted for this svelte (as compare to iTunes) 22MB update if I had one of the preview versions of Safari installed, but I don’t. Sorry Apple, no I don’t want your crappy software, and furthermore, when I do, I’ll go get it myself. Until that time, pour yourself a nice tall glass of go eff yourself.