Torres Talking

I'm using a new note-taking app for project notes, personal notes, goal tracking, checklists, and random brainstorms: Evernote.

Evernote is really the definition of software plus services working harmoniously together to get things done.  Similar to Remember The Milk, which is also available just about everywhere, it’s just a shining example of what can get done with a small, dedicated team of people.

I’m currently using Evernote on a couple Windows PCs, a Mac, and my new iPhone (and before this, on my Windows Mobile phone!) and changes made to notes on one device are almost immediately available on all the others.  The iPhone app is optimized for quick note-taking on the go (with video + audio, and even location tagging!) while the Mac and Windows apps are fully-featured note-takers.  Frankly, neither of them compare well with OneNote’s elegance and ease of use (I don't even really like the Windows app - and I love OneNote)... but the fact that my notes can be accessed and even edited from so many different places makes up for that.  I’ve always wanted OneNote for the Mac (and web) for the times that I’m not on a PC, but more importantly having my full notes available from my phone without ever having to connect to a PC is just a killer feature. (Anything that doesn’t sync wirelessly with an online service is dead to me these days)

The all-time coolest thing happens when you hook Jott up to Evernote though.  I called Jott and just started speaking to see how it would work, and about 5 minutes later the following note appeared directly in my Evernote notebook:

I'm just testing out the note taking feature from Jott to Ever note(?). I really would like this to work because if it does, it would be a fantastic way for me to be able to take note on the go, in the car, and so on. Thanks.

Perfect example of what technology can do for you.

For almost three years I've used my Xbox 360 just about every day - yet I haven't played a game for more than 10 minutes since 2006.  We use it in our house for renting movies (great quality, skimpy selection), watching DVD/"old" HD-DVD movies, streaming Zune Pass and WMA/MP3 music from the PC upstairs, and about once a month, streaming photos for a traditional slideshow for guests.  In our house, the 360 is our entertainment hub - we could almost care less that it plays games too.

Yet I have to admit, when I was in the Apple Store amidst all the chaos the other day, I yearned for an Apple TV.  The visuals are great, but the thing that almost had me is the selection of content (movies mostly, which is what we care about in our house).  Xbox Live Marketplace just doesn't have the same quantity/selection.  Yet did I really want yet another set-top box?  Remote?  Wi-Fi endpoint?  Not really.  I wanted my 360 to just *do* this.  Because no matter how great the Apple TV would end up being for us, we would still need to use the 360 for the Media Center capabilities + the WMA Lossless support, and adding yet another piece of hardware to the fold always complicates things for me.  With my luck, it would crash and destroy my router like the last time I tried connecting something.

Well... Wish granted two days later.  I love technology.

The 360 will have an all-new dashboard (check out the video) updating it's slightly dated look with snazzy new visuals, avatars, and an all-around more immersive experience.  But the kicker: Netflix queue integration.  Add a movie to your Netflix queue on the web and it appears in the queue on your Xbox with direct streams that start in 30 seconds.  It doesn't look like it's HD quality yet, but it's something - and I can't imagine HD is too far off.

This is cool stuff - I seriously thought my 360 would be obsolete by 2008 (I bought it in 2005) but it looks like it's getting another BIG upgrade.  It'll feel brand new again (although the fan is still too loud!)

Read more:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/events/e32008/articles/0714-nxe.htm

And a great write-up:
http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/netflix-comes-to-the-xbox-360-did-microsoft-just-destroy-the-apple-tv/

I swore off the iPhone for at least a year when it was first announced.  I had good reasons (to me at least).  To recap:

1. I couldn’t synchronize with Exchange over the air (ADDRESSED)
2. Couldn’t swap the battery out for a better one
3. The EDGE network was/is so slow to be unusable (ADDRESSED)
4. It was a closed platform (ADDRESSED)
5. It was ridiculously, insanely expensive (ADDRESSED)
6. It was a v1 from a company that’s never built a phone before (ADDRESSED)
7. Typing on something without feedback won’t work
8. I didn’t want a phone that could get scratched easily
9. Functionally, it didn’t do more than my current phone (ADDRESSED)

I compromised on a few of these things – but Apple addressed the important ones.  So I ended up waiting in line for 2.5 hours (I think it was actually more like 3!) yesterday morning to get one.  I don’t even know where to start with this thing, I dig it so much; it’s easily the most excited I’ve been for a toy since I got my first PalmPilot in 1997 (the thing that started this addiction).

I likely won’t be writing too much about my iPhone though, for a few reasons: 1) I don’t want to gush, and I will end up gushing 2) I’m not blogging that much anyway - even though the iPhone is inspiring me to, 3) It’s been covered to death, 4) Anything I write can’t do justice to this little marvel.

So, just in case anyone cares, I now have an iPhone (syncing it with Windows Vista and Exchange Server of course).  Using it is like having a magic wand ;)

I got tired of waiting for the great folks over at Remember The Milk to build a real Outlook add-in to sync tasks.  So I hacked something together myself now that I’m using RTM exclusively for tasks (the iPhone syncs with Exchange – but of course, not for tasks)  As I’ve written about before, I absolutely love RTM – I have Quicksilver and Dashboard widgets for my Mac, I have it working with Jott for “voice tasks” while I’m driving, and I now have it pseudo-integrated into Outlook 2007.

How to do it:

1. Click “Configure buttons” in the Navigation Pane and hide the standard Task list button
2. Open up the Folder List from the Navigation Pane
3. Create a new Folder in the tree and call it “To Do”
4. Right-click on “To Do” and click Properties –> Homepage
5. Enter www.rememberthemilk.com and click “Show homepage by default for this folder”
6. Click OK
7. Go back to your Inbox
8. Right-click on “To Do” again and click “Add to Favorite Folders” to get it to the top of the pane
9. Click To Do

This is what you end up with (upper left corner of Outlook)

It’s a total hack, but I’m going to give it a whirl for a while.  This doesn’t let me attach email threads to tasks which I will sorely miss, but it’s good enough given all the other benefits of RTM – most importantly, the ability to access it from anywhere (phone, web, Mac, PC!)

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.