Tag: Technology

Several years ago, I wrote about how librarians will become experts in web searching. While I still believe that this is true, there is no reason that everyone can’t become masters at getting good search results. Lately, I’ve noticed that the ability of people to effectively search using a search engine (my engine of choice is Google) is quite limited and if people learned how to search better, it would really help them.

Anyone can enter words into a search engine, it takes some skill to figure out which words are going to produce the best results in the shortest amount of time, hence “the art of Googling”. If you enter too few words or too many words, the results will either be non-existent or provide too many that the results are useless. Even if you enter the right number of words, you have to know which words will get good results.

I seem to have a knack for searching as I can get results quite quickly. Maybe there should be a high school or college class in searching. If more people could search by themselves, us tech savvy people would have to answer far fewer questions that we consider below our pay grade!

My wife and I have started watching 24 on Netflix and have become quite addicted to it. Since we’re behind the times, we don’t have to wait a week between each episode, instead we can blow through 2 or 3 episodes a night.

The technology in the show is kind of humorous as they’ve been using Palm OS based devices, at least in the early episodes. So far I’ve seen the Samsung SPH-I300 as well a Handspring Visor. I even caught a glimpse of SplashPhoto on the Visor!

This brings back memories of all the technology I thought was so cool way back when. Comparing it to today, it seems so primitive. If you look at the first Palm OS based smartphones, the way they handled data was quite primitive. Basically they “dialed” a special number (00 in many cases) to trigger the packet data connection. This, of course, prevented voice calls during the time. Then using the stylus seems so crude. Let’s not forget the displays; today’s devices have full color, awesome looking displays. The displays way back when were grayscale screens that were not pleasant on the eyes. The devices were not very robust and resetting the devices was a common occurrence; I got rid of my Treo on Sprint when the battery died because the device crashed and I hadn’t noticed it.

I can’t wait to keep watching to see what other tech memories come back!

The other day I had lunch with some friends and one mentioned that he was reducing his monthly bills by dropping cable, installing solar and switching his home phone to Ooma. He had Ooma for 6 months and was quite pleased with it. I had tried Ooma about 1.5 years ago and written about it; unfortunately my experience back then wasn’t as positive. I decided to give it another try as the potential to save money is huge. In the last few years, my phone bill has gradually risen while the features have gone down (I had lots of features with Qwest over a decade ago including a blacklist, then with MCI I had voicemail that forwarded to email. Now I don’t even have voicemail as there is an extra charge for it.)

This time I just plugged the Ooma into the back of my Time Capsule (it had an open port) and forwarded my home phone to the Ooma number for testing. So far through a few calls, there have been no complaints. I’ll give it a few weeks and I’m crossing my fingers. Even if I stick with Ooma Premier ($120/yr + $3.50/month for taxes), the cost recovery (including number porting and getting a Telo handset) is about 7 months and then I’ll save about $50/month. My regular phone bill will just keep going up, so this may be the only way to keep a home phone without paying through the nose.

I’m crossing my fingers that this pans out!

Today I got notification that I missed a call coming through my Google Voice account. I checked Google Voice and everything was setup correctly; I had also noticed that the Google Voice app on my iPhone didn’t notify me of an SMS that I received the other day which was strange.

Thinking that things may have broken after I ported my cell number to AT&T last month, I deleted my cell number from Google Voice and added it back. While I shouldn’t have been surprised, I was when that simply fix made the forwarding work again and notifications started working again in the Google Voice app.

So, if you have trouble with Google Voice, delete the forwarding number(s) and re-add them.

Just over a year ago, right after I quit my job, I bought an iPhone 3GS off Craigslist for development. I was going to be working on a project that did barcode scanning, so the iPhone simulator wouldn’t cut it. I had a feeling that a new iPhone was coming out, but it was either work a month and earn money or save the $325 and make excuses to why I couldn’t test the app; the choice was pretty easy. When the iPhone 4 came out, I bought one and kept my iPhone 3GS running iOS 3.1.3 for a testing device.

I made the mistake of letting my son (3 years old at the time) play with it and he quickly learned to use it to play music, see pictures, take pictures, and check the weather. He now calls it “his” iPhone and loves to listen to music on it (yes, I did set the volume limiter and selected appropriate music for him). The phone is amazingly durable and my son now listens to it with headphones when we’re in the car which is a huge improvement from us having to listen to his music on the stereo!

At least I didn’t actually lose my iPhone, but I doubt I’ll be able to get it back from my son anytime soon!

Today my father was playing with FaceTime and couldn’t reach me which was odd as my phone was on and had WiFi access. My dad had tried earlier using my email address as well and when I looked at my iPad later, I saw a missed call, but it should have rang on my desktop. The number on my iPad was the number that my dad’s phone was initially given before he ported his phone number.

Ahh, a bell went off and after a bit of searching, I came across an Apple Support Article about this particular problem after porting. After reading this, it dawned on me why I couldn’t FaceTime from my desktop to my iPhone; I had ported my phone number to AT&T a few weeks ago (I was just forwarding it from Sprint since I got my phone last year). The quick fix was to turn off FaceTime and turn it back on again to get it to re-register with Apple’s servers. My dad did the same thing and presto, FaceTime worked.

However, I also forgot to setup FaceTime on the desktop with my primary email address (my Apple ID is not my primary email address). A trip to the FaceTime preferences on the desktop fixed that issue as well.

So, if FaceTime isn’t working, check preferences and turn it off then on again and it should work again.

As you can probably tell, I don’t use FaceTime much!

For WWDC, I’ve been staying at the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco as it is close to Moscone West where the conference is being held. While the conference has WiFi throughout, having access in my hotel room is needed so that I can keep up with work before and after each conference day. Unfortunately with the hotel filled with geeks, the Internet connection goes from bad to worse at times. I’ve managed to sort of carry on a video chat with my wife twice, but that was when no one was around. The hotel apparently charges $60 for the week (the front desk said it was complimentary when I checked in) which is more than the full monthly bill for my home cable modem connection. My experience isn’t unique; my co-workers in the W hotel down the street have been experiencing the same problems. As compensation for the poor experience (after tweeting about it), one co-worker received a cheese plate. Personally I’d rather have a working connection than a cheese plate!

I can understand that WWDC occurs just once a year and the hotel has no interest in paying for excess bandwidth the entire year for the one week there are a bunch of geeks in the hotel. While the room has been fine, the quality of the Internet connection may be the deciding factor for people choosing a hotel.

I feel quite frustrated trying to do work with the slow access which is causing me basically to do nothing; it’s a good thing that I’m at a slow point in my project.

I’ve decided to give Spaces another try. Combined with BetterTouchTool, I can now switch spaces with a swipe of my trackpad. I’ve tried Spaces in the past, but really got annoyed when I had problems dragging between workspaces. I think one of the problems is that I had the Finder in a particular space instead of all spaces. We’ll see how long this experiment lasts; sometimes I consider myself an old dog that can’t learn new tricks! I’ve been using my computer in the same way for so long that even if something is going to make my life easier, I resist it!

Back when I worked at a large company (before my current job), there wasn’t a huge issue using a Mac except for some tasks like version control as this was a time before the browser wars. Now over 10 years later, I sometimes feel like an outsider using my Mac.

For the most part, I’m isolated from a lot of the infrastructure as I’m remote and am pretty self sufficient. I do, however, use Microsoft Outlook on the Mac as it works nicely with our Exchange server and the Mac’s built in support, despite what Apple says, is pretty poor. For instance, if I change my password, I only have to change it once in Outlook; with Mail, iCal and Address Book, I have to change it a total of 3 times. Also, scheduling is much easier with Outlook as I can look up people’s availability quickly.

Many things make it hard to work in this environment and frustrate me. It starts with the ancient logins that prefix my user name with a domain (you’d think that someone could fix the system such that the domain isn’t used since everyone in the company uses the same domain), to the sites that say “For best results use IE”, to the sites that don’t even work in Safari. Also with the single sign on that many companies employ today, you’d think you could login once and be authenticated across the board until being signed out; unfortunately I think single sign on means that you have the same username across the board, but still have to enter it a dozen times. Internet Explorer may handle single sign on better.

Today my frustration was trying to watch a webcast; I clicked the link that said “Mac users click here”, but it failed to work and running Windows under Fusion didn’t help either. Looking back, the issue may have been connecting via the VPN, but I had watched a webcast in the past. If we were using the HTTP streaming standard, this would not have been an issue due to HTTP working well over a VPN, but someone chose a “standard” that is very Windows centric and only has limited Mac support.

I’m not advocating that the company switch to all Macs or even Mac servers (I wouldn’t wish a Mac server on anyone), but making systems work across not just platforms, but browsers would give people a choice. There are basically 3 choices of browsers on each platform, Safari or Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox. Why not give employees a choice and make it easy to use any one of these? Yeah, yeah I know the answer; supporting one browser is the easiest for IT support as most users aren’t as technically savvy as I.

Luckily, I only have to deal with these Windows centric systems every once in awhile. Every time I do have to use the systems, I’m reminded how far we’ve come with technology in some ways, but how stuck in the past we are in other ways. I guess I should be happy I don’t work for the federal government where I suspect that they still use DOS in various agencies.