Facing Forward, Pursuing Progress
I have an Associate in Technical Arts in Web Application Development degree, as well as certificates in:
I have a deep knowledge of technical systems and have solved a variety of problems.
Funny discussion recently: using non-phone photos on Instagram…cheating or no? Fascinating thoughts about purpose, medium, and veracity. To me, all art embraces a zen quality. Cheating doesn’t exist. Well, not in this context. Plagiarism, another beast, another story.
So, the question remains, and no answer comes from me. You?
After working in real estate for the past few months, several things became clear. In today’s age, a small home owners or condo owners association must, MUST have a website. This should contain contact information and the scope of the org. Really, this is a basic yet powerful communication tool for your membership. A simple blog would do wonders.
I’ve heard many HOAs reps complain about banks not dues. Yet they make it nearly impossible to track them down. A basic website, around long enough for crawlers to grab key SEO terms, can get this accomplished.
Extend this out to small governmental and quasi-governmental orgs. I’m thinking mainly, right now, about small water associations. A simple website can make you, well, findable.
So, a little rant on a Saturday morning. Thanks for listening. Well, reading. Peace and well-being to you all.
I love some things about this age. I like sitting in bed working. Getting some calm family time, yet also arranging my day, answering email and the like. And making a much delayed blog update without too much effort.
Another “like” is being able to utilize wasted time better. Things like standing in line, waiting for the doctor. I don’t sit reading months old magazines; I get work done.
Crazy side bar: I’ve spent the later half of this year working for a real estate company. Same sort of work, whole new sector. I never would’ve guessed just how tech dependent real estate is. Or can be. Perhaps a piece of this tech utilization is related to locale. We are in a major tech hub. My team lives and breathes via Dropbox and Gmail. Acrobat is additionally critical. Most communication with our sellers is via email, or via website.
Thinking of websites and real estate, one thing I spend time researching are Home Owners Associations, water associations and such. People, in today’s age, there is NO EXCUSE to not have a website with key information. At least post contact information. You must make some effort to be found if you want to be paid.
I’m a Mac guy. This was typed on a Macbook Pro, which is my second Macbook. Before that was an iBook, and before that was a Powerbook. And (yes, AND…) before that was, well, another Powerbook. And that’s just my laptops. I’ve owned a Mac LC, iMac, eMac and a Mini. I just upgraded my iPhone from the 3gs to the 4s. I’ve been using .Mac since it was free, upgraded to MobileMe and now am on iCloud.
So, that said, I’ve been annoyed with iCloud. My main beef has been with calendaring. My wife and I use invites to keep track of each our commitments. Once I upgraded to iCloud, my invites to my wife stopped going through. For us, that’s a huge minus. Fortunately, Apple has resolved this. But big problem. But this break down reflects poor execution.
Part ii of my MobileMe/iCloud beef is with the website. The web tool for this, well, stinks. It’s slow and clunky. If any Apple hardware had the same design “afterthought” effect, it would be scrapped. Comparing Gmail with iCloud really reflects this. Gmail is world class and way, WAY outdoes iCloud.
Thanks for accepting my brief rant. I still love Apple stuff. What I want is for Apple to point their energies towards iCloud and make it a world-class product that it should be.
So, you an Apple fan bothered by their webtools? What would you like to see done? Or is Gmail so superior that I’m an idiot for sticking with iCloud? Add a comment, let me know.
A few years back, I came up with a project that sounded fun: build a Linux system focused on older hardware. It pained me to see operational machines made non-functional simply due to software-side demands. Wasteful. Now, though, I’m not convinced of it’s practicality. Is the problem with the older machines simply due to OS creep, or could the OS expansion be due to user demand?
Most users have increased their demands on their machines. So many Internet apps, for instance, are video and image rich. An older machine, even with a lean OS, will still be taxed by the demands of Flash, et al. My goals would only be realized by refining all the apps, too. Then those those refinements would ripple back to the mainstream systems, giving them performance gains. Upon which new apps would be built utilizing the freed resources. Thus, everything would revert back to the previous state. Assuming, of course, that I was able to overcome such other challenges as security.
So, how do I look at my original goal, now? I’m refining my vision. My concern was waste. How do we maximize these obsolete systems? Perhaps we could look at a more basic level. Look at the computer as a series of pieces, then apply the cradle-to-cradle lifecycle approach. Perhaps dissembling the machines and returning those components to the manufacturing stream.
A truly sustainable economy has zero waste. Every item, at the end of it’s life becomes a building block for something new. That’s my underlying vision. The task is both simple and massive.
To answer a requst via Twitter, here is the quick & dirty way to export photos. For this example, we’re putting the pictures on iDisk (MobileMe, if you will).
Open iPhoto, then “File”:
Then select “Export”:
I see a convergece of some troubling trends. First, device providers (such as Apple, Google and Microsoft) are creating devices that heavily utilize the net (smartphones, netbooks and such). On the opposite side we have the ISPs, not just the traditional hard-wire services (Comcast, Frontier, et al), but also wireless carriers (ATT, Verizon, etc). They currently need to throttle access. I see a train wreck coming as they’re moving opposite ways, but critically depend on each other. Somehow, the ISPs need to build out their infrastructure (based on the assumption that the throttling is based on lack of capacity, not on blind greed). It would be great if somehow the device creators, and content creators, could find ways to share revenue with the ISPs. Clearly, such would need to be done so that net neutrality is maintained, anti-trust is ensured and such. Basically, ISPs need to have the increased demand become income, not simply expense.
Hey folks, there’s a nasty Mac specific trojan running through the wild. It looks to be mostly transmitted by social engineering means. Particularly, with alarming “virus alert” messages from an infected website demanding you install MacProtector, MacSecurity, or MacDefendor.
If you have this beast, I recommend following the instructions posted in Apple’s forum.
There are a few discussions about this going on over the web right now. I came across this via Ed Bott’s pieces today over at ZDNet (#1 & #2). Bott’s replies to John Gruber’s “Wolf” post @ Daring Fireball has birthed some interesting discussion, including a clever rip by Walt Mosspuppet. In the end, it seems to be more of the old Mac vs. PC bickering that’s been going on for decades.
My concern, at this point, is that there are those who think that the Mac OS “superiority” towards virus and hack exploits makes them immune from concern. There ARE Mac viri out there. As a long-time Mac user who’s passionate about the platform, I think this attitude is not only bad but dangerous. We should remind people that they should be aware of the latest exploits out there and how to protect themselves. We can’t let ourselves get blinded by arrogance.
So, folks, don’t click on strange links, exercise caution surfing porn (if you must surf it at all), don’t trust alarmist pop-ups, and don’t give out your credit card number to a site that you don’t trust implicitly. To paraphrase a quip by Graham Hibbert (via Twitter), we need to make sure that, when the wolf comes, we are ready.
Now, go and practice safe computing!
My wife spent the end of last week and part of the weekend in a conference. Upon returning home we noticed the hotel had a $100 hold on our account. A quick call showed it as legit, and I have no problem with the action. However, what flummoxes me us that it will take several days to process. In today’s world, this is stunning. I can’t understand why any transaction is NOT closed out upon checkout. I can see waiting until housekeeping had cleared the room. There doesn’t appear to be any benefit to the hotel, either. No cash changes hands, so it’s not like they’re making interest on the held money. Seems simply to be a weak system process. One that makes the hotel look disorganized and non-service savvy. Of course, most folks probably wouldn’t watch their accounts like we do.
Finally reading up on Facebook’s campaign to smear Google. My first thought was how laughable it is for Facebook to defend this by stating “they’re concerned about Google’s privacy concerns” just makes my head spin. Let’s pretend that this is legitimate. Then it should be done in the open, acknowledging their own issues with managing privacy. Otherwise, you look childish and deceptive. In today’s media saturated space, losing consumer trust can be fatal (not that I think this will kill Facebook. It can be one proverbial nail-in-the-coffin, though).
My impression? This was an attempt at being hyper-competitive and has backfired. Facebook looks childish and grossly unprofessional. Burson-Marsteller (a whole ‘nother post) looks grossly unethical. A bad, bad choice that will add ammunition to the anti-Facebook crowd. There is a point which this energy can obtain critical mass. Facebook needs to work on building up the trust “bank account”, not continuing to draw it down. When it’s empty, the house of cards collapses.