Organizing Events

Four years ago, my dad's side of the family started having a week-long reunion every two years.  This week is the third installation of the series.  In each of the previous reunions, we had a rather ragged and hard to follow series of emails blasted out to most (but usually not all) of the concerned parties.  This would often keep some important details from making it to a few people, which I had made an effort to remember later on so that we might avoid this problem in the future.

Dad started asking for suggestions (as it was his turn to organize) for events during this last Winter, and I was hit with a moment of realization. We could make our own common interest "Group" using the resources of our favorite web portal (MSN, Yahoo!, Google, etc.) to keep track of conversations, schedules, and anything else we might need.  Most denizens of the web have become members at sites like these, usually looking for advise concerning life experience of some sort.  I had been using Google Groups as a repository for our Vonage voicemail, until Vonage got better at distribution of voicemail alerts and Gmail started expanding their storage capabilities.  Administering the Google Group, exposed me to a lot of features that I grew to love about Google's brand of group. 

With this in mind, I suggested the idea to Dad, who fell in line with it right away.  I set about making it all happen.  I quickly realized some drawbacks to going Google.  In order to become a member of a Google Group, one has to have a Google/Gmail account.  This was no problem for me, but might not work so well for some of my relatives.  Another bad part was that there wasn't any integration between Google Groups and Google Calendar (another favorite of mine that requires a Google account).  With these two problems in mind, I set about finding the next best thing.  That ended up being Yahoo! Groups.  Yahoo has some very flexible posting and summary option, keeps things simple, and includes a calendar.  Did I mention that you don't need to be a card-carrying Yahoo! Mail user either?

The only thing I didn't find acceptable about the Yahoo! solution was notification and presentation of the Calendaring resources.  I decided to stick to it anyway, and construct a solution for myself to get the scheduling available on my phone in time for the week of fun in the Summer.

Well, the Yahoo! Group was a big hit, and my aunt started a companion group for sharing information and organizing events for a much larger chunk of family to meet up on occaision.  Dad started laying out the weeks activities, filling in details when he could.  We had plenty of discussions about it all, and it was very easy to use.  There was no more worrying if we were sending all our email to the right addresses or not.

My personal desire for access to the calendar from my cell phone drove me to sample options for importing and exporting the group calendar to other applications.  From Yahoo! Mail, one can view group calendars alongside your own personal calendar, but you can't actually do anything with them until you bring them into your own calendar.  After that, I was able to export the calendar to a CSV file, which could be imported into a Google Calendar I had set up for the same purpose.  This went fairly smoothly, except for one event that didn't make it across by itself.

This was the point where I became glad to have stuck with Google for myself.  I had attempted to print the week's agenda from Yahoo before this, and it just looked horrible.  I tried out the same trick with Google's version, and not only did it come out very polished looking and informative-like, but I was given the option of saving it in PDF format.  So I did that too, then uploaded it to the Yahoo! Group.  I think that was the most useful thing I did for the whole event.

I just finished checking some of the pictures from the big picnic, and I can't wait to see these folks again.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

kEnny's Favorite E-Tools!

Let me preface this entry with the notice that one of the tools listed here, of which I am undoubtedly a fan of - and could even be considered an evangelist for, rather failed me the other day. I was well into the task of typing the original version of this post, when Flock choked and lost all but the title. Oops!!

I have been on a quest for a number of years to become more elegantly (but not intrusively so) organized on a number of levels. In this time of ever-increasing availability of information I have found quite the smörgåsbord of options for keeping one's life in order. My particular quandary lies in the fact that there are times when I spend copious amounts of time using a computers, lots of computers, and others when I am glad to stay away for a nice long time.

I have enjoyed the usage of Microsoft Outlook at work in keeping me aware of and (as much as it is able to) on time for appointments. Before the days of cell phones that could synchronize their calendars with PIMs, I found a way to keep myself current while away from my own PC: using VBA to forward Outlook's pop-up notifications to my cell phone. I can't tell you how many meetings this kept me from missing. It made me aware that there are always alternative means to keep on schedule, and that I could increase the productivity of others by promoting that awareness.

At work, I use Outlook to keep track of multiple projects, remind me of mundane tasks, tell me where and when my meetings are, and keep the unimportant stuff from getting in the way of my work. While Outlook is a very capable application for work, have untethered myself from it for personal organization, as it requires me to be attached to a single computer. At home I have 3 different PCs I use, so it just doesn't do the job. Browser based email and calendaring, coupled with easy integration of newer "smart phones", give me the continuity I ask for without keeping me tied to a computer screen. The purpose of this post is to increase the awareness of many of the handy tools I have found, and maybe some of their lesser known features as well.


Web Browsers- There are a few big ones to choose from, and a lot of others that leverage their technology. While Internet Explorer is a necessary evil at work, it has no compelling features that make me want to recommend it. Here are my favorites:

• Opera: Very flexible and standards compliant. Available across multiple platforms, including mobile devices. Want to know what I like it best for? Setting the default magnification allows me to browse the web easilly on the 61" TV from across the room without ever having to fiddle with the settings again. Unlike any other web browser I have tried, Opera alters the size of images and plug-ins like Flash movies to scale the whole page (not just the text) for easy viewing. It seems to have some problems with some sites using Ajax features, but I've read that can be as much the website's fault as Opera's. Opera also includes voice support, by allowing you to control it vocally, and it can read content back to you.
  
• Firefox: My favorite all purpose browser. Firefox's strength is in it's ability to add functions thought up by smart people not associated directly with the browser's development. I'll touch on some of my favorite ones shortly.
• Flock: Based on Firefox's Gecko rendering engine, Flock is a wonder to behold. Coined as "The Social Web Browser", Flock has gone and integrated support for many of the more popular hot spots on the web, making quick work of uploading photos & videos, blogging, bookmarking, and keeping up with your friends who are doing the same. I try to use it for all my blog posts, because the off line capabilities combined with powerful online integration make it a very pleasurable experience. Like Firefox, Flock can be enhanced with extensions, and in fact many of the extensions written for the former can be used by the latter.

Websites & Online Services- In trying to make my own and other information available from my phone (via SMS-only right now) and from any computer I end up being attached to, I have assembled a bushel of helpers. I should stress that because most of these services offer some level of SMS functionality, it really doesn't matter what kind of mobile phone you have (even if you end up putting your phone through the laundry and have to use a substitute for a while). Here they are:

• Google: Talk about overload. It seems like I am always curious what Google is up to next. When they buy a company or enhance any service, I am all over it. They have extensive resources available on the web of course, but many of them bridge across to mobile use as well. I use GMail and Google Calendar to keep my personal life in order. While my cell phone's calendar gets synchronized with my work calendar, Google's Calendar sends me SMS messages to remind me where I need to be. I can add new events and invite people by sending an SMS message to GVENT. Google's recent purchase of GrandCentral caused me to sign up for that service as well. It is a universal voice telephone routing/messaging service that has so many possibilities I can't begin to tell you what they do in this post. Everything I get from Google is free of charge. I'm sure I'll end up paying for it in some other way.
• Yahoo!: I'll admit that I'm more attached to Google than Yahoo!, but Yahoo! has some very compelling competition to most things I use from Google. Something I've been wanting to try out from Yahoo! was their latest version of Yahoo! Go for mobile phones. It wraps up all their best mobile accessible content and squeezes it into an easy-to-use interface.
• AOL Instant Messenger: Don't get me wrong, I'm not really into instant messaging too much after it got me married (and it was AIM that did it, too). But after I got my first "nice" phone and was looking for ways to exercise it, I went looking for an IMAP email service that offered Push service. For a brief explanation, most email software needs to be running for you to find out that you have unread messages (the client PULLs the messages from the server), where Push services notify the client first (and in this case the client was my phone). AIM's email service is the only one I have found in the US offering free Push email service that didn't require extra software to be running on your PC or phone. Using AIM, I had working Visual Voicemail while it was just a cool idea at Apple.
• Vonage: I can't say they have distinctive service any more, and I can't say they are the best price in town, but they are the ones with the most reputation to protect. They give us reliable phone service with LOTS of features for a very low price. I get SMS alerts when someone leaves a message, and the messages are emailed to any email inbox I desire. Thanks for offering an alternative to Qwest!
• 4INFO: I found 4INFO after being disappointed by Cingular/AT&T's unreliable SMS alerts lack of punctuality (I think their "service" is contracted through Infospace, remember them?). After dropping the unlimited internet plan from my phone in favor of unlimited family messaging, I stopped my morning weather RSS feeds on my phone, and changed to morning weather SMS messages. I stuck with 4INFO because I can put up with the unobtrusive advertising at the bottom of the message, and because they send the information when I ask them to.
• Windows Live Alerts: This one I'm a little on the fence about, but I joined on the off chance that it would pay off. They supposedly offer local traffic updates, no matter how local you want to get, but I haven't gotten anything yet. Microsoft gets traffic data from both NAVTEQ and Inrix, so I figure if there's gonna be anything to report in Olympia, WA, it should be available there.
• Twitter: If I were a social butterfly, I'm sure I would be using this constantly. Twitter allows other you and your friends to keep track of the other's life via short messages that can either be entered via the internet or SMS. I think it would be fun for a large group of people to tour a park or zoo together. I only use it so far to access my To-Do List, brought to you by my next featured service:
• Remember The Milk: This service is my non-Outlook task reminder for things that don't go on the Google Calendar very well. RTM can be used for scheduling as well, but I like that I can use fairly plain English to set a reminder via SMS, quickly and easily. The first tab on my iGoogle home page contains an RTM widget now, which complements my Google Calendar widget quite nicely.
• Jott: This is one I just read about while looking for tips on advanced usages of RTM, and instantly had to join. There is a service that Vonage provides for an extra fee per message, or you can spend a little extra for multiple messages prepaid: Transcribed Voice mail. Jott doesn't quite do that to follow the same function as Vonage. You call Jott (toll free number is 1-866-JOTT-123) tell the machine who the message is for, and speak the message you want delivered, then Jott sends an email to the recipient with the transcribed message. The person(s) being addressed has to be in your Jott phone book for it to work.
  

While I really wanted to go into more detail about Firefox extensions and how I have all of these toys arranged to keep me happy, I think I'll have to make this a multi-part entry instead.

Come back for Part II!!!

Blogged with Flock

Much ado about Blah-Blah Blah

I'm sitting here with some time on my hands, so I thought I'd get some typing practice on my lovely ergonomic keyboard, which I have just recently rediscovered at my (gasp!) desk. This won't quite be a freewrite session so much as some of my thoughts of late, and what I would like to do about them. Meanwhile I'll be digesting my tasty turkey salad sandwich.

If I don't think about it, I'm a decent touch typist. I can go on for quite a stretch when I don't think about it. Too bad I am at the moment.

I've always enjoyed watching movies in theaters, so much that even though I have an entirely adequate home theater, I still have a hard time staying away from the local cinema. One of the things I'm preparing to tell you about has to do with my desire to go visit the movie theater. I'm not doing it so much to share my unending combination of lazy bastard and geek, but because I think I should document it somewhere so that when you see it later, you'll know I had the idea first.

My job allows me quite a bit of flexibility, and sometimes I choose to take longer lunch breaks than I might under normal circumstances. I used to comb through the movie listings from Google and Yahoo! to find the best movie to watch at the best time, at the best theater. In rather short order, that became too much like work (hey, does that make you wonder what I do? It sure makes me wonder). I decided it would be better to let someone else take care of this heavy lifting for me. Since one of my children is just beginning to read, I didn't feel comfortable giving this responsibility to them yet. I decided to see if I could get my trusty copy of Microsoft Office to do it for me.

My goal was to assemble a list of movies to wach at lunch, sorted by the approximate time of my return to work. I had used Excel in my search for a new HDTV before by using it to grab prices from one of the popular price-search websites, so I was somewhat familiar with using web queries, and manipulating the data from those queries. I started by looking at the data presented by a number of websites. I have still only found one that consistently differentiates AM times from PM times: Yahoo! was the one, so I set out to customize a query for each area theater to download the movies and showtimes on their own worksheet. This seemed to be working well, so I set out to start manipulating the data to assemble the return-drive offset times.

About halfway through this process I began realizing that Yahoo! was Screwing! With! Me! They were throwing ads and switching up the order of the theaters, so that I was not always getting the showtimes for the theaters I thought I was. I figured I would sort that out later as I was starting to work out a good system for converting a long string containing multiple times into multiple time entries with the correct 24hr time format (so I didn't try to watch an 11pm show at 11am). Next I put together another worksheet which would display all of the results. I decided at this point that it might be handy to filter for just a single movie. Yahoo! also had me covered because they could give me a list of just movies, guaranteed to have the same name as the lists of movies at each theaters. Now I had two sort methods to figure out, and a recurring problem with my movie theaters not staying in the same spot.

I decided to rework the whole thing. If yahoo wasn't going to give me consistent results, I had to make a smarter spreadsheet. Instead of grabbing the same webpage 10 times to get one small table I would download it once, then parse each line to sort each theater's shows into their own worksheet, where my previous technique of pulling out the showtimes could be reused.

This gave me an idea for another "feature". There were some theaters I really didn't care to waste my time on, so I grafted in some more creative math to ignore the ones I didn't have an alias or commute time for (duh, because I wasn't going to go there) once the data got copied to the report worksheet. This way it could all be processed the same way, and would be simply hidden from view in the end, maybe not the most efficient for processing, but much simpler for me to design with Excel. I also threw in an option for a second "base" location, with a second set of drive-times. Now I could find out when I might get back to work OR home after seeing a movie. Nice!

Is the current form we have a fairly large spreadsheet, that can retrieve the first 20 showings of up to 20 movies each at up to 10 theaters closest to (up to) two locations. It sorts ALL of this data by proximity (represented by the number of minutes you think it takes for you to drive between your "base" and each theater) added to the calculated ending time (start time plus end time plus 15 minutes for commercials and previews). Alternatively it can show you a single movie's showtimes, in case you already happen to know what you want to watch, but don't know where to watch it. Two to four clicks is all it takes.

I'm rather proud of it, but I recently decided it wasn't enough. There seems to be a boom in web creativity as more content owners make it easier to play with their information, or to add your own to theirs (Hi, Google). I would love to have something like this on the web to look at from anywhere, but nobody seems to have done it yet. I guess it's gonna be me for now. Man, are you gonna be sorry for not doing all this hard work for me.

I've got another thing I really want this to do. I want it to pick a showing, then add it to my calendar! Why? This started out as an exercise in not missing important things at work. If I can put it on my calendar, it would be eaiser to see where there might be any conflicts with other items on my schedule. Right now I use two calendars: Outlook/Exchange for work, and Google for not-work. I sync my phone with Outlook, and get alerts from Google Calendar via SMS. To begin with I'm going for Outlook "integration" to leverage the work I have already done, and my relative ease with using VBA. The kicker is that I would like to integrate on the Outlook side so that I can preview the movie schedule right next to my current calendar, select the item, and slurp it into my own calendar. I haven't come close to playing on this level before with Outlook. The less elegant method (in my mind, anyway) would be to use Excel to grab the calendar from Outlook and do the picking from Excel, then send it back over to Outlook. It may end up being easier to implement, though.

Once I have the kinks worked out, and a clearer vision of how it works, my goal is to make my own gadget for Google Desktop/Home-Page/Etc. that would look at your location, ask what movie theaters you do or don't like, automatically calculate drive times and store that info for future use, show you the movies coming up (maybe for the next few days) and send the appointment to the mail/calendar app of your choice after you pick the movie.

That would rock.

I think I've exercised the finger enough now. More "free writing" later!

Blogged with Flock