a(HUGE)company

I figured I would try something new so here ya go…

Audio Post One (mp3 716 KB)

I don’t know about you, but being an RSS-addicted crack whore I can’t seem to keep up with everything. I think Google Reader needs a “cluster view” to weed out all the duplicated stories; much like Google News does. So for example, it would pick the most popular story about this AOL OpenID thing and then all the stories related to it could be under it. I’m not sure how exactly this would be done, but seeing as Reader has statistics they could see which “item” is most popular in the “Reader Community” and rank it accordingly.

I hope Google is listening, because if I don’t get this feature soon I’m going to lose my mind.

Widgets need to go to hell.

Enough said.

Yes, I’ve started a podcast. It’s been a month in planning and finally pumped out Episode 1, a beta test, Monday. If you have time and want to check out our beta episode, go to hometowntechtalk.com. Episode 2 is already in planning for sometime next week, I’ve got another co-host to substitute since Jeff can’t always be there. Episode 1 was really messy, I spent three hours editing it down to get the final version, another two hours figuring out how to encode it over and over. I’ve learned from audio mistakes (sync issues), and poor preparation. Episode 2 will be very polished, have four unique segments (each with their own intros), and possibly an exclusive interview with someone special (it’s a surprise) if I can get it arranged in time.

I don’t know what it is but I’ve been ecstatic about putting out another episode so I cannot wait. I really want this to be something we can put out every two weeks, but it’s just hard with our schedules. I’m thankful enough to get at least one person together with me to record. Two or three extras would be my target, no more than that.

The website is still underway; I’ll eventually put up some more content pages so you know who we are, and what we are actually doing. This blog is actually kind of a mess too, will work on that sometime soon. It’s all on my big to do list.

If you have any suggestions, comments, questions, please don’t hesitate to email me. I love feedback; you can find my email address on the hometowntechtalk website. I’m Stephen Crawford, if you didn’t already catch that

This is a continuation to my previous post entitled: What is email and how quickly should I reply?

I quite honestly think Instant Messaging will be the demise of my future. Like I had said before, email has its time and place, its prioritized. IM isn’t however, when you get an IM you’re obligated to reply instantly. So it really ticks me off to see people talking about how IM will replace email as a form of communication. IM has its time and place; it shouldn’t be used as a replacement to email. With email you leave a digital paper trail of everything previously said so that a large group of people can review it quickly if necessary, this does not apply with IM however, you need to have a client that supports logging and always be in a group conference so everyone gets everything. This of course is never the case though.

I agree, IM is nice, I use it religiously which is probably why I get next to no work done on a daily basis. I could go on about VoIP and video chat, but that would be a whole new post, which is why I will stop here.

Ok so I got this nice new 22″ LCD monitor (225BW) on Black Friday (day after thanksgiving) from Circuit City, except randomly I notice it flickering, like the screen goes black for a fraction of a second and then comes back. I called Samsung’s support line since I’ve dealt with them before about another 19″ LCD, which they replaced with a refurbished one. The only complaint I have thus far is when I first called in the menu told me “we are experiencing extremely heavy call volume,” except the phone was answered instantly and I didn’t have to hold. Weird; just a way to scare people off I guess.

After verifying my information, getting my product id and serial number they arranged for me to receive a brand new monitor! I’m still waiting for a call from the UPS Store, they must have some sort of deal with them because I have to go there and exchange it–weird. I’m impressed by how it was handled, that’s all I have to say.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 may just be the runner up for “Swiss Army knife of the year,” next to the iPhone.

Ever since I started testing the early beta versions of Office 2007, I must say I’m very impressed by the new ribbon design and a few new features it incorporates. I’ve always been a big fan of using styles to keep things clean so it’s perfect. I have tried all the open source “word” replacements too and none can compare to this. The new font package is very nice too, Calibri is my favorite, now everyone needs to upgrade so they can enjoy the documents I write with Calibri.

One of its new, little known, features is a blog publisher. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, bloat. But no, it’s actually really great. I draft all my blog posts in Word anyway; it’s just a quick easy way to check spelling and such. So now all I have to do is click the “Office Button” and then Publish and Blog. It couldn’t be any simpler, and it works great with WordPress blogs too.

Every post on this brand new blog has been posted using Word, can you tell a difference? It publishes very clean html, unlike what you would normally expect coming out of Word; <FONT><FONT><FONT>a</FONT></FONT></FONT>^h^h^h. Uploads pictures, this feature is priceless. I like putting pictures in my post most of the time so it’s just a real time saver. The only buggy thing about it is image placement.

Before I publish a post, I usually post it as a draft from Word. Then add the categories from the WordPress admin since there appears to be a problem with adding new categories from Word. Then I check image placement, linkify (sucks from Word–I’ll admit), finalize it, and publish directly from WordPress. Let’s review: Office Button->Publish->Blog. Easy as pie.

I often ask myself, how should email be prioritized? Sure I’ve read up on all this “GTD,” but aside from that, really how should email be handled? I’m guilty of always being tethered to my computer/phone checking my email every 20 minutes, most of the time I don’t physically check it though because some sort of notification always pops up You’ve got mail!; except not in the creepy AOL way. The reason I’m bringing this to the table is because I often feel 50% of the email I send goes to /dev/null, not because it’s junk, just because people don’t care.

Here’s my own rendition, on a scale from 24 hours down to 3 seconds of how quickly emails should be replied to.

• 24 hours - acceptable, but feels like snail mail
• 12 hours - mediocre
• 6 hours - good
• 3 hours - great
• 1 hour - this should be the standard
• 10 minutes - excellent, I should pay you but not in a whorish way
• 2 minutes - this person should use IM instead
• 3 seconds - get a life, stop raping your mail server

Now, does it blend scale? Let’s say this email is going to a support help desk, some general mailbox that gets picked apart by vultures. I expect a reply within 1 hour in most cases. This same bar should apply whether you’re paying for the service or not, yes that’s harsh but if you’re not paying for it I’m a little more flexible. For example, I email them at 2 am; I wouldn’t expect a reply till morning anyways. They aren’t getting paid to stay awake so why bother? Ok I take that back, I stay up and I have no reason! I’m just crazy, that’s all. Paying for a service and getting horrible support is another thing though and I wish more businesses would work on this.

Ok, now personal email. This is a touchy subject because I’d expect a reply within 12 hours at least. Let me put this into real life perspective. Would you let your traditional mailbox pile up for days? Of course not, it would simply be overrun by junk mail, bills, packages, or whatever else you may have coming. I could most certainly deal with a piled up inbox because you can easily sort and eliminate emails which don’t need reply. I know, your defense is that the post office will stop delivering after a while, but set that aside and treat this as you would your inbox. But, how would you physically remove mail from a mailbox that had been stuffed for 5 days? Using your Kanata of course!

The only reason I’m in such a tizzy over this is because I’ve experienced several different things with email over the years. Either you get a reply or a lump of coal. Sometimes the reply could be as simple as “ok got it, working on it,” while other times people go out onto to that extra limb to provide you with as much information as you requested and then some. I just think that’s great, and I try to put that extra “oomph” into my emails too.

To end this, I would like to commend those who’ve replied to me quickly and efficiently. Robert Scoble - Scoble Show, emailed him a few months ago, replied in 7 minutes; impressive, but sad at the same time because if I were paying him I would of had to wait longer ;). Cali Lewis - Geek Brief TV, emailed for podcasting advice, replied 2 and a half hours, great considering the length of my email; yes I basically wrote a small novel. Unfortunately that concludes my very short list, sure it may be bias since I haven’t really emailed that many to test their reply time; but there are a few dozen I have yet to receive replies from; not particularly podcast related, just small stuff in general. In example, suggestions like “how about add an RSS feed?” or “your template is cool, are you releasing any of those?”

I’m going to make it my personal agenda when I start my podcast to reply to everyone’s emails, good or bad. Even Cali takes some heat sometimes as displayed in her recent episode “The Critic.” You know what; right now I wouldn’t even care if you emailed me about this blog. Or anything, I like to talk and meet interesting people. Sure I’d prefer you use the comments if it was something you had to say publically, but aside from that my email address is in a block on the right.

I really thought I was going insane this morning when I started reading my feeds, Google Reader grabs the next 20 items ahead of time as you know. So it just happened to grab the next 20 which included Boing Boing’s post. At the time they seemed to think it was a good idea to embed flash. Now it’s gone of course. But scared me because I thought I was being taken over by some odd bunny virus.

I use flashblock but apparently this didn’t prove effective in this case since I had allowed it on “google.com”. Flash needs an option to not auto play stuff. The bunnies were cute after I found a way to annihilate them, so plug.

The popular BitTorrent search engine isoHunt has been downed since yesterday. Most likely due to pressure from the MPAA because of an ongoing legal battle since early January 2005.

As of 12:45 PST a site admin has posted the following update to the temporary placeholder site:

We are moving house. If the tubes run smoothly, we expect to be back in full swing tomorrow.

I’m not sure where these organizations get off suing people who index content. Maybe they ought to go after Google or Yahoo then… It only seems logical to not just pick on the small fish. But then again, that’s the only way they get a response. They figure such a small site won’t be able to recoup and move. What do you think the response would be if they sued Google?