Are Seven

Shaking off the blogging sleepiness (and taking another stab at the “drawn-out Twitter” style of posting that’s the only hope of posting here any more) to weigh in on a couple of the tech things that have crossed our paths recently.

Google Wave is pretty fascinating. After watching more of the video, I’m more intrigued than before, mostly in that it’s as much a collaborative tool as a communications tools; more Google Docs than gmail.  The more features they go through in the video, the more I started thinking about how incredible it would be in the workplace, and that just as I wish that Word would be more like Google Docs and Outlook more like gmail, I would wish that they would all be more like Wave.

But that’s the initial excitement. I wonder (along with everyone else) what it’s going to take to have it catch on. Again, the more I watched that video, the more I thought that the workplace would be the takeoff spot, but workplaces are notorious for taking a long time to implement software, and IT departments love cracking down (or at least “discouraging”) outside softwares like Wave. But it is possible.

One of the interesting parts of the video was when they show Wave interacting with Orkut, Google’s purchase of a social network (translation: it’s like Facebook).  So I went back to Orkut and re-signed in for the first time in a very long time and started playing around.  It’s terrible. It’s about as basic of a social network as you can imagine. 

Google has an incredible chance to build fantastic social networking tools through Reader and through their new profiles without people even knowing that they’re on a social network. So why are they even bringing Orkut into the Wave conversation? It seems strange.

But damn I want my hands on Wave, though…

Today’s post on the usually-brilliant Seth’s Blog brought to mind a topic that eats at me almost every work day: the problem with email. Seth talks about the freeness of the email creating so much noise that email is losing its value.  He’s talking mostly about email as its use for marketing, and in that sense, he’s right, even if the excessive noise of email has been the case for years.

What he misses, though, is that, at the workplace, email is failing because it’s become a crutch; the ultimate tool of the passive-aggressive. Email is miserable as a tasking system, and yet people continue to use the ease of sending an email as a way to pass on tasks and then pat themselves on the back for taking care of the problem.  Conversations that could be over and solved with a 2-minute phone call turn into days-long email threads, owning to skittishness of confrontation (which I can’t condone, but do understand) and the perceived ease of emailing, when it takes much longer to write (and read) an email than to have a conversation about it.

Email has its uses: it’s nice to have a formal write-up of verbal requests, or to follow up on the understandings of a conversation. It’s good to track what’s been done and understood.  But if you’re getting mad at people at work for not replying to your email or not taking an action on an email request of yours, go talk to them.  It’s a hell of a lot more effective.

Whenever I check the little box that categorizes one of my posts as “Tech”, I do it knowing that about half of my little audience tunes out immediately.  This is a shame, because whenever I talk tech here, it’s only because it’s something that I think could benefit the people who don’t consider themselves at all tech minded. Trust me: if I was really talking about the tech that interested me, you’d be getting a lot more about Google Analytics and Excel formulas. Seriously.

I’m ticking off that tech box today because, in the last few weeks, I’ve seen a slew of status messages on Facebook that are bemoaning the loss of their hard drive and all the important files that go along with it. It just doesn’t need to be this way.

So today, I’m going to tell you to install Dropbox to back up your files and share them, and that if you don’t and lose a whole bunch of important files, I won’t feel the slightest bit sorry for you.  In fact, I’ll laugh at you, and will send you cards taunting your loss, and write out TOLD YOU SO on your front lawn in gasoline.  Okay, maybe not that last one, but only because it would be environmentally irresponsible, and not because you don’t deserve it.

Here’s the reasons you need to put Dropbox on your computer. There’s only TWO, so don’t tell me you don’t have the time to read it.

REASON ONE: Everything you put in the folders gets backed up.

See, all the installation of Dropbox does is put some folders on your computer called “My Dropbox” (or just “Dropbox” on the Mac). You interact with them just like you would with any other folders on your computer and can create as many subfolders as you want, but everything that’s in these folders is available on the Dropbox site and is getting backed up and versioned.

The backup thing is good enough. If your computer totally crashed and you lost everything, then at least everything in Dropbox would be instantly retreivable. And when your computer gets fixed up or you’re starting on a new computer, you just re-install Dropbox, and all your files are there again.

But the versioning is great as well.  I had deleted a PDF from one of my folders in Dropbox, but wanted it back when I was at work.  No problem: I just went into Dropbox, selected “Show deleted files”  and reverted back to the version of the folder that had that file in it, and there it was in my Dropbox folders again.  Brilliant.

REASON TWO: Synching your files between two computers.

I used to think this was the main reason to have Dropbox, but it seems to confuse people.

You can install Dropbox on more than one computer and then you see the exact same contents in both places.  I have Dropbox on both my work computer and home computer, and it’s been a lifesaver more than once. Recently, I had my employee evaluation form to fill out in a Word document, and I just plunked it in the “Work” folder I’d created and worked on it at home.  When I got back onto my work computer, there was the file, right where I’d left it, except it had all of the changes I’d made at home.

Now, a lot of people can’t go installing stuff on their work computers like that, but it’s still definitely worthwhile installing on your home computer just for backup purposes, but if you can have it on both home and work computers, it’s invaluable.

BONUS REASON: Share files

Anything you drop in the “Public” folder has a public link that you can get as easily as right-clicking on the file:

I know this isn’t necessarily something that people need, but it’s really handy.

So there you have it: one quick and easy sign up and installation, and you won’t need your little flash drives much anymore, and you’ll have backups of all your files.  Use this link to sign up and install it and you’ll get a little extra room in your Dropbox (and so will I, thanks).

You can’t hear me right now, but I’m practicing laughing at those of you who read this and still lose your files.  I’m an obnoxious jerk for your benefit.

I’ve heard a number of people lately talking about how they’re going to give up on Twitter or Facebook, and read a few articles about “social media exhaustion”.  I can understand it to a certain extent, but I feel the same way about computers in general: the appeal is not in the technology itself, but the fact that the technology just happens to provide me with the perfect medium for various parts of my life.  My blog gives me an outlet for the writing that I always like doing, but that journals never satisfied.  I love Facebook because it’s gotten me back in touch with tons of people from my long ago past and keeps me in the lives of people that I care very much for but rarely get to see. I love my RSS reader because it lets me devour enormous amounts of information and I love mp3s because it lets me devour enormous amounts of music.  I love Twitter because I can scratch little thought itches and then continue on my day.

I’m not going to predict that I won’t give up on Twitter, Facebook or any of my blogs–realized or imagined–because I could give up on them at any moment.  But the reason that I’ll be giving up on them isn’t because of social media fatigue or because I think they’ve gotten stupid: it’ll be because they’re no longer the right tools for what I looked to them for in the first place.  No matter how much people like to think of me as a tech geek, I’m really not.  I just get excited about the fact that it lets me do the things I want to do.

Nutshell: Get your Outlook calendar showing up as a separate calendar in your Google calendar. Warning: this post will use the word “calendar” often.

Let’s get it out of the way: if you use gmail and have a phone capable of a calendar and contacts, and don’t use Google Calendar (gCal, for the sake of not repeating the C word so much), you’re crazy. The new auto sync for gCal and Google contacts is awesome, making your iPhone about kabillion times more powerful that any dumb ol’ Blackberry. Make a change on your gCal or in your contacts and it shows up a few seconds later on the other. Amazing.

Insults aside (oh, let’s not kid ourselves: insults are always possible around here), it’s a powerful tool, and when you use the gCal/Outlook sync tool, it means you can have your work calendar on your phone and gCal as well.

The problem with that, though, is that the gCal/Outlook sync tool only syncs up one calendar, so when I went into gCal, I saw a whole ton of events all on my main calendar, when what I really wanted was a way to have my work life and personal life separated out into calendars that I could turn on and off.

Figured it! And it’s easy. Basically, all you have to do is:

1. create another Google account (no problem for me: I always create a separate Google account with my work email address as the username)
2. have the gCal/Outlook sync tool sync to that account
3. share the calendar in the work Google account with your personal account

And there you have it: two calendars that can be turned off and on as necessary, both in gCal or on my iPhone (here’s the instructions on how to show multiple calendars). The people that I share my personal calendar with no longer see all of my daily meetings, they only see the stuff that takes up my nights and weekends, which is all they’d be interested in anyway.

This does have at least one drawback that I’ve found: times when the work and personal calendars converge (like vacations or work-time personal appointments) take more managing than if you just have the gCal/Outlook sync dumping your work appointments on your main Google calendar.  I’ve found that it means that I have to duplicate the appointment so that it shows up on my work calendar, showing me as busy so that no one invites me to a meeting only to have me break their heart when I decline their meeting invitation.  I hate it when they cry.

And now, to sign off as I sign off so many of my work emails: hope that makes sense.

The common line on Twitter for those that aren’t on it is, “I don’t get Twitter”. But when I go to try and explain it, I realize that, in spite of using it on a daily basis for well over a year, there’s a lot of times that I don’t really get it either.

Yesterday, one of my Facebook friends mentioned he had got on Twitter out of professional necessity, but still didn’t get it, and in trying to explain it to him, I crystallized to myself what it is about Twitter that make me continue to use it as well as why it’s so popular.

Twitter rarely gets called a “microblogging platform” anymore, which is kind of a shame, because a blogging platform is exactly what it is. And, like with full, long-winded blogs, it’s the desire to find a medium for an already-existing message that keeps it going. If you get on Twitter just for the sake of Twitter, then you’ll likely be one of those annoying people who writes things like “@repliedperson Yeah, totally” or “@repliedperson Sounds great! How does Sunday at 1 pm sound?” But if you have a desire to express something but not the time or inclination to organize it into longer expressions, Twitter is your platform.

And this was the big realization: Twitter has survived and flourished because it forces brevity, making it not only easier and quicker to write, but quicker and easier to read. The web is littered with abandoned blogs, but people stay on Twitter because it’s an outlet without being a time suck. Which explains why many of those people that rarely-if-ever-updated blogs are still on Twitter: put half an hour into a post and no one reads it, and it’s frustrating, but 10 seconds of a Twitter post and no one reads it? Big deal.

I have it on pretty damn good authority that at the Tools of Change conference–an annual meeting of book publishers–there was a prediction that mass adoption of digital book readers like the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle would happen in about 12-18 months.

Total crap.

First, you can take any prediction regarding technical adoption or advances and multiply it by three at least before you’ll actually have an anywhere-near accurate prediction. These things are usually said by the early adopters who are surrounded by other early adopters, who tack on a year or so and assume that EVERYone will be doing it. Meaning only that the early adopters will have convinced some of their spouses to give it a try.  12-18 months before mass adoption of ereaders?  Far from likely.

Secondly, the Sony Reader still looks pretty clunky, but it’s downright futuristic compared to the Kindle, which is on its second version and still looks like something that some gearhead whipped up in his garage lab one weekend after reconnecting the wiring of a Speak & Spell. There is nothing exciting about these devices, and digital books are going to need a gadget with a wow factor before they get anything more than the people who are a cross between bookworm and tech geek.

Third, while there’s a lot of advantages to having books being digital (as I look at the huge pile of books that I have sitting on my bookshelf that still get shuttled around in the heaviest boxes every time I move), there’s more disadvantages.  You’re not going to take a $200 device on the beach or in the bathtub, and no one’s going to mug you for a paperback.

Most importantly, though, the book industry doesn’t really have as much pressure on it to digitize as the movie or music industries do. This is simply because music and movies are already digital. People just had to figure out a way to rip and compress DVDs and CDs, which they did. So movie and music industries have had to go along with digitizing their wares because they’re competing with people who have already figured out how to do it.  On the other hand, it’s a hell of a task to digitize a paperback.

There were apparently a ton of people sweating at the Tools of Change conference, but really they don’t need to. Unlike record labels, a publisher could elect to not digitize their works and not really have to worry about pirated copies floating around.  You either buy the book or you don’t read it.

One point that digitizing advocates make is that the iPod took off partly because of the ease of use of the iTunes store.  I think there’s plenty to that argument, but one thing where books are different is that, with mp3s, just about everyone already had quite a few mp3s on their computer that they could add to their library, not to mention the CDs that could be ripped, creating a large library in a small amount of time. Going to a digital book reader is only possible when you’ve made a conscious decision to switch.

It’s not that I think that books won’t eventually go digital. They will, and the flexible digital screens that are being worked on will make it a possibility. But I’m saying that wide adoption is still at least five years off. You’ll know people with Kindles and may even buy one of your own. But the day when it’s a standard and not a sidenote is still a long way off.

It’s one thing to have a pointless geeky obsession. Most of us have some fascination/obsession that keeps us busy. But it’s the combination of that geekitude with a complete lack of a functioning internal monologue that you get a person (namely: me) who deserves the label of “dork”. But maybe, just maybe, one of you who is a little quieter but no less obsessive can actually learn from this laughable interest of mine that I somehow can’t keep quiet about.

It comes in two parts. The first part is a desire to collect every song on the Pitchfork 500. It’s been a surprisingly time-consuming hobby, but the end result is a collection that gives a fantastic overview of the last 22 years of music.

But this post isn’t about the music. No, that would be too interesting. It’s about this second part, which is…oh, dear…well, see the thing is that…it’s just that I kind of…I got to the point where there was no way I could keep track of what I had and so I…um…I kind of…

…made a spreadsheet.

There. I said it. Now those of you who are only interested in the Pitchfork 500 part can just quit reading now. And if you’ve never thought of spreadsheets as “fun”, you definitely shouldn’t read on any further.  But if you’re interested in how I made this spreadsheet using iTunes and Google Spreadsheet’s awesome external data functions so that it updates with the changes I make in my iTunes library, then read on.

The start of the project was simple enough: make a playlist of the Pitchfork 500 songs that I already had. I had learned from past experience with this level of ridiculous obsession that it’s better to tag the songs using the “Grouping” field in a song’s info than it is to just drop them into a playlist and then create a smart playlist, meaning that you can always delete the playlist and then easily recreate it later.  I also found that it helps with the sorting to add a number, so in the Grouping field in iTunes, I would put PF500-001, PF500-002, etc., making sure to put that very first in the Grouping, so that I just sort the smart playlist by Grouping and then I have the full list.

To keep track of what I had and what I still needed, I made the spreadsheet, putting in a column where I could type “Yes” or “No” when I found whether I had it or not and could easily change when I got one I didn’t have.  I used conditional formatting (”Change colors with rules” in Google Spreadsheets) so if I wrote “No” in the “Have?” column, it would give it a red background, making it easy to see at a glance what I had and what I didn’t.  Finally, I added in a count (=countif(C4:C506,”No”)), just so I could see my progress of what I had and what I didn’t.

All fine and well until I found that what my spreadsheet said and why my playlist had were off, and finding out where they were off was a real pain. I knew that I’d made a mistake in the tagging, but I couldn’t find where.  What I needed was for that spreadsheet to automatically look at the playlist and tell me what I had and what I didn’t, rather than me going and typing in not only the tag in iTunes, but the “Yes” or “No” in the spreadsheet.  I knew that getting the XML of the playlist and then using the =ImportXML function was the solution, but there were a number of hitches in the way.

Problem one: exporting the XML of the playlist.
Solution one: no problem. Just select the playlist and select File > Library > Export Playlist

Problem two: putting it online.
Solution two: This should be easy, but I wanted it to be easier. I knew that I could take the exported XML and put it on my server, but that involved FTPing, etc. It’s only a few steps, but I believe very strongly in doing things in as few steps as possible.

Dropbox to the rescue.  I love them.  I just export the XML file straight to the “Public” folder and then reference that: http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/11104/Pitchfork_500.xml

Problem three: Getting the right xpath statement to reference only the “Grouping” field in the XML.
Solution three: This was a tough one. I hate XML that doesn’t have a clear naming and grouping structure, and the iTunes XML certainly doesn’t. There’s tons of “Key” elements which refer to all of the fields in a song’s info. So selecting the info wasn’t as easy as going, say, “//song/Grouping/”.

I don’t know why it took me so long to Google the correct answer, but my answer came in a “contains” function to use in the XPath, so what I ended up with was: “//plist/dict/dict/dict/string[contains(.,'PF500')]“.  That did the trick. After that, I had a list of all the groupings.

From there, I just needed a LEFT function that would remove the PF500 tag from any other tag that happened to come through in the grouping (see “Dynamic” sheet, column B), and then use a MATCH statement that would cross-reference the first sheet with what came through from the XML and then change the “Have?” column (column B) so that it changes the “Yes”, “No” automatically. Now, there’s absolutely no difference between what’s in the spreadsheet and what’s in my library.  Plus, I learned a thing or two.  Plus, I’m a geek and just enjoy doing these sorts of things simply for the sake of doing them.

Here’s what you should take from it: 1) Google spreadsheet’s ImportXML function is awesome, 2) Dropbox is awesome and 3) the Pitchfork 500 is an amazing view into the last 22 years of music, and is well worth some money and elbow grease to put together.

Note: if you want to have a spreadsheet like that of your own, just go to the spreadsheet and then select File > Save a copy

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I’ll almost surely regret saying it so many times one day: I welcome our Google overlords.

Google’s made a few changes to gmail and it’s auxillary parts in the last few days that make it even better than it was before, and it was already the best email client out there.  Notice that I didn’t qualify the “best” with “free”.  That’s because I think it stomps all over any email client, including Outlook and Thunderbird.  I constantly search around Outlook trying to figure out how to do the things I can do so easily in Gmail.

Gmail is adding features that make switching to Gmail from Hotmail, Yahoo or a host of other services a breeze. This seems to be able to do the switching without paying the fees that Hotmail and Yahoo charge to forward your email; a charge that you don’t get with Gmail.

So why should you switch?

• Free forwarding. This is something almost no other service does. You don’t like Gmail?  You just forward it somewhere else and don’t think twice about it. Every other place I’ve seen will charge you for it.
• Threaded conversations. I have to admit that I didn’t like the organization of Gmail when I first started using it, but now that I’m used to it, it drives me nuts that it’s any other way anywhere else.
• Labels. I didn’t use labels for a while, but once I did, I started getting frustrated that they weren’t in every email program. It’s a way of tagging your emails, rather than having to pick one folder to put them in. I’m much more organized in gmail than I am in Outlook.
• Labs. New features are coming out all the time that are constantly keeping gmail not just ahead of everyone else, but way far ahead. Funny to think that when they started up Labs for gmail, it seemed disappointing and lame.
• Mobile phone synching. Starting today, you can have your mobile phone automatically keep your Google calendar and Gmail contacts. No more worrying about your SIM card or keeping info in multiple places.

If you’re using another Yahoo or Hotmail, you really should switch.  If you’re using the email address you got from your ISP, you definitely should switch. One day, you’ll move providers, and you’ll end up having to go through all the pains of switching anway.  And if you’re using your work email address for anything–anything–besides work related stuff?  Then I have a present for you.  See?  It’s a bag full of scorn. It’s candy scorn, because I somewhat understand how you got in the predicament you’re in, but don’t ever, EVER use your work email for anything other than work. EVER. Don’t let your friends or loved ones do it, either.  Let the people you hate do it, though. It’s likely to get them fired.

In a flurry of posts to hit my RSS reader today, I found out that Google had launched a product called Google Latitude. It’s a pretty simple (at the end, anyway) and unoriginal idea: people can see where you are on a map. You have to approve people before they can see you, and you can either set your location by typing in an address or by having it automatically recognize you. You can turn it off anytime.

In case you didn’t quite follow that from my ridiculously simplistic explanation, please enjoy this ridiculously simplistic video:

Notice how the video doesn’t show it working on an iPhone? That’s because it doesn’t work on the iPhone yet. Sorry I don’t have a video to explain that point a little better. I have to say that I kind of like the fact that Google is clearly making a statement by launching this without having it working on the iPhone. I love my iPhone and I love my Mac, but Apple needs to be taken down a peg or two or twenty from the high horse.

Anyway, the pro/con of Latitude (cue Jimmy Buffett) is pretty obvious, but I’m going into it anyway. The negative is that it, if you choose to block out any of the positives of it, it’s really fucking creepy. People–even people I know well and who I’ve given permission to watch me jump all over town like a Family Circus cartoon–being able to watch you move around town puts a nasty tightening sensation in my nasty bits, and that’s before I stop to think about someone with thefty tendencies getting ahold of it and seeing when I’m not at home. Then I start to panic a bit.

But after a nice breathe into a paper bag, the upsides get a little clearer. We’re in an era where everyone loves pointing out how disconnected we’re becoming from each other, but we are, in fact, even more connected. There’s the plusses of Latitude that the video above gives you with illustrations (that means “comics”), but here’s another example: let’s say you’re sitting at a coffee shop and wouldn’t mind a little company. In the old way of doing things (cue infomercial black-and-white and pained expressions), you would call your friends up one by one and see if they want to join you, only to get turned down one-by-one because they’re all “doing laundry” and only wearing their “stained sweatpants”. In this new way, you can post where you are on Twitter or Facebook or (now) Latitude and have whoever can join come join. Coffee shops are going to get even more popular.

Note to self: buy stock in coffee shops, 200 shares of Coffee Shop Total Index Fund (DJI: CSTIF).

Yes, I’m using it. I reserve the right to turn it off in the future, but for now, it’s actually nice to think about knowing where people are in relation to me. That creepy feeling may come creeping back in soon enough, but at the moment, the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages that, for now, aren’t really too much of a concern. For now…