shaking the dust off [oneself]

It’s a new year. What better time than now for a cliché self-reflective. Cliché or not, its something I need to do. The marking of a new year is just a milestone like any other. Its a blatant reminder that we need to take a moment pause look back where we’ve been, where we are, and make sure we’re headed where we want to go. I used to be move reflective (note the parallelism in reflecting on reflection..I hope that doesn’t break the space-time continuum) . Here it goes…

 

The Past

Social

I wanted to improve my social skills. Be more extroverted. This is something I’ve been working on since Dec ‘06. This goal is one of the main reasons I decided to pursue my MBA and even jumped on the social networking bandwagon. I even wrote a blog post back in April about it. I had a follow up post (a part 2) that sadly never made it out of draft.

I feel I’ve made really good progress on this front. Moving to DC was a great choice for me as a person. There is just an amazing abundance of social outings, gatherings and people to interact with.

Activities

I joined a kickball league to meet new people. It was a mixed experience. I didn’t end up making many friends from that, but it was absolutely surreal to be kicking a red rubber ball yards away from the Washington Monument. I blame the lack of friends mainly on the way the team was formed. We had 6 or 8 people (I forget) on our own and a sweet name (Kick Ballers), but that wasn’t enough for a full team. We ended up being placed with another group that had less people than us. That kind of killed moral for us as we lost our name and felt like it wasn’t our team. Part of that was just unlucky as the folks we were teamed up with. I might try it again next year if we have enough people for our own team.

I had good intentions on taking advantage of the DC meetup’s, but haven’t had time.  After kickball I thought it’d be fun to participate in a Ultimate Frisbee “league”. The one I found plays on Saturdays, which I’ve since devoted toward being in class.

Social Events

I’ve meet a bunch of really great people in my MBA Cohort. I’ve made it a point to attend all the related social outings. We just need to find some more social things to do together.

Online Social

I’ve tried to take advantage of online social tools. I could do better. I’m on Facebook, but I don’t interact much there. I mainly use it as an aggregation spot for all my various online social tools. That was somewhat a conscious decision, so its not all bad. I do use it to see what’s going on with people and so they can do the same with me. I use twitter. Its fun. I don’t interact like I should. I can’t say I’ve done much interaction with people on twitter. Its fair to say I use it similarly as Facebook.

Learning

Blogs

I certainly don’t read all the insane amount of blogs that I used to. At one time I was reading over 1,000 posts a day. Its one of those things that I had to let go of when time became constrained. I mainly just a handful read DC related blogs and get to the technical ones when I have a chance. I now get a fair amount of my news by following twitter related news sources.

Books

I did pretty good reading [non-technical] books.  I started keeping track of the books on GoodReads. My to-read list has grown and I should make some goals to keep reading.

Photography

I’ve done mediocre here. I’ve bought a couple books on exposure and aperture in hopes of becoming more proficient. I did take a couple photowalking trips and did upload some results flickr, but clearly I’d like to get better and do more. I don’t bring my camera around enough and I need to stop breaking it (my wide angle doesn’t focus like it should). 

Technical

As far as hard-core nerd learning outside of work, I’ve backed off quite a bit. I need to make sure my technical skills stay current. I have learned a great deal more about core networking as part of my new/current job, so I can say that I have done some learning this year. When the year started I had planned on developing some applications for my blackberry (like a really cool one for notifying you when you had to leave to catch the Metro), writing some cool apps in Silverlight or making some applications in SharePoint.

Experience

So far the most progress was made in the experience department. This is best in bulleted form.

Notable experiences

• Running past all the landmarks on the National Mall
• Random walking adventures through DC’s neighborhoods (Capital Hill, Adam’s Morgan, West End)
• Finding to dining places and experiences (sushi and Ethiopian food)
• Walking past the Whitehouse
• Traveling to NYC
• Caught a documentary at MoMA
• Morning run in Central Park
• My brother’s wedding in Maine
• Participating in the Great Lakes Relay
• Being in DC on election night
• Trips to Museums and such
  • National Aquarium in Baltimore
  • Museum of Natural History (a couple times)
  • National Gallery of Art

Health

Physical

I’ve been able to take good physical care of myself. (my WiiFit age is equal to my actual age). I love being able to run outside in the “winter”. Something I was not able to do (err. not willing to do back in Michigan). I ran the equivalent of a marathon in the Great Lakes Relay. I’m looking forward to doing that again next year as it was just a blast. I also ran my first 10K at the Marine Corps Marathon. I finished with a time of 41’05” (6’36”/mile pace) which ended up being 48th place overall (out of 5,000 registered runners)

Mental

I’ve seen the most improvement here. Not to talk ill of Michigan, but the environment there was very negative. That takes a toll on someone who tries to be positive.  I’ve noticed I just don’t dwell on the small stuff any more. I’ve learned to let go of things. Simply, that I cannot control everything. Or I suppose more accurately, you don’t need to control everything. I feel like I work just as much (or possible more) as I did in Michigan, but I get more done. Probably because I’m around people who are more positive and don’t look to block good ideas that aren’t their own.

I’ve been able to learn a lot from my brother and sister-in-law and their friends on openness and goodness. A trend I hope to continue.

 

I think that’s a fair recap on my progress for 2008. There’s been forward and backward progress. Some planned, some not. Next I just have to lay out the plan moving forward…The Future

+1 for Comcast Customer Service

http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9938146-2.html

I saw this post and just had to write up about it. It totally reminds me of what is talked about in the Cluetrain Manifesto. Here you have a guy who’s working for Comcast who’s out there watching blogs and twitter just trying to help people when he sees them voicing frustration. I didn’t get the impression he’s doing it based on a Comcast initiative or anything. I wonder if they know he’s doing it or not. It seems to be the classic example of why companies need to trust their employees and let them interact with customers. (yes, this guy is a customer service manager, but still). In a time when Comcast is getting railed for purposely blocking/slowing P2P traffic, kicking “highly-active” users off and tossing around the idea of enforcing a monthly download cap, having someone out there trying to win back some points for Comcast. Pretty sure we’ve all had to deal with Comcast and been less than smitten with the customer care.

 

What was equally interesting was the number of other companies listed as having active staff out there watching social network sites for people having issue with their company. Looks like leadership at these companies read the Cluetrain Manifesto. People are having conversations on the net. You can’t control them. So its best to join in and get things fixed.

 

+1 Comcast. I’ll cut you some slack next time you put me on hold for 30mins. And give that guy a bonus for making you look better.

 

 

Technorati Tags: comcast,cluetrain manifesto,business

live mesh tech preview

I finally got my invite for Microsoft’s Live Mesh today. Spent some time playing with it tonight. On the surface, it looks to be.. lacking. I really didn’t look into the ins and outs of Live Mesh before trying to get an invite. I knew it had something to do with their Sync Framework and I was making the assumption that it was a enhanced up version of FolderShare (which I’m a huge fan of). Well I was partly right. There definitely is the functionality to just sync up folders (although it wasn’t a clear as I thought it would be).

 

Once you get an invite and sign in you get into your Live Mesh Desktop. This should be thought of like the normal desktop we’ve come to know and love (with way less icons, misc word docs strewn about. oh and the wallpaper on my desktop is cooler).  Right now you can create a new Mesh Folder.  A mesh folder is basically just a folder that can by synced onto any other Mesh Device (gee, this sounds just like FolderShare). It does appear that the files are actually stored up on Microsoft’s servers “in the cloud”, which is more like SkyDrive. So now its looking like Mesh is a FolderShare/SkyDrive hybrid. I also use SkyDrive, so it looks like Mesh might be able to help consolidate some of the services I use. When you open up the folder you created on mesh, you get a Vista-like explorer view of the folder.

(hey look.. my first screenshot!)

 

My first time creating a new Mesh Folder I didn’t click on the horizontal chevron. If you do that you can set what devices sync and when. Since I didn’t do that I had to figure out how to get the folder to sync to my desktop. Here’s a screenshot of what you get if you click the chevron to expand out the Synchronization Options

Although this window looks like its a Vista window, its all running within IE as a modal window “on my Mesh Desktop”.

Since I didn’t do that the first time, I had to stumble around until I found out how to sync my mesh folder with my desktop (and I’ve already forgotten where I did that at).

I do see that after you install the Mesh client it creates a Live Mesh Folders in your profile space. In my case since I’m running vista this is C:\Users\Steve\Live Mesh Folders.

 

Ok. I figured out what you have to do to configure the client to sync… wait. you have to wait for it to show up in the active folders view on the Mesh client notification window.

Just click on the folder icon (that thing that looks like it was circled by a left-handed pre-school student…wait, I am left handed)

Once you click on the “New Folder” you can configure where you want it to sync to (on the local machine).

 

Well that sure was a lot about the whole sharing files part… in fact way more than is probably required. Outside of the suped up FolderShare/SkyDrive-esk feature, what do I like about Live Mesh

• Remote Desktop – Although I haven’t tried this yet, it looks like it will allow you to make a remote desktop connect from anywhere to a device running the mesh client. Kind of nice, not sure how much I’d use it…. well, outside of troubleshooting problems on someone’s computer.
• You can use the foldersharing as a collaboration mechanism. The alert/news feature tells you when something has been added/updated in a folder.
• Although I haven’t found any apps (or demo apps we can play with) that leverage Mesh, based on this quick demo you can see there’s a lot more to Mesh than what we’re seeing as end users. As I mentioned at the beginning, right now Live Mesh looks rather empty. But as you can see from the demo, that’s because Live Mesh is a platform, not a product.  You can see it has Google Gears type functionality, allowing you to take web apps offline.

In short, this thing has some potential. It’ll be interesting to see how it fits in with the cornucopia of “web 2.0″ services already out there. (not just in general, I also mean personally… I’m already at at least 15 different “web 2.0″ sites/services)

 

Technorati Tags: live mesh

xobni now public beta

I thought I hade blogged about Xobni before. A quick search tells me that I didn’t(i really thought I did, oh well), which is precular since I’m a pretty big fan (and shared it with a decent number of people). I’ve been using it since November/December timeframe and the earlier beta was quite stable (and enjoyable).  The analytics are quite fun. Its real nice to see when people get around to responding to email.

Productivity experts recommend you don’t respond back to email right away and schedule time to check email (email is not supposed to be instantaneous). Cut down on interupptions. With Xobni you can see who follows those rules and who is just emailing all the time.

The beta is now open to the public, so head out and snag it. Its free and runs with Outlook 2003 and 2007.

http://www.xobni.com/download

 

being social.

Inspired the latest book I read, Linked, I few weeks ago [more like a month ago, after how long it took me to get this post written] I decided to take the plunge into the plethora of social sites/networks out there.

 

Facebook

About 6 months ago I started actually using Facebook as my first real foray into participating in social networks (treading slowly). The purpose of Facebook for me was introduce myself into the social, reestablish communication with people of present and past. One of the most enticing properties of Facebook is that it was built based on what I would term, identity realism. An alluring (and comforting) tenet of the Internet is the ability to exist in one of three ways; anonymous, alternate persona or self. Facebook compels people to participate with their self identity giving the network a sense of realness.

But lets face it, there’s a lot of problems with trying to portray the real you. Extending your personal self with previous mechanisms on the Internet it typically boring (i.e. “My cat’s breath smells like cat food”) or filtered to fit the identity they want to portray.

Facebook was able to create a social network of realness by creating mechanisms to document what people are doing, not just what they are saying. This allowed Facebook to become a content producer without requiring people produce content (which all gets neatly packed up into one’s personal news feed). Become a friend with someone, that action is content. Write a message on someone’s wall or tell the world what you’re doing through a status update, that’s content. Heck even dumb things like throw a zombie or fight the ninja/pirate battle, that’s content And its real. The open application developer platform allowed people to develop more apps (some less purposeful than other) to further contribute to content creation. And a lot of these apps allow you to bring content from other Internet sources into your Facebook profile, which helps further add to the content to your real. Facebook apps somewhat solve the problem of aggregating all these disparate social network and applications into a holistic unified “me” that is your identity realism.

 

Flickr

Shortly after feeling a level of comfortableness with Facebook, I decided to join Flickr.  As a hobby I started getting into Digital Photography a couple years ago.  As a present to myself (I forget for what) I picked up a Nikon D50. The challenge I outlaid for myself was to attempt capture the beauty in everyday things (I was mainly into macro photography at that time). Since then I’ve taken many pictures (very few, if any, that are any good) and they sat on my hard drive on my computer pretty much never looked at. Flickr gave my photos a chance to be seen (assuming that’s a good thing). Why Flickr and not some other photo hosting site? Flickr is a community of professional and amateur photographers. Its a place were these people go to view and contribute pictures. I’ve personally spent a good many hours just looking at the different photos people have taken and posted. As a way to learn and challenge myself to become a better [amateur] photographer. Although I’ve been posting pictures to my own Flickr page, the real value is participating in groups. Not just becoming members, but sharing photos with them. Flickr groups are the networking hubs. Groups are the way you increase the visibility of your photos. Accompanying the higher visibility is the increased responsibility of sharing quality. I find I’ll upload some pictures that are “okay”, but I try to only share the ones i really like with a group. being that I want to share more, I’m pressured to learn more and try and shoot better photos.

Additionally, Flickr has open APIs which you can use to write your own applications to interact with photos posted. Although I haven’t done any development yet, I really really want to (probably with silverlight).

 

WordPress

There’s a lot of information on the Internet for one to consume. But consuming isn’t a value adding activity. going back to the Linked, its the hubs that are the key pieces of any network. The way to become a hub is to produce content. As part of my personal goal of being more extroverted and creating a personal brand, i decided i should start blogging as a way to share things i know. A way to participate in the conversation (ala ClueTrain manifesto). At first I tried Microsoft’s Live Spaces. It was…not good. The look and feel was not good. I gave WordPress a try and I love it.  They have a lot of themes that look good and I can write posts to it using Windows Live Writer (which is just awesome in its own right)

So far, I’ve found the hardest part of blogging is the actual act of blogging. Its pretty time consuming. I think this is why a lot of the other social sites I’m using get more activity. Its a fine line between writing something so your participating and writing something to contribute value. At first I was annoyed at myself for “not blogging enough”. But I realized that if I’m not writing something that contributes something of value, its probably best that I’m not. There are a lot of things I’d like to share, but a blog isn’t necessarily the best way to share them (like re-posting links to other blog posts). The key to a blog isn’t just about writing things, but having it scoped to a particular topic (find a voice they say). Which is something I haven’t done well. You need to find a topic so you can build an audience. I need to work on that.

 

Twitter

I think one of the features of Facebook that everyone really honed in on is the status update. Short action statements about what your doing. The fact that all status messages start with “Steve is” and they give you a little text box forced people into having tiny quick updates. That’s basically what twitter does. You follow friends, post your own updates, they follow you. quick and easy. I can update from my phone (via text message or mobile browser), a web page or any of the plethora of apps that have been written using their open API.

I really like twitter because I’m able to capture and share what i’m doing, how i’m feeling quickly. I can go back and look at my “tweets” and really get a sense for how my days/weeks/months have been. So its sort of a nice way of keeping a journal or log of what’s going on without any real reflection.

Likewise its a great way to keep up to date with others. Its nice because it speeds up conversations and interactions with others when talking over other mediums. Instead of asking someone how their day was, i can see that they tweeted about being something and ask them about it. For example, a tweet of “stressed because of all the work I have to do”, I can ask them if they need any help or want a break.

www.twitter.com/geeksteve

 

Technorati Tags: twitter,facebook,wordpress,social networks

Walk Score

http://www.walkscore.com/

Came across this site last night. Normally I’d just post a link to a site to my tumblr page, but this one seemed extra cool to me. Probably because I’m looking for a place in DC, so walking distance really matters, but I’m not a doctor.

Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Check out how Walk Score doesn’t work.

I tried it out a for a few addresses (my house, my old work, my current work, the White House) and it seems to do a pretty solid job.

Highly recommend bookmaking it (using del.icio.us if you’re into that). I did.

Technorati Tags: maps,walking,mashup,googlemaps

ISOs and Vista

Dealing with ISO images has also been kind of annoying. Ever since switching to Vista a year and a half ago (at least, when was Beta 2?) , finding something to burn ISO images to CD/DVD in Vista hasn’t really been easy. I had always kept an XP computer around just to mess with ISOs. With the following 2 utilities, I think I can finally get repurpose extra my XP computer.

I came across this free utility/program that will burn ISO images.
It works on vista, so for those of us who don’t have Nero (and don’t want Roxio), it looks pretty good (although I haven’t done a burn yet)
http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

If you just want to get at the files in the ISO (and not waste the media to do it), I found MagicISO – Magic Disk. http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm. MagicDisk is free from MagicISO. They also make a payfor version that allows you to make/edit/burn ISO images.

MagicDisk lets you mount ISOs to a virtual CD as if there was a physical CD in the drive (like Dameon Tools). MagicDisk also lets you explode the contents of an ISO right to a folder (saves you the time of mounting it and then doing a copy/paste).

FolderShare (beta)

FolderShare

I love this utility. I’ve been using it for about 6months now and its one of those things I just love having installed. Getting files moved from computer to computer is ridiculously easy. In fact, last month I used it as a makeshift way to copy some files from my future sister-in-law’s old mac to her new one. A little more typically I used it for the following things

• Keeping my media files in sync. It was always annoying to rip a cd or copy a bunch of pictures at home or work and then not have it on my other computers.
• Keep documents in sync. This was especially useful with my laptop. I would use FolderShare to keep My Documents in sync. This allow me to have
• Keep a backup of files on computers physically in a different location. Although I wouldn’t really lose any money if I lost my mp3s, pictures, or documents, i’d be pretty ticked. Having my laptop automatically backed up to a computer (or multiple computers) reduced fears of losing data because of theft, dropping or accidental liquids spillage.

Although Foldershare has been around for quite awhile, Microsoft bought them awhile back and this beta is their first attempt at integrating into the Live namespace. On the surface it looks like pretty much all the work has been on polishing up the UI (which was definitely needed, but hey, with rock solid tech the UI can suffer a little). So far, I like the new interface and I’m looking forward to seeing the feature improvements. I shouldn’t say there hasn’t been any additional features, as I think Microsoft expanded on the ability get at files on a computer that you’re not currently sharing (provided the computer is on). I never really used this feature much since I had already created shares for the stuff I cared about. But its is nice to know that you could get at any file on the hard drive from your remote location. (If my computer back in MI was still on and hooked to the Internet I could have snagged my Microsoft Money data file and saved myself a day worth of work recovering from a 6month old backup file.) If the ability to get any file wasn’t slick enough, FolderShare also hooks into the Windows Desktop Search engine so you could do a search for a file and then download it, all via the FolderShare web site. This functionality was in the old client, so its nothing really new.

An additional feature that I used very briefly was the ability to create shared folders with different people. You can grant them the abiltiy to just get a copy (read-only) or be a full sync partner. There wasn’t much i needed to share on an on-going basis, so i didn’t use it much. I see there being a lot of potential with students who want a better way to collaborate on group project stuff. Of course, anything is an improvement on the current practice of sending every minute updated file via email. Another way this could be used (that just occurred to me) is you could use it to create a little publisher/subscription service for family members. Instead of posting pictures up to a photo site like Flickr, you could just dump everything into a folder that is shared out. And then have family members (like my parents) subscribe to the share (read only of course) and have an up-to-date copy of my photos. The only constraint there is the limit on the free service is 10,000 items per share.

Technorati Tags: foldershare,utilities

In short, if you have more than one computer or want to share stuff, get this utility.

Nokia Concept Phone – The Morph

Nokia Concept Phone – The Morph

This looks quite fun!

Sure its all market and idealism wrapped up in a nice package, but this phone is the type of thing that according to Back to the Future I should totally have. If they can’t make me a flying car, then they should make these. I’ve seen similar things concepts with translucent paper that you can roll up, but this is way cooler.

Sure this looks neat, but checkout the full video to see what they really hope it to be able to do. Way more than just a semi-circle shaped phone. Not sure why but part of its morphing ability reminds me of those stupid slap bracelets from the 80s, but this would actually serve a purpose (other than obviously looking cool)

Even if they can’t make it all, the ability have it solar charge is pretty nice. Specially since they indicate the same skin could be placed on all sorts of things (like buildings). In the meantime I’m just hoping to see more devices come with built-in support for electromagnetic charging, like this one.

Technorati Tags: Technorati Tags: mobile,concept,gadget

Last.fm

http://www.last.fm/

Hardly new or anything, but I figured I’d do a little write up on it. Need to get some more techno-nerdy posts up here. So hey, why not.

I’ve been using last.fm for awhile now (although, I just installed it on my computer out here in DC).

last.fm is a music social network blended with a radio station. I originally found last.fm when I was looking for a way to automatically keep a list of songs I’m listening to on my facebook profile. After looking a little bit on what it would take to write a Windows Media Player (my player of choice, albeit I really didn’t evaluate many alternatives).   You create an account with last.fm and then install their software. When you install the software it scans to see what players you have installed and then will install “Scrobbler” plugin for those players. The Scrobbler posts the songs you are listening to up to the last.fm site. You can then see the listing of songs you’re listening to. Here’s my profile: http://www.last.fm/user/geeksteve.  If you were really obsessive you can even subscribe to an RSS feed with of what i’m currently listening too. A little less on the stalker side of things you can add a widget to you site or blog. For my blog, I decided to go with publishing the list of Recently Listen Tracks.
(I’m not sure on how to get that info the widgets sidebar on wordpress yet though…)
EDIT: Seems wordpress.com for security won’t allow javascript, embed, or flash in posts. Although that means I can’t host the fun last.fm widget, I do like knowing that I won’t be causing any cross-site-scripting vunerabilities. Usibility comes at the price of security after all . Instead I’ve just hooked into the RSS feed using the wordpress supplied widget. Not as pretty, but it works.

On my facebook page (mainly because it never auto-refreshes), I chose to go with the Weekly Top Tracks. The facebook app is called What I’m Listening To and published out pretty much the same information that you get with the site/blog widget. The only downside (and I think this is a facebook performance imposed constraint) is that the copy on the profile isn’t updated. Every so often I go into the settings for the app and just click save to force a refresh on the profile.

Anyway, back to the last.fm app. Besides the ability to just keep a tally on what you’re listening to, it takes that information and allows you to

1. create a radio station with just the music you like.
2. find people who are into the same type of music you are into
3. notify you when artist you like are having a show/event/gig near you

the last big feature (probably the biggest) is that you can stream music from their player/app. Back in MI (because I didn’t have a lot of ripped music on my computer) I was using it pretty extensively. I would just enter in “emo” or “alternative” and bingo-bango I was set with hours and hours of music I like.

If you have a Windows Mobile device and a Last.fm profile, you can grab the software from the Last.fm Mobile Forum or download a version direct from here:

Last.fm Mobile for Pocket PC (v1.4)
Last.fm Mobile for Smartphone (v1.1)

(Sadly, I have a crackberry now, so I can’t enjoy said app)

Sidenote:

I think that’ll do for a post. I’m trying to stick with my 1 post minium a week. Its been tough. But then again, would I have really needed to make a goal if it wasn’t going to be a challenge?