A new piece of electronic gear arrived the other day (an early Christmas gift perhaps ;) ) and while (ahem) checking to make sure nothing was broken in transit (that's my story and I'm sticking to it) I decided to read the installation instructions. The first four items on the instruction manual (in bold type no less):

1. Read Instructions
2. Retain Instructions
3. Heed Instructions
4. Follow Instructions

I caught a really cool commerical on TV last night - for Dentyne gum - where todays commonplace social networking terms were portrayed by people acting them out in real-life activities. What initially caught my interest was the use of the buzzwords, what kept my interest was relating it to "face-to"face" activities. Fresh!

Checking out their website I found it really cool that they have a 3 minute countdown after which the website "shuts down" and they encourage you to put away the computer and go outside and have some face time. How truly radical! It seems a sad sort of commentary on the state of things as we find people more and more relating to each other across the digital networks rather than face to face... in an effort to bring the world closer, are we really pushing people apart? Face time is indeed important, often I find myself now choosing to walk down the hall to confer with a colleague rather than sending an email or picking up the phone. A little more effort yes but a lot more rewarding. Anyway, an interesting ad campaign - take 3 minutes, check it out, then go outside and meet a friend.

And as suspected, Rogers did not disappoint in offering less than stellar rates for the new iPhone 3G. As usual, Canadians will line up like sheep to get seriously boned over the ludicrous "deal" from Rogers to use the iPhone. The cheapest plan is $60/month with a whopping 400MB of data included. Free evenings and weekends except, hello, evenings are near to over by 9pm (see: wikipedia definition), and so in order to get real evening minutes we shall have to shell out an extra $20 for a "value" package. Plus add on the system access fee, the telco 911 fee, and the provincial 911 fee... feh! The addons will run you about $30 or so on top of the advertised rate which, to me, seems a lot. And that, folks, is life when you have only one supplier of the product. Sigh.

It occurred to me as I was reading about Raven Zachary's $837.20 iPhone bill that as the iPhone is released to more and more countries, and if (or when) it becomes as ubiquitous as the iPod, then there shall be a mighty backlash against marketers and spammers pushing their wares/messages via HTML email as it will be chewing up peoples' precious data allotments - a direct hit to the wallet, at least until WiFi gains the coverage of airspace that mobility currently enjoys. I don't necessarily see that happening in the near future, and I certainly don't see a major restructuring of mobility revenue models. I think the reality will be that HTML email will become anathema to a much wider and far more vocal group than the email purists currently railing on about it. That will be a very good thing in my opinion.

I'm all about consolidation these days, trying to simplify the many into few. A person's online presence can be multi-faceted as you may be revealing different piece of your person through different systems for viewing by different sets of people. Being able to links these facets together so that you can more easily disseminate the content is the goal that I'm after.

So it happens that I have this blog, a facebook account and accounts on Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku. A lot of services to post information to. A while ago, I had a posted discussing whether to use pownce, twitter or jaiku for a microblogging platform. While all have their merits, I found that Twitter seems to be the one I've been using more often than not and the trouble of trying to keep up with three services that kind of all do the same thing was more than I wanted to deal with. So I went dark (so to speak) on both pownce and jaiku - on both of which I have different sets of "friends". And then there was my blog and my facebook. I found that my blog posts suffered as I started hanging out more often on Facebook and posting more and more technical updates there. Lately I felt I needed some way to bring all these bits of my electronic self together and try to link them all up.

Through sheer serendipity I happened across Twhirl. Twhirl is a Twitter client which, while posting to Twitter, will also cross post to your Pownce and Jaiku accounts. Are you kidding me? It's just what I was looking for. Fantastic!! So that takes care of the twitter stuff. Now how to integrate my Facebook and blog?

I had already set up my blog to pull my facebook postings into the content, but I wanted it to go the other way as well and so set up facebook to pull my blog posts in as posted facebook notes. (Just pull your blog in as a notes feed). That was easy. Nice. Now I feel motivated to write longer posts on my blog once again and I really like the fact that it also gets posted to my facebook.

There are a few bits of me still scattered around out there but the important stuff is now better linked and I can determine what to do with the other stuff later, for now I'm writing more and posting less but posting to more places - works for me :)

Happy as I am to be using Firefox 3.0, as a web designer I felt it was necessary to hang onto Firefox 2.0 for testing purposes, at least for the short term. When installing FF3, it automatically updates your old installation, and there is no way to specify the directory it installs to. So, it was a relatively simple solution to go just switch the name of the FF2 folder to (what else?) Mozilla Firefox 2.0 which cleared the way for FF3 to install to Mozilla Firefox and voila - two versions can happily co-exist.

In windows (before you install FF3):
My Computer>Local Disk>Program Files>Mozilla Firefox <--- change this to Mozilla Firefox 2.0

On a mac, you can simply download the new FF3 application to your desktop, change the name to Firefox 3.0 and then copy it into your Applications folder.

Ok, what are you waiting for? Go and get Firefox 3.0:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

And, while you're at it - try these handy add-ons:
Adblock plus - don't ever have to see ads again!
ColorZilla - advanced eyedropper tool
Del.icio.us - access and organize your bookmarks
Foxmarks - sync your FF bookmarks across many computers!
MeasureIt - on screen ruler to get pixel width & height of any element on a webpage
PDF Download - choose what you want to do with a PDF file
Web Designer's Toolbar - lots of handy tools in one easy place.

I had the strange urge to blog today about the trials and tribulations of trying to get Groupwise (our Enterprise calendaring software which we must use at work) to sync up with my iPod touch. It's more than just that really, I keep my personal appointments that don't affect my office availability separate on my iCal, because, well, my work mates don't really need to know my after work schedule do they?, and sync that to my iPod touch as well. At the end of the day, I just wanted to have the whole mess available on my iPod which goes with me everywhere. It's not quite a simple solution though, it happens that one needs to install a 3rd party piece of (Windows) software and have Google calendar act as an intermediary step.

So, here is how to accomplish the grand sync (in a really roundabout way!)
Step 1: Set up a Google Calendar (you don't have to share it with the world!)
Step 2: Download CompanionLink Software's CompanionLink for Google (not free though - you will need to register it for $29.95 US to keep using it past the trial period)
Step 3: In iCal, add a subscription to your Google calendar
Step 4: Configure CompanionLink for Google to sync your Google calendar with your Groupwise
Step 5: Sync up - once the sync is complete everything should now be on your iCal
Step 6: You can now sync your iPod touch which will sync your iCal data as well.

I had originally installed CompanionLink for Google on an XP Desktop but recently switched it to a Parallels Vista install on my MBP

Bonus: if you're on a MacBook / MacBook Pro, install Windows either via Bootcamp, Parellels or VMWare Fusion and install CompanionLink for Google there. I personally prefer the Windows client for Groupwise over the Mac client so I installed that on my Parallels Vista install as well.

What a lot of bother just to get everything onto my iCal so I can (a) have it all on one calendar and (b) sync it with my iPod.

Really pleased with Remote Buddy which allows me to use my apple remote with MS Powerpoint. It has other useful features too and - how cool is this - you can even use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a remote as well. Neeeeat.

This is an article I meant to write and publish back in December, however, the entire month was ridiculously hectic and it seemed that I could find absolutely no time to sit and write. Fortunately, the event was memorable enough that I should have no problem at all remembering exactly how it went.

In early December I was lucky enough to attend the Web Builder 2.0 conference in Las Vegas and while there I decided to visit the Apple store and have them take a look at the battery on my new (few months old) MacBook Pro. Shortly after receiving it I had noted that the battery was no longer flush with the underside of the case and in fact seemed to be ever so slightly bulging a bit. Upon removing the batter I found that I could easily separate the casing by hooking an edge with my fingernail and pulling gently up - this did not seem like a good thing to me. Plus, the raised edge underneath was annoying. So in I went and got an appointment with the Genius Bar techhies. The wait wasn't overly excessive (20 minutes) even though the store was bustling. In fact, they bumped me into a no-show slot within 5 minutes. Cool.

They took a look at it and felt that it was not a safety issue, rather more a cosmetic issue but were willing to swap it out for a replacement if I liked. Uh, yeah! Absolutely. And swap it out they did. One concern of mine was the charge status as I would be flying out of Vegas later that evening to which they responded by hauling a stool over to the end of the bar and letting me sit there and work for as long as I liked while the battery charged.

Well that was awesome. So work I did while while other customers came and had their issues taken care of. I was so impressed by the guys manning the bar and their professionalism in dealing with the customers. One poor woman came in with her "broken" brand-new iphone - she could talk through it but couldn't hear anyone from the other end. The techie took a quick look and, without making her feel like a total dunce, peeled off the anti-scratch film it ships with which was covering the ear piece hole. Very impressive.

I've read online both pro and con articles of the people staffing the Genius Bar, and well, my experience was definitely pro. In fact, all the staff I dealt with were awesome there - it's heartening to see that the art of customer service is not dead.