Substitutions

You may have heard that I love the Flock web browser. You may not have heard that Flock has changed the browser their product is based on from Mozilla's (for 2.x) to Google's (for 3.x).
I'm trying to adapt.
In the process of moving from one version of Flock to the other, I have to find Chrome extensions to match those that I used with the 2.x version of Flock, along with the features no longer built into Flock 3.x.
One of the features that keeps me on the Firefox side is the offline blog editor that integrates that version's drag-and-drop clipboard, which does wonders for quickly adding photos to a new post. I just found this new Chrome extension called Scribefire, which is a blog editor of sorts. I'm still looking for some sort of clipboard, but may be completely out of luck.
Onward and upward, if not a slight bit to the left!

I need your help

I'm making some playlists to keep handy on my phone, and I would like your help in making some suggestions. As I receive suggestions, I'll add the songs to my playlists. I'm looking for three categories of music, all of which I would like to make me want to move in some rhythmic fashion, however strange and clumsy that may be.

Our first category is the classic Cowbell. Why Cowbell? I want to be prepared in case I happen to run across Bruce Dickinson and I need some way to break the ice.

Secondly, we have the Harmonica. It is a simple instrument, but one nearly as versatile as a piano. I can't get enough Harmonica, fast or slow.

Last, we have Brass. I've always had an affinity for brass instruments, and still regret not staying with the Cornet longer. I love the rumbling bravado of the Tuba and Baritone, the blaring screams of the Trumpet and Cornet, and everything in between.

If you have any favorites that fit in these categories, I'll gladly add them to the playlists, so we can all benefit.

Thanks for your help!!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The Latest Adventure of Note

This entry is a bit complicated, and could be a bit long winded (for me). Monday began as many have, combing through recommended job openings and looking for new ones. I hit a particularly productive streak, where the jobs I applied for were similar enough to ones I'd previously prepared my resume for that I didn't need any more preparation for them. within 40 minutes, I had completed applications and submitted different resumes for 8 separate jobs, and was feeling pretty good about myself.

I spent the rest of the morning looking for others and took a break in the afternoon, entertaining the idea of repurposing my brother-in-law's old iPhone as an iPod touch. I was happy to see this could be done, just not with my current SIM card.

Not long after, I got a phone call by somebody who was looking at my resume. I was elated to have such a phone call not started by myself. The guy was calling about one of the eight positions mentioned earlier, an MDT Technician.

For those of your who don't know, and MDT is a Mobile Data Terminal, and can be used for any number of data collection/availability activities. Any time you sign for a package from UPS or FedEx, it's on an MDT. Many retail stores use them as well for tracking merchandise. They come in many sizes and shapes, so there's no telling exactly what it is in this case.

The gentleman wanted to bring me in for an interview THE NEXT DAY, which of course I agreed to. That day would also be the first day of school in Ohio for the kids. No big deal, right? He wanted to meet at 3:00pm (ummm... Bye, kids!), and started trying to give me directions for roads I had no familiarity with. I tried to cut to the chase and asked for the address. He didn't have the address for the particular building he was in, but gave me the address for their corporate headquarters, saying they were located across the highway from there.

I thanked him kindly for the appointment, said goodbye, and set out to look the place up. I hadn't been able to quite make out his name or the name of the company, but the address was sure to be of help. Allison and I set out to track down some information, along with figuring out what we were going to do the next day. We found out the address belonged to what was originally a local delivery company, now claiming to be among the premeire LTL carriers around (I didn't know what that meant, either). The company listing the job appeared to be unrelated, so we figured they were merely a placement agency, but even more curious, looking through the job listings for the trucking company we were unable to find any relevant openings!

After Allison got off the phone from telling her mom the news, she told me Lisa had offered to pick up the kids from their bus stop. This would allow Allison to go with me to the interview, which I was very happy for. I had never been to the city of Wilmington before.  There was  much discussion of which route to take to get there. I was happy to leave it in the hands of the experts.

***

Tuesday came along, and we walked the kids to the bus stop for their first day of school. After seeing them off on the bus, we delivered their school supplies to the school, shmoozed with their teachers, and caught them at the door to take them to their classrooms. Allison took me to the barber, as I was begining to be in need of a haircut once again.

We got back home to prepare for the trip to Wilmington, and found a cute little flag in our yard, indicating that our gas had been turned off for maintenance. Oh, really? We both took care of showering and such without running out of ot water, which at least felt like some kind of victory. After carefully selecting my wardrobe for the day, it was decided I needed a new tie. We left for Meijer to look for one on the way out to Wilmington.

Guess what? Meijer doesn't have ties in stock for "the season" yet. They just got their dress shirts in. Hmmm... T.J. Maxx had what we needed, and so we were off to Wilmington.

We found the company headquarters after a fairly pleasant drive out to the "country." The place was impressive, with a well tended water feature out in front. I walked through the revolving door into the lobby to ask for which way to their Tech Center, and was very politely given the proper directions. The place was easily found and we had about two hours to spare, but it was getting close to lunchtime.

We had lunch at the local convention center. Yes. The hotel had a convention center and a Max & Erma's built in. Our server was nice and we had fun eating our food and wasting time. Eventually the bad cable news became too overpowering and we had to leave. We found a parking spot at our destination and Allison and I discussed a few interviewey things.

When I got around to making my way to the building, I still had about 10 minutes before the appointment. I called the extention for my contact at the door and he came out to meet me, took me to a conference room, then left me with a job application while he finished up a meeting. He came back about 15 minutes later, with a few coworkers and the interview began.

We discussed where I had been, why I was in Ohio, why I wasn't with Intel any more, all kinds of different things they were looking for and how well I could fit those functions. I'm happy to say I believe I exceeded everything they threw at me, and I we all shook hands with smiles when the interview was over. After that I got to tour their shop and ask questions, which was also a lot of fun.

I left with a great feeling, which I'm still carrying with me the next day. Even if I they don't hire me, I'm rooting for them from the stands. They have a small operation, but they are quick and agile because of it, and they work with all kinds of gadgets all the time.

When we got back on the road. Allison heard from her mom that there had been some severe school bus snafus, and the kids were very late getting home. This gave me an idea for what could be done to make it simple for parents to find out where their kids were, or at least how long until the bus arrived at the stop, using technology simliar to that being built by the company I just interviewed for. Hmmmmm...

In any case, it was all very exciting and I had great fun! I hope I get the called back with an offer, as I would LOVE to work there.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Get out there and go Geocaching!

While I've been aware of it for a long time, Geocaching has never felt like a very compelling thing to do, until we had to come up with a an on-the-spot birthday gift for my step-dad. He's been wanting to start geocaching for a long time, asking my sister to keep an eye out for a deal on one with the features they want for both car and trail use.

So while I was pondering what to get him for his birthday, I was reminded that I actually owned a (very old) stand alone GPS of my own, a Garmin GPS II. I got it out, replaced the batteries, fired it up, then sat it on the window sill while I finished shopping for a book to complete the perfect (and now less expensive) Geocaching starter gift. After finding the best book for the job (The Complete Idiot's Guide to Geocaching, 2nd Edition) and placing the order, I check out the GPS II and saw that it was indeed grabbing a few satellites. Ron was gonna be in business.

Somewhere in the process of looking for gifts, and trolling about the Geocaching website, we caught the fever as well. I was amazed to find that there are a few hundreds of caches just in our humble city of Lacey, Washington. I was still using my former phone at the time, which had proven its usefulness as a GPS previously, so I poked and prodded it a bit to see if it could be useful for geocaching.

It turned out to be very useful. As a member of AT&T Wireless' App Store Beta Site, I had some extra software already installed, in the form of Trimble Outdoors. Previous to this, I hadn't found a real use for it, but it made things VERY EASY to get started. Once you have registered your phone on Trimble's website, and registered your account on the Geocaching website, you can send any geocache's information directly to Trimble, and then download that information to your phone later. We used this method to find our first four caches. The only problem? This phone was not made to run any add-on software, having very little RAM, to the point that recieving a text message while doing anything else could be a major pain.

Replacing the Nokia phone was already in the works, but also left our geocaching adventures temporarily in the lurch because my replacement phone didn't have a GPS, and we weren't exactly prepared to shell out more money for whole other unit. Thanks to TrekBuddy, I have found a way to use my new phone (a Sony Ericsson K850i) with a bluetooth GPS reciever (a Holux M-1000)that we picked up for much less than a stand-alone unit would have cost. The end result is VERY simple to use, and costs very little to enjoy.

Installing Trekbuddy is a snap for most non-smartphones (if you have a smartphone, you probably have MANY OTHER apps to choose from). If you don't have a data plan, you can still download it to your computer and use your USB cable, memory card reader, or bluetooth to get it to your phone and install it. If you have a choice, install it to run from your memory card to facilitate the adding of LOC or GPX files.

Trekbuddy is actually very simple to use, but my problem with it was that it was too simple. It starts by showing you a map of the entire earth.  How was this going to turn into something useful? It really didn't. This map is just a graphical placeholder. If you want, there are a number of tools available for grabbing various maps of different sizes and types to show instead of the global atlas view. I grabbed a map of Lacey using GoogleMaps 2 TrekBuddy and dropped it in the \TrekBuddy\Maps folder on my phone's memory card to give me some street references. You don't have any zoom control, but TrekBuddy allows you to build atlases that include maps of varying detail for just this purpose. My take on this is that you really don't NEED that sort of detail for simple geocaching. Once you get close, you'll pretty much just need the Compass display to get you in the vicinity of your intended cache. This brings us to the question of how you get the geocache location information into Trekbuddy.

If you are too cheap to pay for Geocaching.com's premium membership (like me), you can't get access to the downloadable GPX files that contain all the handy information available on their website for each cache, but you can have the LOC files which contain the bare essentials. TrekBuddy can deal with either one of these. Simply find the cache(s) you want to look for on the Geocaching website, download the GPX or LOC files, then drop them in the \TrekBuddy\wpts folder on your phone.

Now that you have the basics, give it a try when you have some time and decent weather, and remember to keep an eye out for Muggles.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Become a Guru, and Win!

So you may have noticed that I'm a user of GetGlue.

If you haven't noticed, please take a moment to gaze over to the left of this page. At the top of the sidebar you can see a cute little "Enhanced with Glue" sign. There. Now you have surely noticed.

You may be asking why you should care, and you may be wondering why you are still reading this, but I'm hoping to answer both of these questions for you very soon.

AdaptiveBlue's GetGlue leverages the power of popular shopping and informational websites (that you probably already use) to allow you to share, and leave comments for, things you like or dislike without leaving the web page you were originally on. Glue also makes use of Facebook and Twitter to share your accomplishments with your friends. I've decided to throw a little self-promotion in as well. When my wife was writing Haikus about movies, I used GetGlue's comment capability to post links to her work for each movie.

One of Glue's most recently added features is called Guru Giveaways. When you have demonstrated your interest for a given book, movie, or music (or just chatted people up a lot), you may become a Guru for that item. Once you have become a Guru, you are then eligible to receive free promotional giveaways for your particular Guru topic, or one related to it. The eligible topics are determined by the giveaway's sponsor and the folks at GetGlue.

I was a winner of a $20 Fandango gift card to see The Wolfman for being a Guru of a related topic (I don't know which one, as my Guru status has been dwindling of late). All it took was a few clicks and comments using the GlueBar that popped up when I browsed a couple of IMDB, Amazon, and WikiPedia pages.

So give it a try! It's easy to use, and doesn't take any extra time.  Maybe you can get a free book or album for leaving a few words about things you love.

To see the most recent list of Guru Giveaways (from March 8th), click here: http://blog.adaptiveblue.com/?p=4377

Blogged with the Flock Browser

And now you know.

I've decided this is the reason I haven't been blogging in a while. I was preparing for (last year's) National Procrastination Week!

kEnny's Rant

I have an email problem. A stupid email problem.

Many years ago when so many of us thought it was cool that America Online allowed access through it's service to the internet, I was an AOL customer. Once I had graduated from AOL, I kept my AIM account active to chat with my family. I did not know at the time what a stroke of genius this would turn out to be. Despite all my best efforts to shut my profile away from wandering eyes, I seemed to be attracting the attention of many curious young people (mostly underage girls). One of these curious young people eventually turned into my wife, which was the only good thing I could say about AIM at that point.

Flash forward, a bit. In an attempt to keep the man from perpetually sticking it to us we dropped our POTS for VOIP from Vonage. Vonage had many class leading features at the time, including one which I exploited to the best of my advantage: Voice mail. In the "olden" days of Vonage, you could email your voice mail audio files to a single email address, which was pretty handy if everyone using this single phone line could get to that same email address. I used a private Google Group as the destination for the messages, which could distribute the incoming messages to the other "members" of the group: Our individual email accounts, and the SMS email address for my phone (we could have done Allison's too, but she already had too many people chatting her up). Our cell provider conveniently removed the attached audio file, so the message going to my phone consisted of a time and phone number, which was better than nothing as the WAV file didn't make for a valid MMS, either.

When I got my first Sony Ericsson phone, the K790a, I was very excited to learn that it was able to log into POP and IMAP accounts all by itself. Aside from being able to email full size 3.2MP photographs taken by it's camera, this also meant I could actually go so far as to send complete voice mail messages to my phone for remote listening. The cool thing about Sony Ericsson is that their phones support IMAP's Push feature, so if you have an email provider that supports the same feature, you don't have to wait for whatever time interval to pass before finding your new message in your inbox. I set out to find an appropriate (read FREE) email provider supporting IMAP's Push.

In those days, Gmail was still in it's infancy, and was still having trouble supporting IMAP, so it wasn't even in the running. I looked high and low for free providers, and couldn't find more than one available in the US. Which one was it? That's right: AOL/AIM Mail. I was able to log right in and set it up with no problem. It worked really well. There was NEVER any spam.  All I ever got was the messages I emailed to it, and the voice mails from Vonage.

Not long after this semi-utopia of voice mail retrieval was set up, my phone was sent through both the washer AND dryer.

Since that time, I went through a couple of phones, including WinMo and Symbian devices, neither of which could support IMAP push. They sucked. Then, we dropped Vonage. It just wasn't very useful to us any more, especially with Google Voice supplying each of us with extra phone numbers. I still kept the AIM email account so that I could email videos from the my phone to Facebook. In December, I got this email for AOL's President of Consumer Applications, Brad Garlinghouse:

Dear kEnny,

Today marks a very important milestone in AOL’s history – and future. As we separate from Time Warner and become an independent company, we mark the beginning of a fresh start and open the door to new opportunities. I believe this is a perfect time for rebuilding trust, confidence and passion around AOL and the products we bring you.

I realize that – at times - over the past few years, it’s been challenging to be an AOL Mail user. I’ve heard your feedback and we’re going to start making changes with a renewed focus on you. We can and will make our free AOL Mail product world class!

We’re starting today with three simple (but important) changes:

1. Significantly fewer ads
2. An easier AOL Mail sign-in experience
3. A new message reading pane that helps you get through your email faster

I know that some of you are comfortable with your current email experience. So, wherever possible we’ll provide you with the choice to disable new features and keep the classic email product.

This is just the beginning. I’m truly excited about what’s to come in 2010 so please stay along for the ride. Our promise going forward is to keep you well informed of the changes we make and the new features we launch. In the meantime, please continue to send us your feedback or suggestions as we work to build a world class email experience – focused on you.

Thanks again for choosing AOL Mail!

Sincerely,

Brad Garlinghouse
President, AOL Consumer Applications

Since then, I've gotten a few spamessages a day. Yesterday, I recieved my latest Sony Ericsson phone, and was able to see, in real time, what a turd this service has become. I think they've come a long way in making things better. Thanks, AOL!

Blogged with the Flock Browser