Kencasting Media

Twhirl just released an amazing update, it’s now the best twitter client I’ve used. But, nothing’s perfect. Here are some features I’d like (some of which Twitterific, the 2nd best client I’ve used, has). I never did this for another twitter client, it’s just that Twhirl is so good, I want it to get better (for me, of course :-).

I’m just writing this to remind myself what I’d like to see, and after they get their legs after integrating with Seesmic, figured I’d actually submit it as a suggestion to them.

- Let me use the arrow keys to move up and down the list of tweets.

- Open URL’s in a new tab, not a new window, or give me the option

- Integrate with Growl

- If you don’t/can’t integrate with Growl, let me choose what kind of messages I get notification windows on, and the ability to make them sticky (I still run Twitterific just so I can get sticky notifications on replies and direct messages)

- LOVE the followers pane. To make it more useful, show me if I’m following the follower, and let me block them too. Love seeing them all in one big list, great I can follow them, but would like to know if I AM following them first!

- Customizable keyboard shortcuts, all my function keys are already all used on my Mac, and one key shortcuts that only work if there isn’t a text entry window mean the usage changes depending on app “state”, which confused me.

- Want an easier way to “go back”. If I intentionally (or unintentionally) click on someone, I have to remember the keyboard shortcut, or navigate the “what pane I want” menu. How about an easy way to go “back?” (or maybe just a really easy way to go to timeline). Hoping for something like I can do on my iPhone clients. Again, all my function keys are being used already.

OK, I think that’s it after a full day of use. I’m giddy about the integration of URL shrinking (I use tinyurl, but maybe it doesn’t have an API?), twitter lookup, search, all in one tool? And, posting to Jaiku and Pownce simultaneously? Great work Marco!

I’m having an interesting conundrum right now. With my new (and very exciting) job at Sun, I’ve got a wide breadth of projects/technologies to be aware of and make strategic decisions on, people inside and outside the company to interact with, and background information to absorb so I can make informed decisions. I’m an email junkie, have been for a very long time. And, with my recent surgery, I’m stuck at home, not very mobile, while my Achilles tendon reattaches itself to it’s new home on my heal.

So, I need non-face to face communications methods, and email was my “go to” way of doing that. But, now it’s killing me. I now get over 1500 messages a week in my various accounts, that’s 200 a day (but much of it happens weekdays). I can keep up, but at what cost? I also have to read the content of many of the messages, schedule meetings to either be briefed on progress/issues, or make specific decisions. Now, I know others who get far more email than this, and I bow to their superior data handling skills, but I’m now finding I spend probably 4 hours a day reading, categorizing, flagging and responding to email, then another hour or two reviewing information in the mail I flagged (like a document or presentation). OK, I’m now up to 5-6 hours out of my day, and I’ve never actually seen or talked to anyone in person, and likely not made a significant impact in any of the areas I should be.

This is in the forefront of my thoughts now, since I’m supposed to be spending a lot of my time resting, maybe reading a book (I’ve even got a book to read for work :-), and my first week of recovery I found myself spending any time not sleeping, working. 1/2 on email 1/2 on meetings, while on painkillers that made me a little less patient than I usually am. My doctor was not very happy, nor was my admin, and my lovely wife just sighed knowingly. And they were all right. And, it was my own fault, I was creating my own email dungeon.

Then, what brought this home, in terms of the last straw, the point that told me I needed to fix my own problem I’d created. I was watching a recent version of Webb Alert with Morgan Webb. The part that perked my ears was her highlighting an Engadget article about a Motorola insider telling all about the fall. A little rant here, I’ve worked for a bunch of companies, it’s pretty easy to find hundreds or thousands of ways a company is “in trouble,” and then if it dies, they all look like an obvious roadmap for failure, but if the company succeed, they look like nothing at all. Hindsight is not a method of trying to make things better, it’s just an attempt pointing at problems, now that you know the result. So, how about people who spend their energy working with a company (and let’s be clear, if you work AT a company, you should either change your mindset, or find a company you can work WITH, and go there), doing all they can to make it successful, and if it fails, then they take your own personal responsibility for that, rather than blaming others, or saying “it was obvious, why didn’t anyone else see it”? OK, rant off.

Anywho, the article specifically mentioned Motorola’s CEO, Greg Brown, being “technically out of touch” because he had his secretary print out his email, and then dictate his responses. My first response wasn’t “gee, that guy is out of touch,” but rather, it sounded like he had an inbox so full he couldn’t manage it! His solution, to have someone on his staff scan his email for the messages that needed his personal attention, print them for easy access (one can safely assume a CEO’s time is in high demand, and they’re on the go all the time) and that way he could read them without having to cart around a laptop, make notes, then likely using a PHONE, have someone compose replies to the important ones. That then reminded me of Tim Ferriss, who’d outsourced his email reading and responding. Hey, wait, is Tim Ferriss, celebrated author of the “4 hour workweek,” technically out of touch? No, he’s touted as being a young, passionate visionary (and he is a very bright, very balanced guy, I like his work). He’s also found that summarizing email in a form other than, um, email, often makes it more digestible. He has his email summarized and read to him. Humm. Email, summarized and dictated. Maybe Greg read Tim’s book, or had it summarized by his staff into action items!

This then made me remember, I kinda liked the general idea Tim had for having someone else “think like him,” pay them to filter through the morass of email, finding the important ones and saving himself hours a day. Also, I’ve been a fan of David Allen’s “how to get things done”, and brutal focused email methodologies. Both have some great ideas for increasing productivity, by spending time on the important things, and filtering out the things that aren’t important. Keeping up the discipline is always a challenge though, especially when the load increases past what your process had previously handled. And, I’d used some of these for a while, then slacked off, fearing I was missing something important. Oops.

So, today as I sat here catching up on the weeks emails, flagging the ones I’d get to tomorrow, I’m re-thinking email as my primary deferred communications medium. The more you send, the more you get, and I send a lot, so I’m creating my own time-sucking environment. So, I’m now creating my “recovery filters,” pretty stringent filters for going through the important email only, and leaving the rest. And, I’m going to work on getting, and sending, muti-purpose messages. Ones that summarize person-to-person communication, rather than task-based communication. Fewer messages, more content per message. That’s how one-on-one meetings go, maybe that’d be a better way of organizing my email communication. It’ll be a challenge figuring out how to keep track of replies to a series of separate questions, so I’ll work on that first.

No great insights yet, I’m sure I’ll use a combination of the many “mail filtering” tools I’ve always used, but with more vigor. I’ll report back how this goes. I’m also going to try something challenging for an email addict, I’m gonna start by doing 4 email readings a day, and I’ll enforce it by closing my email client inbetween, and having a calendar appointment remind me when I should read it, thus removing it from my internal “todo list” and having that reminder happen externally, so I can just forget about it, I’ll be reminded when it’s OK to check again. But, it’s OK, I’ve got FriendFeed to keep me tapped in to everything happening on Twitter, and what all my contacts are doing, so I’m not going cold turkey!

This is not a Michael Moore Sicko story…

I’d been having progressively worse problems with my feet over the past years. Went through two podiatrists, the last of which had figured out my Achillies tendons over the years had pulled out the bone where it connects, either from being too short when I was a kid, or any other number of various reasons. He was reluctant to do any surgical fixes, but that religated me to less and less activity. If I did too much, especially hiking uphill and the like, in a day or two, I’d be in exruciating pain, and have to keep my foot up, and in an immobilizing boot.

I finally had just had enough of this, and through a good friend, found an excellent medical group, SOAR. The podiatrist there was excellent, and in fact I later found my general physician, as well as another buddy who’s a doctor, both knew him by his very good reputation.

A couple MRI’s later, and telling him I wanted to be able to hike, and bike, and do things I used to do, we came up with a plan. I have a different problem with each foot, but the tendon in my right foot was the one that I constantly had some pain with.

So, yesterday, I had surgery to get things working again. We had to re-attach my tendon, since it was fraying. That meant removing the tendon, grinding down the bone, removing the bursa, and re-attaching the tendon to a pin in my heal. Recovery is the hard part here, 3+ weeks of a non-weight bearing dressing/cast, then 3-5 weeks of a walking cast, then physical therapy. But, in the end, it’ll be worth it. Then, after this foot is done, well, I have a torn tendon on the other foot, and quite possibly the same problem with the Achillies on my heel there.

Now, with all that description out of the way, my experience with these doctors, and all the support staff has been beyond anything I’ve experienced before. From the fact that everyone either reads about me before they see me, or the first thing they do is ask my name, and then always refer to me by name, and introduce themselves. That one thing, that they all made an obvious effort to do, just impressed me to no end.

Then, every single person who was going to be involved in the surgery introduced themselves to me (again, making sure they knew my name). From the Jenn who had to shave my leg, to my OR nurse, who’s name I cannot now remember (I was sedated though, so I have that for an excuse). The anesthesiologist was great too, called me the night before, explained what would happen, then explained it again, warned me they’d have to draw blood to then extract the white blood cells, which they’d then re-inject to help  in healing, but that they might have to try a few places to get the vein, and if I woke up with “more holes than I fell asleep with”, not to worry, they weren’t just experimenting on me :-).

Oh, and cost-wise? Well, my doctor and the medical facility are covered as providers under my corporate Blue Cross. So, my MRI’s were reasonably priced, and cost me perhaps $100 a piece, and the doctor/hospital visit, for a multi-hour surgery was $380, my insurance covered the rest. The anesthesiologist’s bill is separate, so that’s still to come, but given my last foot surgery, some 12 years ago when I broke a bone, cost me on the neighborhood of $10,000 above “reasonable and customary”, this experience is proving to be both financially, and treatment-wise far and above better than anything I’ve experienced prior.

So, partly as an update for people who’ve asked what’s wrong with the feet, and what I was having done to fix it, wanted to describe that, as well as my very pleasant doctor and hospital experiences. With all the bad healthcare experiences, people don’t seem to share very good ones.

I’ve had DirecTV service since 1996. Its just worked ever since I got it, with a few very small exceptions. It’s like dialtone to me, I often just forget how reliable it is.

The very few times its stopped working, 3 times was DVR failure, and 2 glitches with access cards being unauthenticated. The DVR failures weren’t DirecTV’s fault, in all cases it was hard drive failure, fixed by a call to weaKnees for a disk upgrade.

Sometimes I think about that. Going on 12 years, and the signal has never gone out. I compare that the few times I’ve had cable. I know things are better all around these days, but I can’t think of another service I’ve had that has worked, day and night, for 12 years.

But, it’s not just the uninterrupted, always on service. When I’ve gotten a new box, and had to activate it, aside from the occasional 15 minute hold time, every time I’ve called DirecTV to activate, or rarely troubleshoot, or change programming, by the time I got off the phone, my problem was solved. OK, now that’s just unheard of. I also know I’m lucky in this regard, I’ve recounted this to others, and they haven’t had the same flawless experience. Some of that is related to the newer HD services, and the fact that they’re way more tempermental to cabling and signal loss than standard definition.

Recently, I got a new DirecTV DVR. I loved my TiVO’s. I have 3 of them, but the drive just died again on the oldest 1st generation box. Since it was painfully slow compared to the newer boxes, I decided to try the new DirecTV DVR. Well, long story short (for a change), 2 weeks later, it stopped working. First symptom, it couldn’t play recorded content, the screen just went black. OK, I tried that a few times, decided to restart it. That was the end of that, it wouldn’t reboot. Did a “checking the disk” screen, then said it couldn’t start up. So, I figured the disk died, the new business model for DirecTV DVR’s is sending you leased, remanufactured boxes, and this one probably was on it’s last leg.

I called support (and at 9pm I might add), expecting we’d go through the reset dance a bit, then find the box was dead, and swap it out. And, that’s just about exactly what happened. I got another good customer service representitive, and we started. Now, one thing about DirecTV’s phone support, these folks seem to mostly know their stuff. They’ve got their book/screen for “try step a, then step b”, but they seem to actually understand what they’re saying, and when they get a response they don’t expect, they almost always can look it up, or find another path. I don’t feel like I’m talking to someone who has no idea what they’re actually talking about.

We go through the standard resets, try disconnecting the satellite feed, a few different front-panel tricks. Nothing. Finally, he said “well, looks like we’re gonna have to swap out the box. But, there is one more thing to try, it’ll reformat the disk, and you’ll loose your information”, well I’d loose it anyway, so we tried it. Viola! The DVR was working again. I was sure it was toast, but the last resort worked. Yet again, off the phone with my problem resolved (although I would have considered a box swap as resolved too).

Just reflected on the far less than stellar customer support I’m coming to expect, and then having one service be so head and shoulders above the rest. I read a lot in the forums about less than satisfactory service from other vendors of TV programming, and that’s actually stopped me from signing up with anyone else, along with the much higher cost, after you factor out introductory and multiple services discounts. Now only if DirecTV was able to make a healthy profit!

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Just doing some work here, with the “holiday playlist” on. Thought I’d share my favorite albums from it. Links are to Amazon, who I have no relationship with other than being a frequent customer. Think I’ll go and put it up as my radio station on mediamaster.com too.

Merry Axemas: A Guitar Christmas - maybe my favorite
Yule Struttin’
The Jethro Tull Christmas Album

Oh, I like a bunch of “traditional” songs and albums from my childhood, and other newer favorites, but I’ve never tired of these entire albums, and I look forward to hearing a track from these come up on “random spin”.

OK, enough distraction, back to that work…

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Just re-reading my Quicken tirades. I still think they were embarassingy horrible at customer service, and will indeed never use their products again. Just in case you were wondering.

But, now I had to put my money where my morals were, and stop using Quicken. Yes, the customer service people doing Quicken BillPay, and the whole BillPay service might be an entirely different division of Intuit, but they had so fully pushed me over the bad service edge, my vendetta is now with Intuit the company, and all their products. Oh, have I mentioned I’m one of those annoyingly anal engineering types lately <smirk>?

I’d been a loyal Quicken user for 10 years. Had a decade of financial information in there, used it to manage all my bank accounts, and in fact, chose banks based on how they supported Quicken. So, going cold turkey, well, I wasn’t sure how that’d really go. And, if I’d end up crawling back to Quicken as a management tool, and editing my blogs to cover my tracks. If I delete it after I’ve published it, it disappears from the web forever, right? I read that somewhere, I’m sure I did. OK, I just made it up.

Well, I’m happy to report that after going to all my billers, and turning on alerts for my accounts, and cancelling the only biller that didn’t support that, and then going whole hog with my Credit Union and their bill pay service, I haven’t looked back. I also turned on paperless billing from everyone, and since I’m online all the time anyway, I never miss any activity. I now know every single time a debit or credit occurs to all of my accounts, in nearly real time. Bills get paid faster paying them throught the Credit Union, or inversely, having the biller suck mail out of my checking account, in which case I can pay bills the day before they’re due. More interest for me! No longer do I have to pay things a week or more in advance, since I was never quite sure how long it’d take for Quicken to get it there.

In fact, I’ve now got bill pay set up with both my credit union AND with my investment broker. I’ll be paying my larger regular bills like the mortgage through my investment accounts, and my more real-time changing bills through the credit union, letting me keep the bulk of my money where it gets the highest interest.

Oh, and for budgeting, well, I just used Numbers, that came with my iWork purchase, loaded the budget spreadsheet, and I now have a really good monthly budgeting tool too! OK, so it doesn’t take my checking accounts, and each individual payment, and semi-automatically categorize and file it so I could monitor cash flow, it is a bit clunkier, but that made me streamline my budget, which actually means I’m (at least so far) using it, which I never got to doing regularly enough with Quicken.

By finally stepping outside the comfy blanket of Quicken taking care of my accounts, I now have more information, more quickly than I had before, and am able to more wisely allocate my assets. So, thanks, Intuit, for making me mad enough to dump you!

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Tried publishing as an edit, didn’t work, so, now it’s a new post. Oh well.

Now that the furor has turned into a low growl, a few thoughts. I’d “hacked” my phone with iFuntastic. Mostly because I missed the ringtones on my E61, where I could pick any media file on my phone to play. So, I tossed in a few of those ringtones.

Yeah, I get that the RIAA figured out there was big money in ringtones, so they came up with special licensing to extract money for that too. However, because of the RIAA’s heavy handed tactics, and actively attacking customers, informing us that paying for music doesn’t mean we actually own how we use it, I have to admit, I, like it appears the majority of their customers, aren’t big fans of the RIAA. Just a hint, when you actively, and even more, proactively alienate your customers, you will eventually go out of business. And, you cannot regulate and intimidate behavior change with your customers. All the more so when the “competition”, i.e. unsigned artists, are better, by and large, than the “product” you’re peddling. Nya.

So, most of my ringtones are from non-RIAA sources. I have several friends who are musical artists, I have their “personal label” CD’s, and their express permission to use their music however I want, short of reselling it. And, some are from old recordings for which no ringtone rights have been negotiated. So, if the music isn’t popular enough to license as a ringtone, does that means it’s explicitly not licensed as a ringtone? I don’t think so. I don’t see any EULA in my CD packet here for my Mozart symphonies dictating what I can and cannot do with snippets of the music I bought. But, Apple needs to placate the mesozoic media companies, so I guess it had to make deals with the devil to agree to disallow any random ringtone creation.

Anywho, so I did that. Then folks figured less arduous ways of putting ringtones on the phone. That was cool, but I already had mine set up, so I didn’t mess with that. Then the infamous 1.1.1 came out. Now I was a little nervous. I knew I’d eventually want to upgrade, but now I might have a pending brick.

Now, I think it was a poor marketing choice for Apple to go this route, but I don’t see anything inherently evil. They came out with an update, they knew it would and in some cases would brick phones, so they warned you before you updated. Threw in a special “Danger, Will Robinson!” dialog and everything. At that point you could a) say to yourself “self, I modified this phone, do I really want to risk updating”, or b) take your chances.

When I bought the phone, I got a device, and a set of software with it. That’s all I got. Folks found a way to hack that version of the software, great, if I wanted to use it, that’s my choice. I don’t have any illusion that I bought that and the right to tweek it, and the right to free updates from Apple. If I want to use a device, with the restrictions that were made clear to me when I bought it, that’s my choice, and if I choose to disregard those restrictions, which I often do, well, you break it, you lost it.

The train of thought that you bought the phone, so not only can you hack it, but that Apple owes you compatibility, and owes you not to unhack it? Sony has been battling back and forth with the PSP for a very long time, and DirecTV had a similar battle with people unlocking all the channels for a long time, until that got pretty difficult to pull off as well. Not everything you buy is a general purpose computing device. A Palm, mostly a general purpose device, other smartphones? Kinda similar. The iPhone, well, not so much. And, if it wasn’t so absolutely brilliant at doing what it does do, then we wouldn’t really care, now would we?

So, how about this, if you want to hack it, fine, hack away, but don’t update until the hackers catch up with Apple, and if Apple does something that makes future updates just not work, well, enjoy what you’ve got. Works for the PSP folks, should work for the iPhone too.

Now, does this cause Apple some headaches? Well, sure, when there’s some real hardware/software competition to the iPhone, and it’s open and developer/hacker friendly, then there will be some migration.

But, remember, Apple didn’t build and market the phone to developers/hackers. Just like the iPod wasn’t opened up, and yet became the largest selling music player, they’re betting that same thing will work with the iPhone. And, for non-power users, that want power a different way, they may be right.

I’m gonna enjoy the heck out of it, just like I did my E61, until the NEXT killer device/platform comes along! I’m just excited that Apple kicked the mobile industry in the butt with a platform that could be built today, if only other providers had thought out of the box enough to do it. The iPhone is, as a friend told me, “The Mac on a phone”, it’s kinda like Frontpage. Apple’s got a way they want to interact with Consumers, and a lot of it is in limiting the customization. That’s got a similarity to my day job, looking at ways to make general purpose hardware and OS’s more like an “Appliance”, once you know what you want the device to do.

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Was going to do a “nice little things about Leopard” post, but that’s not coming together. So, I thought I’d post one of my favorite features. Mail context-sensitive text. I found the first bit by accident, ran my mouse over a name in an email message, and a popup frame faded in around the name. Clicking on it I had the option to “Show in Address book”. So, Mail.app had scanned the mail, found names it knew in the address book, and they were clickable. Cool.

But then, I went to copy the location of a meeting so I could create a calendar appointment. As I moved over the date/time, it became active, with the option of “create new event in iCal” and “show in iCal”. This happens with dates, times, dates and times, and date ranges as well. So, to create an appointment from a description in a mail message, I just choose the text I want for the subject, click on the time/date, create an appointment, then paste the text.

Yeah, it’s not going to save me hours a day, but I’m now using this one Mail feature every day or three. Pretty amazing. I’m sure it’s mentioned somewhere in the “what’s new”, but I like this one feature better than those popup folders in the dock that I’m not really using a lot yet.

Oh, and today’s cool utility? Hazel. Found it during a Lifehacker perusal last week, and I’ve now got it managing the only two folders left on my desktop, Inbox and Outbox, and managing my trash too.

OK, so I got one blog entry in in November. One a month, that’s all I ask!

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My latest email to the incompetent, and I now believe legally questionable people at Intuit. I only wish I had the time to pursue this in small claims court…

—-

Subject: I want my account closed permanently NOW

I’ve now been charged a $25 LATE FEE on the $9.95 payment that a month ago bounced, and which I immediately called to remedy. Your incompetance at handling the last problem, cancelling several transactions IN PROCESS caused me to have to close my account with you.

I trust this last insult on top of injury is that last time I will ever hear from you.

I want my account permanently closed, IMMEDIATELY. I do not need any further access to it, I have moved all of my financial management elsewhere, and will never purchase another Quicken product, or recommend Intuit for anything to anyone as long as I have breath.

I want ALL funding accounts REMOVED, and if you attempt to remove any further money from any of my bank accounts, I will take legal action.

Sincerely,

Ken Wallich
A now VERY disgruntled former customer.

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