Tag: Technology

I’ve been dealing with email for about 20 years now and the amount of email that I (and everyone) receive has increased over that time. In addition, the email has become more and more important. It’s no longer forwarding of jokes, continuing chain letters, or just quick “hello” messages, it is absolutely vital to businesses these days.

Unfortunately people are having a hard time dealing with the deluge of email they receive. For many, every email is extremely important and when you receive 100+ email messages a day, your entire day is spent dealing with email. So some people simply just don’t read or respond to email. This, of course, creates a problem for others that rely on replies. In extreme cases, I’ve heard of people that go on vacation and when they return, send out a message saying that they deleted all their email (on purpose) and to resend anything that is important.

I’m probably in the minority in that I handle a large amount of email everyday with very little effort. My strategy for dealing with email is quite simple. I go with the inbox zero principle in that every message that I haven’t dealt with stays in the Inbox and I try to clear it everyday. Next, I skim subjects and to/cc recipients. If the message is unimportant, like out of the office or “free tomatoes”, it immediately goes in the trash. If I’m in the to/cc line, I spend a few extra minutes on the message and see if I need to act on it. If I do, I try to act on it quickly so that I don’t forget about it. If I’m not in the to/cc line, I see if the subject is something I need and then skim the first part of the message (I’m also a fan of “top quoting” where the most recent part of a message is at the top of the message). I’ll act on it, if necessary and then move on.

I also deal with email throughout the day so that it doesn’t pile up. It also doesn’t hurt that I have very good time management skills and can handle a large amount of data at a time.

Maybe I should hone my skills a bit and start teaching classes “how to deal with email quickly and effectively”.

We don’t go out to dinner all that often and when we do, we visit the same places. When we want to look for some place new, we do online searches or use sites like Yelp! Unfortunately, it seems that the results I get are not all that helpful. My wife asked me what kind of food I’d like for our anniversary dinner next week and I said Cuban food. I did a search on Google and came up with:

While I’d like to think that this is a fluke, I tried the search again today and got the same result. I’m not sure why I have so many problems looking for restaurants. Maybe all the tools out there are lacking complete, up to date, and honest information. Maybe that’s a new business, but I’m not sure how to promote it to consumers that the data is better than everything else.

When I was in college, I thought it was cool to have multiple email addresses; at a time when most people didn’t have 1 address, I had at least two, so I put them in my email signature, along with my website and phone number.

These days, people have Facebook pages, LinkedIn page, Twitter address, blog, Flicker account, Google+, Skype, Email, etc. Up until today, I had never seen anyone list all these “contact” methods. Is it really necessary for anyone to list these? These days, I think if someone wants to contact you, they can find you without you explicitly telling them.

I use a work email address, a personal email address, and this blog. I’m a pretty easy person to find (it doesn’t hurt that I have my own domain and my last unique isn’t all that common).

When I first signed up for AT&T, I wrote that rollover minutes were pretty much a joke. I kept racking up rollover minutes and never used them until last month. I use my cell phone for work and last month I had to be in a ton of conference calls and managed to use up basically all of my rollover minutes! With my anytime minutes, rollover minutes, and then putting the final calls of the month on Ooma, I was on the phone for something like 2200 minutes. That is basically a complete work week on the phone!

The rollover minutes saved me from upgrading my plan for 1 month; as the conference calls are probably going to continue, my 450 minute plan just isn’t going to cut it any more. So while I initially thought it was a gimmick, it ended up having some value to me. Now that I’m on a 900 minute plan with A-List (which I found out is being discontinued and if I switch to a family plan, I may lose it), I’m going to start accumulating rollover minutes again! For those that don’t know, A-List is 5 (or 10 for family plans) numbers that you call frequently and don’t use your minutes. I put the conference call numbers on my A-List, so my usage will drop to virtually nothing again.

With my cordless phones failing, I was on the hunt for a new set of phones. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I got the Panasonic KX-TG7624 4 handset set. The main feature I wanted was the ability to set a different ringtone per caller. The old Uniden set we have (about 8 years old) did this and worked well. We have a bunch of ringers to choose from and we can set them on a per phonebook entry basis. This new Panasonic said Ringer ID was a feature.

After 45 minutes of playing with the set and reading the manual, I figured out that the Ringer ID was not as full featured as what I already had. The ringer tones are limited to 3 groups, each with 1 ringer per group. The groups were named Home, Cell 1 and Cell 2. This was less than helpful. The phone has the ability to link cell phones to it which is something that I not only didn’t need, it made the phone far too confusing to figure out.

Once I realized that it didn’t really have the 1 feature I wanted, I immediately boxed up the phones and will return them to Costco tomorrow. I felt like a moron trying to set up the phones; I have a degree in engineering and setting up these phones became an exercise in frustration.

Do all these extra features really help? Do people really want more features that they can’t figure out how to use?

Anyone that works in a company that accepts credit cards has to deal with periodic password changing as well as a few other issues dealing with passwords. This is due to PCI Data Security Standard, a document that specifies how companies handle security for credit cards and related information. For instance, your password has to be a certain length, have certain characters in it, must be changed at certain intervals, and your account must be locked after so many failed attempts.

The last one is the one that got me the last time I changed my password. While I can remember my password, I have a number services/devices that automatically check for mail. I have my iPhone and my iPad both connected to my work account, as well as Outlook. This basically creates 7 connections (3 each for the iOS devices) and if my limit is less than 7, I get locked out almost immediately. So here’s my process:

1. On iPhone, go into Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Set Mail, Contacts and Calendars to Off for my work account.
2. On iPad, go into Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Set Mail, Contacts and Calendars to Off for my work account.
3. Quit Outlook on my Mac.
4. Open Keychain Access. Search for all work saved logins. Delete them.
5. Login to VPN.
6. Change password. (If you’re locked out, call someone to fix it.)
7. Close Browser.
8. Launch Outlook. Enter password.
9. Launch Browser. Login to corporate site. Tell Safari to remember password.
10. Carefully change password on iPhone. Re-enable Mail, Contacts and Calendars.
11. Carefully change password on iPad. Re-enable Mail, Contacts and Calendars.

Back in April when there was a lot of talk about Mac OS X Lion coming out and it not supporting Rosetta. As I relied on Quicken for my accounting and have been using it for almost 20 years, I decided to start looking for a replacement sooner rather than being forced to make a decision when Lion came out. Intuit was pretty quiet about what was happening with Quicken and considering the last real Quicken version was Quicken 2007 (Quicken Essentials could only give me a snapshot of my investments and not track them), I didn’t have high hopes for an Intel native version of Quicken coming out for Lion.

So I looked at all the options and settled on iBank 4. The interface was pretty and pretty much imported my 20 years of Quicken data. I’ve been told that there are former Quicken people working on iBank, so that gave me a little more reassurance that they know what they’re doing. There are a number of things to get used to in iBank, but that’s expected as I can’t unlearn something after 20 years!

Now that I’m fully in Lion mode, I had to bid a fond careful to my old friend, Quicken. Quicken helped me budget my way through college, track all my expenses, keep my accounts balanced and reconciled, and gave me a good picture of where I stand financially. However, it is time to move on and for all the other ex-Quicken or soon to be ex-Quicken users, make the leap now to something else as it will make going to Lion much easier.

Have you tried to edit video in iMovie on the iPad and found your video doesn’t appear?

Do you want to take just your iPad on vacation, shoot videos with your compact digital camera and edit a video before you return home without a desktop computer?

If you answered yes to either question, then do I have an app for you.

If you have an iPad 2, iMovie for iOS, a compact digital camera such as the Sony DSC-WX9 and some time to test an app, let me know. I’ll need your devices UDID and I can sign you up!