As usual, Omar is a couple weeks ahead of me here.  But Mozy has been an absolute dog for me over the last few weeks, and it's time I move on.  Of course I'm going to wait until I'm completely backed up elsewhere before ditching Mozy - and I've "sold" Mozy to a number of people, all whom I now have to cross my fingers and hope they're not having the same problems.  To sum it up, look at this one screenshot:

There are like 4 “bugs” in that one screenshot.

1. Why 15 days?  That's like a lifetime when you take pictures of a 4 month old.
2. ConnectionError1 – that’s great.  Wha?  Sometimes it says this, sometimes it doesn't.  Nothing else on my machine has trouble connecting to the Internet.
3. Look at the bytes next to the # of files backed up (-86744233809... a negative number?)
4. 224GB remaining even though I’ve been running this thing every single day since last summer?  A couple weeks ago it said 0.  What happened?

I'm not patient enough to deal with customer support - there are just too many problems here to deal.  So I'm going to give Carbonite a go.

PS. Yes, I know.  My blogging is slow.  But I warned you ahead of time a little while back!  Just subscribe to my RSS feed and don't bother checking back regularly; that way quantity or frequency of posts don't matter at all.

I've been playing with Remember The Milk quite a bit this week, all the while wondering how I could fit it into my task/to-do workflow without complicating my life more than I need to.  It's dangerous when you spend too much time in the "meta zone", thinking about how you're going to complete your tasks instead of actually completing them.  So I gave myself a deadline (today) to figure out if and how Remember The Milk was going to work for me... and this is what I came up with.

<If you don't know what Remember The Milk is, check it out at www.rememberthemilk.com.  It's an impressive service for task management/getting things done.  I'm going to refer to it as RTM from now on.>

Since I rely heavily on Outlook + Exchange for work, any solution that took my tasks out of Outlook would be a non-starter.  I need the ability to attach PDFs and (more importantly) emails to tasks for quick follow-up and I need them in my face all day long.  At the same time, there are aspects of RTM that would make me more productive on a day-to-day basis so I wanted to find something that would work across both systems.  So I started with this:

• I continue to use Outlook tasks & my toolbar macros (from 2004, wow) to create tasks while at work.  Obviously this syncs to Exchange and to all of my other Outlook installations; I think I'm up to 4.  Using my macros, I'm able to attach emails to tasks automatically so that when I'm sitting in front of Outlook on any of the machines I regularly use, I can pull up tasks and act on email immediately.
• I continue to sync my tasks with Exchange on my phone.  I use Oxios ToDo List on my smartphone; when I complete a task on my phone it synchronizes immediately to Exchange and to Outlook at home, work, on my laptops, etc.  It's a great system that I've been using for a long time.

And this is what I'm now doing a little differently:

• I also use MilkSync on my phone (which works well) to sync my tasks back to Remember The Milk.  I have it set to every 15 or 30 minutes (experimenting) which means RTM now has all my tasks, complete with notes and categories.  But since RTM doesn't support email attachments, it doesn't store any of the email I've attached.  Which is fine with me because a) it would violate corporate policy to store Microsoft email on another company's servers and b) I only need those attachments when I'm sitting in front of Outlook anyway. 
• I setup Jott to publish directly to my “Next Actions” category.  So now when I’m driving and I need to remember to do something, I just hold down the number 3 and say “Task” followed by what I need to do.  It then just flows into the system and shows up in Outlook, my phone task list, and on www.rememberthemilk.com.
• I added an RTM gadget to my new Netvibes homepage.  No escaping my tasks.
• I added an RTM bookmarklet in IE and Firefox so I can grab any date or text on a web page and make a task out of it.  That task then flows through the system.
• On my Mac, I'm using Quicksilver to add new tasks to RTM with just a couple keystrokes.  I don't have to actually open anything at all to create a new task.  And I have a Dashboard widget running that gives me a quick snapshot of my current tasks if I ever remember to hit F12.
• I can now interact with tasks on every platform via the browser if I have to (Mac, PC, etc.) including going offline.  Ditto on the flowing through the system bit :)
• I setup a special email address for my wife on RTM for "honey-dos".  When she sends an email to this address, it will be added to my "Next Actions" list and sync to all my endpoints.  So if she really wants me to remember something (like the milk!) this is a great way for her to get into my head without spamming me with SMS or email.  TBD if this is good enough - or if IWantSandy is a better solution for us.

As you can probably tell, the killer feature for me is the fact that all of this stuff is talking to each other.  Everywhere I am (web, PC, Mac, phone) I'm working against the same task list.  As I add a task in one place (even via voice using Jott), it's available everywhere.

So basically, I have RTM and Exchange in sync using my phone (running both ActiveSync and MilkSync) as the sync hub.  It isn't the perfect solution, but it's working well.  And yes, I realize I'm a little "over the top" when it comes to time management!  But maybe one person will get value out of this post ;)

Back in September 2006, I wrote about moving to an ala carte model for television instead of relying on the increasingly expensive and unreliable cable companies to provide content for us.  With each passing day, I get more anxious about the fact that we're not doing this in our household - because we watch even less TV now than we did before, and we're still paying Comcast monthly for the privilege.

I just looked at my Comcast cable bill.  We have HD support but none of the special channels like HBO or Showtime.

$68.23 + $6.80 taxes & surcharges (approximated since my Internet access is on this bill too).  Add $10.75/month for Tivo (annual prepay) and you have an astounding $85.78/month just to watch TV.  If I were to translate that into iTunes or Xbox LIVE purchases, you're talking an average of about 42 television shows/month for that price.

Yet I think we watch about 8-12 shows monthly depending on the month (Smallville, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The Office, and maybe a few others).  Seriously, why in the world are we paying $85/month when we could just drop $2-3/each to watch the shows we want to watch when we want to watch them?  How could things NOT be moving in this direction over the next couple years?

The catch for me is that sports content isn't available through either iTunes or Xbox LIVE - which means I'm either relegated to watching baseball on my laptop through MLB.TV or not watching it at all.  Neither is acceptable - so until there's a solution to this problem (and I suspect it will be in the next 24 months somehow) I won't be able to switch completely.  And of course, neither iTunes nor Xbox have Smallville... and iTunes doesn't even have TV shows in HD yet :(

So the dream will probably be on hold for a short while.  But I'm really looking forward to the day when I'm not paying $85/month for less than 8 hours of television watching.  Ugh.

I've been giving Mint a try over the past few days.  It's not quite feature-rich enough for me to switch from MS Money Plus just yet, but I do see a day when 100% of my banking and financial management moves to the web.  I've been waiting for this day for about a decade, so it's a long time coming.

Mint is unbelievably friendly though and has a great UI for getting up and running in less than five minutes.

And it tells you things you sort of wish you didn't know.  Like this:

Great.