Harman's Room

To provide you with background on this story, I will link you to coverage of what is potentially the largest consumer data loss ever from both Engadget and T-Mobile (TMo). In short, what seems to be a large number of users of any Sidekick, who have, from my understanding, been without reliable service or access to any of their data in over a week are now being told that their data is almost certainly gone forever due to server failure at Danger, the company who manages the software side of the devices which are still made my Sharp (save for the Slide, made by Motorola). I’m going to try as best I can to ignore the fact for as long as possible that Danger is now owned by Microsoft and that this never happened before said acquisition.

I will call out Perez Hilton for a number of reasons, namely the fact that his website, twitter feed, and poor (immature) drawings composed, I assume, in MSPaint bother me to no end. He lost a ton of contacts and data, which is a travesty, but totally avoidable. My main issue is that he then proceeded to bitch about it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t totally disagree with him (as TMo should actually be giving users a refund for time without their data as well as making cutting ties with the company in whom I know I could never trust again with my money, let alone data) but I don’t agree with John Mayer, either (because those are as easy to lose as any data). I think my real problem with his whining was his reason for not backing up his data:

PS T-Mobile used to tell Sidekick users they personally didn’t need to back up their data. They did it for us. That’s why I never did. :-(

Really? That’s your reason? The ejaculatory-mouthed drawings make a lot more sense now: you’re just not an intelligent human being.

So there are a numerous points of failure in the Sidekick Data System. Perez is not the first Hilton to have a data problem with their Sidekick (warning, Nudity) since a simple password protects all that data, and people do not know how to make a password to save their lives as we all know. Another is that, while most GSM phones either default to storing numbers on the SIM cards which grant cellular service to the device, Sidekicks default the data to the device itself, and migration is not made simple. There is no “move…” or even “copy all data to SIM Card” option. There is an option users can set to store their contacts on the SIM card when added, but I do not believe this will migrate existing contacts over (if anyone has a sidekick and wishes to correct me, please feel free). I have not used a sidekick since November 1, 2007 but users from “my day” likely would have had their contacts stored on their devices already and not made the switch. And then, perhaps, the largest point of Failure in the whole system: no backups?

The true test of a backup system is what happens in the case of total data loss. I use Mac OS X’s built in Time Machine to backup data to an external drive. You can bet that if that drive failed, I would overnight a Seagate Barracuda to replace it at nearly any cost and backup my data again the next day. But if someone stole my iMac what would stop them from taking the little hard drive right next to it? This is a problem I don’t have themoney to solve, but when I upgrade my external from the 750GB I am currently using, to something a little more spacey (either a Seagate 2TB or a Drobo) I will surely do it. The plan is to backup my machine onto two drives, and keep one offsite (preferrably) or at least somewhere other than right next to my machine (another room, closet, in a drawer, etc.). Backups are great if your computer dies of natural causes. If my computer were consumed in a fire, what’s to say the data would be okay on my external?

You’ll notice something here: no one had to tell me that my data would be okay. Seagate tells me their drives have a five-year warranty, so they expect them to last for at least five years. Apple tells me that using Time Machine is all I need to keep things backed up. Common sense tells me that one set of backups should be enough but if you’re actually relying on your data that much, you really can’t be too safe. I personally cannot rebuild my 11k Music Library: there are too many bootlegs I taped, and too much time spent organizing it. Photos are traditionally harder to replace as music can be reobtained through ripping, downloading, etc. whereas photos are usually just your own, though you might have them somewhere. Documents, again, are very personal and not distributed. But to me, those things are small losses compared to my music library. Unfortunately for me, the priceless data in question weighs in at about 60GB. Pretty substantial amount of data to backup, as versus what Perez had: some pictures, and 2000 address book contacts. How much data is 2000 contacts?

Alexander William Bradley
x-(xxx)-xxx-xxxx
someemailaddress@gmail.com

I even gave him the benefit of the doubt and included a country code, and think my name is pretty long. 25 characters for my name. 15 for a properly formatted phone number. Regardless of the length of my email addresses, again, benefit of the doubt, I’ll throw in 50 characters for an email, to be safe. That means a name, number and email is 90 bytes, which makes an entire phone book a whopping 180k worth of data. Even if you printed your phone book as a PDF (something I did before leaving TMo and periodically throughout my year of little to no service most everywhere) the file should have been small enough to email. He could have likely exported to a CSV file and imported it into something useful (Google Contact Manager, I’m looking at you).

The point is that there is no excuse for not backing up data seen as this precious, but people do it all the time. It is frustrating as a technologist to have someone rely on me to bail out a dinghy with a paper cup, when I usually don’t even need to ask if they have life-vests: it’s just assumed that the computer will be okay and they don’t need to worry, but they don’t have backups if they’re wrong (and they usually are). I am not proposing a foolproof solution here, but have a few ideas and things I actively do:

1. MobileMe iDisk – While I primarily use the service for syncing small bits of data across machines, it’s nice to know that this data is backed up somewhere, including my address book (which syncs with my phone). iDisk gives you 20GB of space and syncs pretty seamlessly through a mounted drive on your Mac.
2. Time Machine – Again, Mac specific, but, if you have Leopard or Snow Leopard and are not using Time Machine, you’re out of your mind. A free utility I have been able to use countless times for contacts alone, this takes the guesswork out of creating backups. The last time my father’s Mac Mini gave him some troubles, I went and bought one for him. “Merry Christmas,” I said. “Your data’s safe now!” — This was in September, by the way.
3. Dropbox – I have sung its praises before, but this thing’s the real deal. Imagine a 2GB Flash Drive you can’t lose that is on you no matter where you are so as long as you have the internet. It can also sync to numerous computers. I have it on four machines, so if they ever lose my data, unless they go crazy and start erasing data on your machines, my data’s safe in at least one location. Even if it wasn’t, Time Machine is backing up that data on one machine, and two are laptops, so I could just turn off wireless and grab my files (Yes, I have considered the possibility of a full Data Loss by Dropbox and syncing ‘nothing’ down to my machine. I’m paranoid).

I hope this information helps and teaches some people. This is serious stuff, guys. Don’t pull a Perez (or just don’t use Microsoft Products). I wonder if people thinking about using a Web Based, In-The-Cloud Office are watching this and making a mental note that Microsoft is not necessarily the best place to store all your files…

Last night, I was checking my email as I usually do before bed: in the bathroom, while on the toilet. Yes, it’s a very strange habit I’ve gotten in to. My dad often asks me while I’m home “what I could have possibly been doing in the bathroom for 20 minutes.” The answer is simple: urinating for one, checking my email, twitter, text messages and todo lists for nineteen.

And so I finished the one minute segment of the aforementioned ritual and stood up. I turned to my right as I always do. As I did and leaned over to flush, I really only tapped my iPhone on the doorframe, but it was accidental and unexpected enough for it to leave my hands, landing facedown for a brief moment on the inward-slanted toilet seat. Plop.

The toilet is flushing, and the unsanitary nature of reaching one’s ungloved hand into the toilet is not apparent to me in my panicked state. Having been said, even if it was apparent to me, I would have been just as quick to reach into this to grab my phone had it fallen into it. Let it be noted here that as I have already let you all into my bathroom for this story, I went “#1,” not “#2.” So in my hand went, and out my phone came. The backlight flickered and I quickly shut it off. I was shaking, thinking to myself “one second: $700.”

And at that point, all reason flies out the window. What do you do when a piece of technology gets wet? You have a few possible solutions, and none of them take less than a week, really. If you send it off to some company, it takes a while. You’re without your phone. If you put it in a bag of rice, or those little packets of desiccant that come in shoe-boxes, you’re supposed to wait a few weeks. If you’re reading this blog, you likely know me, and that means you know that I don’t even sleep through the night without using my phone. It’s a part of me like no other device has ever become. It is the digital extension of my analog self. So what did I do? Likely, all the wrong things.

1. Turn it off: good. Duh…
2. Towel: good. Get as much surface wetness off of it as I can.
3. Eject the Sim Card: this was good, too. Let’s remove the only other pieces of it to keep the water stuck to them from effecting the device. I dried them with dry sections of the same towel. After this, I start to lose my composure and subsequently try to do a few things which likely are terrible, terrible ideas.
4. The old NES Trick: some say that hair dryers are a good idea. My breath couldn’t have been too warm, but it did do one of the following (not sure which):
   • Remove water from the headphone jack, SIM slot and Dock Connector, OR
   • Push water further into the phone through those same ports. AND
   • Pushback partially-flushed toilet water onto my face near my mouth. Again: I lacked reason at this point. It was nearly 1am and I felt stupid as it was. Don’t remind me.
5. Compressed Air: this, in hindsight, was dumb. Likely did all of the pushing water in with very little of the cleaning out part.
6. Turned it back on: this is a huge no-no, but how else do I know if what I’m doing is working? ;)
7. Synced the phone with iTunes: okay, at this point, I had given up. The backlight was dead. The phone still worked, though! So I figured if I was going to need to replace the phone, I may as well back my data up, right?

Step seven above likely saved all of my data while simultaneously ensuring that my phone would never work again. So if I did it and the cell shorted, I’d have no data and a bad phone. If I didn’t, I might have a working phone in a few weeks, but I might not. And would have no data, or cell phone. Thanks to that backup I made last night at 1:11am, I now have an iPhone 3GS which looks, really, just like my 3G. It’s got all my apps, all my texts, pictures, everything. That’s all a very good thing. The $430 price tag for the replacement, which extended my service contract with AT&T for 2 years from this date, was okay, too. It’s better than the $650 I’d have paid for the “contractless” phone.

The funny thing with all of this was that I’ve owned a lot of cell phones…

• Nokia 5165 (one month, to see if I was responsible)
• Nokia 3360 (my first real cell phone)
• Motorola 120e (few months. Hated it)
• Motorola 730c (the c is for color; Amanda had one, and I wanted it. Loved this cell)
• LG vx6000 (everyone had this phone. I was late to the game, but loved it)
• Palm Treo (my bag got stolen with my cell phone in it. Charlie let me borrow this clunker. It had a stylus, hahaha)
• LG vx6000 (Courtney’s when she replaced it. She’s been through more cells than I have though)
• Danger Sidekick II (Data only. Casper made me jealous. It was great. TMo blew chunks)
• LG vx8300 (The best non-Apple phone I’ve ever had. Wonderful device, build quality, everything)
• iPhone (jailbroken and sold on eBay for $400)
• iPhone 3G (uhm, haven’t you been reading?!)

and now the iPhone 3GS. It took me that long to let a cell phone take a drink. After years of rowing, with my phone near water so much, and even in the boat sometimes, I’ve never gotten a phone more than a little wet. And so, at the request of Ted Reed I present to you a short list of Pro’s and Con’s of this situation:

Pro’s

• Faster processor, new battery, etc.
• Better camera which takes video; has a compass
• Newer, non-scratched body and screen. I popped it in my case immediately
• Battery Percentage Indicator (sorry, this is just a huge plus for me)
• 16GB of storage as versus 8GB. This means more Phish to bring around with me
• Video Tweets when Tweetie 2 comes out

Cons

• $430. This is the biggest one for me: Sonnovabitch
• Extended my contract by 14 mos
• I could have gone to bed earlier and woken up later today
• I may not be eligible for upgrade pricing come the iPhone 4G or whatever it’ll be called
• I really didn’t need any of the pros listed above, if my phone still worked

And finally, the best thing to come of all this. A Google search sent me to an Apple Support page which detailed a man who dropped his iPhone in a river while saving a drowning kitten (his story is not nearly as heroic as mine). He later asks how to remove a grain of rice from the SIM card slot. The answer is priceless:

Flush it out with river water?
;)

I think I forgot how wonderful this service was. I’ve been a member for over a year but just got back into this now that I have a few programs I use (also wonderful programs 1password and omnifocus) which I want to share across multiple machines (and two macs).

So if you have two machines, imagine having a folder on each of them, and anything you put in either of them from one of your machines will show up in the same place on your other machine. Or your other twenty machines. But even if you don’t have a particular machine configured for use, you could always just log into a website and download the files.

That’s what Dropbox is. 2GB of free storage you always have both locally and backed up on the server. No longer will you ever think “Oh, that’s on my other computer” if you store your files in DropBox. I absolutely love it. Try it out with my referral link and give me some extra storage!

So I was an “early adopter” of Snow Leopard—aka I started using it on Friday evening, the day it came out—and I have run into very few issues thus far. The only real snag I hit had to do with iStat Menus being currently unable to run on Snow Leopard: if you have it installed when you boot into Snow Leopard, you’ll see something pretty funny: all system icons in the Menu Bar—for me, this included VPN, MobileMe, Wireless, Time Machine, Monitors, Volume, Time and Spotlight—will be flickering/disappear. Also, taking a screen shot wasn’t working for me, but it also asked me to find “System Events.app” (which is in /System/Library/CoreServices/ by the way) so that may have been why.

Anyway, I actually think this one is a bug. I had some issues connecting to my apartment’s Wireless Network. I restarted the network (disabled and re-enabled) and that didn’t do anything. I hard reset the router and reconfigured everything and that didn’t do anything. I was pretty frustrated. When I typed my password (correctly, mind you, and without the assistance of CAPS LOCK) immediately said “Connection Failed.” This was obviously frustrating. I deleted the saved password in Keychain Access. I deleted my network from the list of remembered networks. I deleted the interface in the list in Network Prefs. The outcome was always the same. I was getting upset. The weirdest part was that the “Turn AirPort Off” button didn’t seem to have an effect. I could click it infinitely and I couldn’t get anywhere.

Let me describe the steps which solved this problem:

1. Open Terminal (it’s in /Applications/Utilities/).
2. Type: sudo ifconfig en1 down (replacing the en1 with whatever your Airport Adapter is).
3. You’ll likely be told that sudo could screw up your machine. Type your password in.
4. At this point, the Turn Airport Off button will still be showing. Clicking it should successfully deactivate AirPort.
5. Type sudo ifconfig en1 up (again replacing the en1 with whatever your Airport Adapter is).
6. At this point the Turn Airport On button will still be showing. Clicking it should successfully enable AirPort.

So there are a few ways to find out what you type in place of en1. Click the Apple in the upper left hand corner of the screen, and click “About This Mac” and then select “More Info…” which will open the System Profiler. You should see something like this if you select Network >> AirPort in the left hand side.

The other is to use a tool in /Applications/Utilities called Network Utilities. You can of course search for either of these in Spotlight without opening any Folders or anything. Anyway, the dropdown in the upper left hand corner of the screen will show you in parenthesis what everything is.

I hope this helps someone! If it does, please let me know :)

So since some of you likely don’t know what sudo is, it’s basically the “pretty pretty please” of computing. Your computer will abide. If you need a pictorial representation, XKCD has a great one!

I’m going to take a break from personal ramblings to take a minute to discuss a few things every person with a computer should have. I can’t see how much more of a preface could be necessary. If you don’t have these things, just spend the money or time to get them. It will save you big-time in the long run…

1. A Flash Drive: How anyone lives without one of these is an absolute wonder. The idea is simple…  Give people more than one CD (700MB) worth of much-smaller data storage which is accepted in (nearly) any computer, regardless of Operating System, and allow that capacity to be written and rewritten thousands of times. You can buy a 4GB flash drive for less than ten dollars and they even come in “pico size” (or, as I like to call them, too small to be able to easily find, and therefore somewhat useless). To put things into perspective, 4GB is just under 6x the capacity of a CD, and one CD short of the capacity of a DVD (~4700MB). It also is enough to hold quite a few songs, some pictures, thousands of documents and even some good advice from your technological person (me). WHY: I don’t advocate backing up all of your files in one place, so things that are extra important or that you might need to access in a pinch (curriculum vitae, anyone?) would be prime candidates for popping on a flash drive. Need to move things from one computer to another? This little baby will get the job done quicker than doing it over the network. Need to give some photos to a friend? Just take their flash drive, load the photos onto it and hand it off. If you’re crafty, you can even install Operating Systems off of them. I carry two on me at all times, not counting my work-issued diagnostic tools flash drive. I’m also going to be buying a load of tiny flash drives in the near future with specific purposes (install XP off one, Vista off another, keep installation files like downloads for common applications for Windows on one and Mac OS on the other.) The time I’ll save will be _priceless_.
2. An External Hard Drive: I understand how people get along without these, but as an IT professional, all too often am I approached with a very funny question. I’ll paraphrase to add to the humour: “So I screwed up my computer pretty bad. Not only do I need your help getting up and running again, but I only kept one copy of these files and I want you to back them up and put them on my computer when you fix it up?” The issues here are twofold… First and foremost, it’s difficult to find a place to store anywhere from 5-30 gigabytes of files. I usually have some free space, but really, I only have storage that I’ll use (and even sometimes I wish I had more). So to expect me to not only spend 3-4 hours wiping your machine and reinstalling everything, and hook up the printers, get you online, and make everything “just the way you had it” (when I never saw how you had it before,) and then on top of that ask me to spend that much time pulling your files and popping them back, as well as having a spare drive to house the files, is just asking a lot. Having an external hard drive on which you back up your files on a regular basis is, therefore, a no brainer! WHY: If your computer shits itself, all you have to do is start anew and you have all your files backed up fairly recently. It’s a safety net. Consider it bringing an umbrella with you no matter where you go, and then not bothering to check the weather before you leave your home. You always have it there if you need it, even though you hope you won’t. Oh, and by the way: they’re dirt cheap, no matter what size you need. I have a 320GB for file storage and a 750GB for Incremental File Backups.
3. A Strong Password: In my mind, computer privacy is incredibly underrated. People make obvious passwords and then complain that Facebook’s TOS changed to allow all kinds of bad things to happen to their data. Of course no one anticipates a breach of privacy, but do you really want to risk it? With basic knowledge about a person, access to their account may not be difficult. Four digit combinations are usually a birthday (4588, for instance, in my case) and on cell phones, those four digits are usually the last four of the number. These are not secure. At all! Let me walk you through a little exercise… Suppose you want to make a password. Well, take the street you live on, or the town you live in. In my case, those are stonegate or chewslanding. Those are such bad passwords. You make them much safer by changing them to stOnegate and chewslandIng. And even moreso by using “leet speak” (l33t sp34k). 5t0n3g4te and ch3w5L4nd1nG are about as complicated to guess as possible, unless you want to start going nuts (yes, I do) and make them S#0n3ga%e and cH3w$L4nd1n6. Now we’re talking! Simple replacement like this, even on a smaller scale, is crucial. Also, try _not_ to pick personal information. For instance, 8anan4 is a better password than your middle name, or anything about you because people who know you are more less likely to be able to figure this out. WHY: Simple passwords are easy to crack, and most importantly, people say “well who cares if someone knows how to get into my facebook or myspace? What’s the worst they can do?” They now know one of your email addresses and one password you use. Most people are very unoriginal with their passwords and assign the same password to multiple accounts. So what’s to say, if you use that email address for other services, like email, amazon, etc. etc. that the person who gets access to your facebook all the sudden has access to your everything. If they have your email password and know some generic information about you like your date of birth or your home zip code, they can likely reset your password to any service they know you use. This brings me to the next thing you should have…
4. A Password Manager: No matter how good you are, unless you use very few web services, you will be unable to create unique, secure passwords for every site you use. Password managers alleviate that problem by asking you simply to remember the password to your set of passwords. This allows you to theoretically create random passwords to websites, theoretically without you even needing to know the passwords yourself. If you use a service which syncs with a mobile device like a Blackberry, WinMo handset or iPhone, your passwords will be with you at all times. WHY: Making a unique difficult to guess but manageable to remember passwords is a near impossibility for any normal human being. Using one of these will save you the trouble and make your cy-dentity that much harder to hijack. (see 1password, KeePass).
5. Basic Computer Knowledge (or a good friend!): Finally, and perhaps most importantly, understand the most basic things about your machine. This site is a little dated, but explains a lot of basic terminology which will help you when speaking to others. Perhaps most importantly, if you don’t understand something, don’t just assume things are fine: ask! I’d rather have someone send me an email daily saying “what does this mean, why am I getting this?” than one a year from the person saying “I ignored a lot of things that kept coming up, and now my machine doesn’t work.” Hopefully the person will learn more and understand more. Simply knowing how your machine operates, and in turn, when it is operating differently, can be a huge help. Oh, and this should go without saying, but don’t ever say “well, a thing came up, and it said something about the printer. What’s that mean?” Frankly, I have no idea :)

I’d love to help any of you with this stuff and getting you up and running. Just leave a comment or email me or something. :)

There, I said it. I don’t like everything Apple’s ever done, and this is a very notable example. The Apple Genius which Steve Jobs touted as so great during its Let’s Rock event just a few weeks ago is a nice feature for iTunes, but nothing they should have used every new device to demo for quite a few reasons.

iTunes Music Store Only

If you lack any AC/DC, or The Beatles (no one has them, right?) then I guess your library will sound just fine. But if you like local bands, or in general don’t purchase all your music through iTunes, you’re never going to see any information for some of your songs. But that doesn’t mean you stole music at all. I have plenty of discs I physically own but which aren’t available for purchase on iTunes, therefore you couldn’t possibly want to listen to them. So this begs the question, how is Apple doing this Genius thing? Are they listening to tracks and making keywords and rankings for certain songs in a variety of categories like Pandora? Or do they have software which analyzes sound? Because if it’s the latter, there’s just no excuse. Oh, and even better, try finding songs that sound like “Back in Black” by AC/DC and iTunes will tell you to Update Genius, and not alert you that it won’t ever find anything for that song because it’s not in iTunes. Lame.

Horrible Settings

And by horrible, I mean there hardly are any. You can refresh your playlist. You can change the number of songs you have (not to a number, or a duration, but one of four preset and poorly chosen numbers) or you can burn the playlist to a disc, and since you cannot limit the genius to a duration of 74 or 80 minutes, you likely won’t be able to fit it all on one CD. Have fun! This is really the flaw of the system, a complete and total lack of settings. How hard would it have been to create a combination of Smart Genius Playlists (which would obviously require a better name. Let me have a playlist of 20 songs which aren’t live that sound like this song! Let me have 80 minutes of songs sounding like a given track which are all rated four or five stars. Let me have a playlist of tracks I’ve listened to more than 10 times which I’ve never skipped that sound like a given song. Let me decide that no matter how much a song may sound just like another, I don’t want it on this playlist. Give me 100 songs that sound alike and let me decide which ones go on the mix. Please! Lamer.

Not Very Bright.

Though this happens more on my iPhone which only has about 800 songs, my 12000 song library produces results like this too. It’s hard to tout a service as one which helps you to discover new music when some of the nice information it tells you is that Aerosmith sounds like Aerosmith (sounds like Aerosmith, actually–they made this mix two times, plus it was based off “Sweet Emotion”) and three songs by The Who appear on this playlist as well. Sometimes the songs they give you are off the same album. Really, Apple? I had no idea that an artist will sound like himself at the same point in time in his career. Damned impressive. Lamest.

I know it’s a first release but for something they think is cool enough to put on older iPods (classics at least will be getting a little brainier [but not much--see above]) it sure needs some of the traditional Apple polish. I look forward to some more options and features in the future.

Today was an okay, lazy day. I woke up and could hardly talk, barely breathe and with a pounding headache. Wrote a letter to Silverpoint to let them know I was not really able to head into work, took a shot of NyQuil and went back to bed. When I woke up a few hours later, I came to my computer and Tried to get my iPod Classic to work now that iTunes 7.6 and iPod 1.1 Software was out.

It worked! I now have 7,049 Songs on my iPod as well as some Videos, Pictures and Phase, a game I think is well worth the $5. It’s from Harmonix (Guitar Hero 1, 2; Rock Band) and MTV, and makes a game out of your songs! Press Left, Center and Right or slide back and forth to play your songs. It’s quite fun!

I made myself some Pasta and have been downing more meds throughout the day. My nose is probably in the worst shape; it’s starting to crack from being so dried out. I’ll continue with my treatment of Vick’s Cream mustaches and Aloe (not together, of course).

Oh, and thanks to Jen (happy birthday,) Rachel, Pat and Allison for being there for me this morning. I don’t know how this is happening, but I think the people I call my best friends seem to like leaving me. Rather, I think I somehow manage to make every single Best (Female) Friend I’ve ever had desert me at some point. There is still one person I can count on to be there forever, no matter what. Though, I suppose I said that about everyone else, too. We shall see as the months and years go on. Wish me luck?

Okay, so hate is such a _strong_ word. But I’m really annoyed. I get invitations to join 100,000 causes, a bunch of applications which let me have super walls and happy hours, vampires and ninjas, and pirates and zombies. I’m tired of it all. Facebook was so nice because you couldn’t change things like you could on Myspace where you have profiles which have been completely raped and utterly destroyed. And now I can’t even communicate my friends because they’re too busy getting eWasted or having people MSPaint on their walls. It’s pretty freaking lame. So please, uninstall applications if you really don’t use them. Or at least pull shit out of your profiles. It’s just getting obscene.

Just a quicky (yet again) but quickies are better than nothing at all! I’m sure a bunch of you got an email today containing a Gmail picture. Google has changed the Gmail contacts interface to much more closely resemble M$ Outlook or Apple’s Address Book.app. I think it’s a huge step in the right direction and a welcomed change, especially in the way of pictures. Before, adding a picture required the following:

1. Click a contact’s name (and wait for the next page to come up).
2. Click “edit” (and wait for the next page to come up).
3. Click “Upload Image”
4. Download the image you want to your computer (if it’s not already there)
5. Attach the picture; wait for it to upload.
6. Crop the picture. Click apply.

And now? Aside from the fact that there are no different pages and clicking on a contact gives you a direct link to add their picture, you don’t need to just upload the picture. You can attach photos to a contact from a Picasa Web Album. You can pick any photo online at all, too. Or use their image, or none at all. It’s so much more convenient. I just go on facebook, and find a nice flattering picture and copy the URL right into the Gmail interface. Voila, crop and go, in less time than the upload used to take, let alone the other steps. This very welcomed change makes adding photos easier, as it does finding and organizing your contacts.

I thought from the very first day Google unveiled the ability to store photos and associate them with contacts, they were really onto something. I’m a very name-oriented person; my address book is all first-and-last names. Same with my cell phone book. And so I don’t need to have the pictures there to know who I’m contacting. Therefore, there are two groups of people. Those who need them to know who they’re talking to, and those who don’t. For people unlike me who need to see the person they’re contacting, how amazing is it that they can, all in one place, have that data? Just mouse over an address and check out who you’re reading emails from. And for people like me? How incredible is it that I can store a little pictoral memory of my friends and integrate that with a place I spend a lot of time?! I think it’s a fantastic blend of technology and culture, and brings a little more humanity to what some people consider the cold and unemotional world of email.

I think I have about half of my contacts with images now. I’m pretty pleased, considering I did most of it over the last hour of my life, using only Facebook. I’ll find more on myspace, more on my desktop, and even more by contacting people and asking for pictures if need be. Completeness is key, like iTunes album art!

Speak with you soon :)

So today was the first day of coop interviews for me, and I was really excited. I wasn’t really sure before things started, but everything turned out well and here’s how things went:

Silverpoint Software
Silverpoint was a lot of fun to interview for and an incredible company. A 30-person company with only ten members here in Hoboken, Silverpoint creates incredibly custom web-sites for schools across the nation. Their interviewers were very helpful in their explanations and made me want to get over there soon. I’m really excited for a potential call back and cannot wait to hear from them. Check out their website, by the way. It’s _gorgeous_.

Datascope
Datascope creates Intra-Aortic Baloon Pumps. Sounds intense. I don’t think I fully qualified but their interviewer was incredibly informative to someone who knows nothing about BioMedical Engineering. The link above is to the currently unreleased product on whch I would be working: a tube inserted into the aorta which expands and contracts to help make the heart’s job of circulating blood easier. This seemed fascinating to me, regardless of its biomedical background, and I think making its Operating System (where, as I was told, anything done needs doing within 4 milliseconds–cool.

Hunter Douglas
Helpdesk at Stevens + a ton of responsibility = Hunter Douglas. The only company my mom was excited for out of the group (”I have blinds from them in my house,”) Hunter Douglas’ location near Hoboken’s IT group featured the man with whom I interviewed and his CoOp hire. And that’s it. Wow. So he told me that while he was interviewing me, back at work, his CoOp was in charge. Kind of scary! But what cool responsibility. Also, having your work cut in half if someone’s sick is kind of brutal. It sounds like it would be a really fun and challenging job. Oh, and Supposedly, downtime is to be used “playing” with servers and the like. Awesome :)

IPREO
After some brief confusion, my interview with IPREO went really well. I thought I was interviewing for Networking Operations but te people from that department weren’t present for my interview, so I interviewed for their Helpdesk and Information Architecture positions. Helpdesk is, well, helpdesk. And Information architecture is designing the front-end of sites

Lehman Brothers
Miles Dolphin. After hearing so much about Miles, my roommate’s boss at Lehman’s Network Operations Division, I was given one piece of advice: “don’t name drop.” Okay, okay, so I was poised to go in and not say anything about my roommate. I sit down and the first thing out of Miles’ mouth is this: “Hey! You know Eric!” I was like “Oh, uh, yeah. I do!” He’s like “You guys are, roommates?” and I said “yeah, we are.” Then we got on with the interview, Miles being flanked by Tom and Ivette. It sounds like a lot of fun to do and I’m really excited to see how they liked the conversation we had.

Marsh
My final interview was, perhaps, my best. The employees who were speaking with me had a blast and so did I. Marsh is a risk management kind of deal and I would be assisting with product ordering and management of applications. It’s not too technical but it sounded very interesting and I look forward to hearing back from them to see how things work out from here.