So I got an iPhone. Wonderful device. I'm a converted Blackberry user. Love the wifi connectivity, love the 3G. No issues with battery life as I'm by my laptop 75% of the time anyway and keep it charging. App store rocks. Bringing only one device to the gym rocks. The three things that bug me about it though are:

-Inbox. Let's see. I have  4 email accounts, Facebook, App Store Updates, Voicemail. Why do I need to go to 7 different places to check these messages? Let me have one inbox where I can see *all* my messages. 

-Background apps. Every other OS has this. Including the Blackberry. Why can't I let my IM (Palringo), Facebook and Twitter apps run in the background and notify me of events?

-Alerts. On my Blackberry, I had the ability to set specific contacts to vibrate/loud ringtone. I can't do this with the iPhone, meaning that in order for me to get alerts, I have to have the phone on semi-loud volume all night to wake me up in case something needs my attention. Don't get me wrong. I can set a ringtone for a contact, I know that, but I can't set an iPhone contact to vibrate.

UI used to be your strength, Apple. This is pretty basic stuff. What happened?

Changed the name of the blog because Twitter is really starting to frustrate me with all their downtime. "Simple Good. Complex Bad." is the new name. It's from an old IBM ad campaign back in the Internet boom days of the 90's and I use that term at least once a week.

We will beat them Russians like it's the year 1700! (Sweden plays Russia today in Euro 2008)

 

 

So I set this up the other day for fun. Basically, a new Twitter account, searched for people in Dallas, TX that had recently twittered, and added them to the Twitter account. Boom. Shows everyone in Dallas that's Twittering and what's going on, including weather and sports. It was pretty interesting, until today when Alex (amuse) twittered about it.

Suddenly IMs were popping up left and right with people who wanted to be followed, emails coming in with people following the account and web site traffic shooting through the roof. Now it's getting *really* interesting.

Looks like everyone is getting hyped about Lost right now, so I'm going to avoid the page while my DVR records the first hour so I can skip through the commercials. :)

 

 

 

Outlook 2007 on a Windows XP Box. Upgrade from Office 2003 to 2007. Rarely, when sending email, the message:

"The messaging interface has returned an unknown error. It the problem persists, restart Outlook."

would show up when sending email. After the upgrade, it happened all the time. (I should probably preface all this with the fact that it wasn't *my* machine and I was troubleshooting it using Fog Creek's Co-Pilot service). The user could not send email. Every time when clicking "Send" that message would show up. Even after restarting Outlook. Went through all the typical troubleshooting steps:

-Reboot (duh)
-Disable Add-ins (Linkedin, Google Desktop Search, Norton, etc)
-Created new mail profile & new .pst
-Disabled desktop firewall
-Disabled anti-spam software
-Paused Google Index
-Switched to use SMTP on port 25 instead of SMTP over SSL
-Archived old data

None of it worked. Google or Microsoft support wasn't much help, simply because the error message is too general and applies to many different problems. 

The solution?

-Empty the Deleted Items Folder

I kid you not.

3-4 hours of troubleshooting and searching for answers and that was it. There must have been a corrupted file in there or something.

I hope someone finds this post and that it saves them the time. 

I need a beer.

 

Today, I was reluctantly tasked with upgrading my 4-week old laptop to Office 2007 Enterprise Edition. My brand new HP laptop has Vista on it. After un-installing Groove and starting the install, the following error message pops up:

"Upgrade to the latest retail version of Windows Vista - The Problem was caused by Windows Vista, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. You are running a beta version of Windows Vista, which is no longer supported by Microsoft Corporation" 

The cost of gas is increasing on this side of the pond. Let's put this in perspective.

Cost of gas in Dallas, TX today: $3.12 per gallon
Cost of gas in Stockholm, Sweden today: 12.24 SEK per liter
1 dollar = 6.0 SEK

Let's make it simple and just make it even, it's 12.24 SEK / 6.0 SEK = $2 so:

Cost of gas in Dallas, TX today: $3.12 per gallon
Cost of gas in Stockholm, Sweden today: $2 SEK per liter  

1 gallon = 3.79 liters. So that means $2 * 3.79 gallons = $7.58. I.e.

Cost of gas in Dallas, TX today: $3.12 per gallon
Cost of gas in Stockholm, Sweden today: $7.58 SEK per gallon

Let's stop whining, shall we?

 

 

I've been checking up on Mosso lately. (Cloud Computing by Rackspace). $100 + $10 per domain moved over. Very impressive and I'm very tempted to move my personal sites there in order to test it out. They're getting some very good reviews. Then again, I currently pay ~$60 per quarter to host my two domains over at Discountasp.net so I'm probably not the target market quite yet. If anybody wants to pay me to get a a couple of web sites designed and managed by me, let me know. :)

(Disclaimer: I don't recommend having a web site designed and managed by me, it's been forever since I actually designed a web site on my own. Not to mention the time required, which is sadly lacking. There are other people out there that are much better than I am at this.)

I'm a sucker for new tech though, so maybe I'll make the jump anyway.

Looks like a perfect solution for web designers, web production companies or anyone that doesn't want to deal with joy of figuring out how to scale. Sarcasm intended. I'll be looking for more reviews and crunch some numbers to see if it makes sense at some point to make the move professionally. Once they start supporting Tomcat, that is.

 

(or: Life with a 13-month old)

• "Don't put your shoes in the dishwasher"
• "Please don't take out all my socks from the drawer and throw them around the room"
• "Try not to chew on the grocery cart"
• "Don't drink the water from the dog bowl"
• "I need to change my shirt, this one is covered in snot" 

Retro Post: How to *not* get hired 101. I originally posted this on GWJ Jan 23d, 2007

1. Apply for a position that asks for experience and you have no experience whatsoever. Case in point:

Me: Do you have any experience with web applications?
Candidate: What are web applications?
Me: Ok then...I'm going to keep your resume on file, we'll call you if we need you. Really, I will. Promise. Click.

2. Agree to a phone interview on a specific time, then don't answer the phone when I call. Then call back two hours later saying you had a lot on your mind, wondering if we can reschedule. No, we can't.

3. Don't spell check your resume. (It is amazing to me how many people make this mistake. 20% of applicants at least). If you can't spell *with* a spell checker, I am going to assume that you are not very intelligent. I know you have one, because you submitted your resume as a MS Word document.

4. Don't send in your resume from an email address that tells me how much you enjoy a certain type of liquor. A lot.

5. Don't lie to me and say you'll pass a background check when you won't. Much better to be up front about what happened in the past so I can make a decision and let you know if we can move forward.

6. When you get to the in-person interview in the office, don't whine about it taking 2 hours to get there. (Also, when asked why, and you answer that you don't have a car because of #5 above, it's going to be a really short interview.)

I'm sure I'll have more shortly. Anyone else have horror stories like this? I sometimes wish I could have candidates go through an IQ test before I have to talk to them.