Torres Talking

On my first father’s day (as a father) I felt it only appropriate to give a shout-out to the old man who got me interested in all this computer nonsense in the first place.  A truly inspirational individual – even if he doesn’t know it – my dad’s responsible for who I am as a father, a man, and… well… a technologist!

We ran our first bulletin board service (BBS) on the Commodore 64 twenty-some odd years ago on a 300 baud modem (then 1200, then 2400, then 9600!) using Ivory Joe’s 6485/Ivory BBS software.  Which we eventually got the BASIC source for and hacked up ;)  From that moment on (sometime around 1986) I knew what I wanted to do with my life.  Cool, eh?  At some point I’ll write something up that’s a more complete history… because a lot of what my dad taught me about over 20 years ago set the stage for what I’m working on right now.  We had IM, forums, email, page designers / homepages, and all that jazz back then!

Thanks Dad!  Happy Father’s Day!

Hello?  Anyone out there?  ;)  I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything of substance.  Certainly longer than I’ve gone with respect to blogging since late 2004.  Again, I expect I’ll be posting just as sporadically in the future as I am now given my “life priorities” and how they’ve expanded since welcoming a baby girl into the world back in October.

I did want to spend a minute or two giving folks an FYI post on the latest release of Windows Live Writer (Tech Preview).  If you’re a blogger and you’re NOT using Writer… well, you should be.  The new features include new formatting for photos, inline videos, word count, auto linking, and more.  It’s really a solid, solid product and one that makes the life of a blogger a lot easier.

Check out this pic of Stella using the new tilt + “reflection” features of Writer for photos:

Cool.  Interested in doing this yourself?  Get the Technical Preview of Windows Live Writer

Not too long ago (Jan 07) I blogged about wanting an Exchange Server for the rest of my life.  This week, something similar was announced called Live Mesh.  Yes, I know I'm days late to the party - but participating in blog chatter isn't top of mind for me anymore ;)

If you haven't been following the buzz around Live Mesh, here are some links to catch-up:

• TechCrunch
• Ray Ozzie's memo (linked from TechCrunch)
• On10 video
• Mesh.com
• Developer information

In short: this is one of the most ambitious platforms I've seen come from Microsoft since Silverlight or the original .NET Framework.  It has serious, serious potential to redefine computing.  The concepts resonate with me in a way few things do, particularly because they aren't an either-or approach (cloud vs. client).  Only time will tell.

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.

It's been a few months since I last posted about photo tagging and asked "how should I use metadata on photos?"  There were some great responses, both in person as well as in the comments, and I filed that task away for a future project.  Well, the future is now.  We took over 1700 photos in the last couple weeks alone (having an 11-week old will do that to you) and our "filing system" is starting to show its age.  Not having things like ratings, dates, or even the basics like "this is a picture of Stella and Mike" is starting to bug me since I'm spending a few hours each week just dealing with photos.

So this is what I'm going to do with our entire gallery, starting right now:

1. Keep the photos organized by event in folders.  So "Christmas 2007 in Seattle" remains - it turns out that's how my wife and I like to browse our photo collection, and since I'm not a hardcore photographer (yet) it's easiest for us to keep it like this.
2. Rename all the files to something like "Title (#) mm-dd-yyyy" where title is the name of the folder (i.e. Christmas 2007) and the # is the sequence number. 
3. Make sure all the photos have the capture date set.  Since some of them are scans or were taken with a 9-year old 1MP digital camera, there's a good chance dates aren't captured across the board.  So I'm going to correct this.
4. Make the title on the photo the same as the filename for now.  There are some instances where I'll type more than this like "Stella laughing at her zebra toy", but just to be consistent I'm going to keep it simple in the default case where there's nothing better to use as a caption.
5. Add creator and copyright metadata.  The creator will be something like "Torres Family" and the copyright is used just in case the photos find their way onto the web.  I know it doesn't actually protect anything, but since it takes 2 seconds to add it, why not?  I'm also going to use the creator tag to indicate who took the photo since I have rolls from just about every family member over the last few years.  So instead of using sub-folders for this, I'm going to use the creator tag and filter on that.
6. Add two basic ratings to photos - 5 star for amazing, 4 for great.  I may have a few that use 3 as well, but to me that's the equivalent of not having a rating at all.
7. Flat out delete all poorly shot or blurry photos while I'm doing this.
8. Convert BMPs to JPGs since I have a bunch of images from the mid-90s using the bitmap format.
9. Opt to write all the XMP data to the file of course!

And finally: 10.  Apply tags to all the photos!  Talk about tedious :)

I realize that a few months ago I said "I'm not going to go crazy with this and spend hundreds of hours applying tags to previous photos"... but I rethought that [I know Jay is laughing right now thinking "I knew you would"].  But the photos we had pre-baby are all actually pretty easy to apply metadata to, and being the neat freak that I am I knew I wouldn't want to have half of my photos cleaned up and the others just sitting around unusable.  So I came up with a very basic tagging scheme based on what I've seen others do online.  I'm going to use hierarchical tags (even though most apps including Windows Live Photo Gallery don't visualize them like this) and I'm going to use capitalization and spaces in the tags.  This is the basic format I'm going to use:

1. Places -> Seattle, La Grulla, Glen Ridge, etc.
2. People -> Full name
3. People -> Stella Torres -> Birth, 0-3 months, 3-6 months, Smiling, Yawning, Sleeping, etc.
4. Nature -> Flowers, Landscape, Ocean, etc.
5. Things -> Car, Plane, Bike, etc.
6. Portraits -> Pregnant, Fitness, Funny, etc.

To perform all of the steps above, I'm going to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom since bulk edits like these are cake in that tool... and any changes I make, including applying tags, will immediately appear in Windows Live Photo Gallery for basic viewing/editing.  As I get more serious about photography (and trust me, I'm really not that serious) Lightroom is becoming an essential part of my workflow.  I love how I can use Lightroom to do all of this and not only does my desktop software (WLPG) pick up the changes immediately, but Media Center does as well!

To illustrate how slick this is, soon I'll be able to pull up pictures of any family member sorted by date in 3 seconds on the HDTV in my living room thanks to Xbox 360 and Media Center.  Love it!  It's like magic.

Of course, this is going to take me quite a while.  But just like I did when I ripped 900+ CDs, I'm going to take it week-to-week ;)  I'll spend about 30 minutes each Sunday working through 5-10 folders until I'm finished with everything.  It should only take a few months provided I'm disciplined about it.  And then I'll never have to do it again; it just becomes about new photos at that point, which is much, much easier.  And if it's anything like my encoding all of my music, it'll be boring and tedious... but I'll be pretty thrilled when it's all done.  Just in time for CES 2009!

Speaking of CES, be sure to watch Bill's keynote at 630 Pacific at www.microsoft.com/ces!  This is my favorite time of the year - CES and MacWorld... geek heaven.

Where will you soon be able to get music from all of the major labels, without any DRM restrictions, at moderate bit rates?  Amazon MP3 of course.  Fantastic.  Sony BMG has finally entered the fold.

I've spent years berating DRM and buying nothing but CDs, which feature both higher quality sound and zero restrictions on how they're used.  But Amazon's MP3 Downloads have me slowly thinking about sacrificing a little quality (most songs are 256kbps variable rate) for convenience [of course, I do wish they would support lossless formats].

I'm not sold on the design of the store - it feels a little bit too much like Amazon.com and not enough like a fun place to hang out (see Zune for this) - but all things considered, it's the best store on the block.  As their catalog grows, I can't see anyone favoring the current iTunes model over straight cheap, DRM-free MP3s.  The subscription model is still a better value (and I expect music junkies will still use that to sample music) but for ownership, Amazon is doing a fantastic job.

Lots of stuff to post about in the new year - like just how great Amazon's MP3 store is now and how I'm a Photoshop Lightroom addict - but for the time being, I'm just enjoying the holidays with family and trying to stay off the computer.  I hope everyone has a wonderful New Years!