I've been doing jury duty this month and so far I've been called in three times, sat for 20 minutes each time, and then was told to go home for the day as they would not need any jurors. It's pretty frustrating because I've had trouble keeping appointments and meetings all month as the jury …
Category Archives: technology
Three phone tips for antisocial people like me that hate phones
In no particular order: 1. A friend recently got a new phone & number on Verizon, and neglected to set up his electronic voicemail account for the first few weeks. When you call, after 4-5 rings it goes to voicemail but the message is simply "This user has not set up their voicemail yet. Goodbye." …
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The Chokehold of Calendars
Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time. via weblog.muledesign.com That's a glorious intro sentence, worth quoting here for …
Facebook’s Privacy Whiteboard
Last year, when Facebook started going lax on their default privacy settings (in opposition to how they'd always defaulted settings) I had this idea. It's obvious why Facebook would push their userbase in that direction, because it would mean more public outfacing pages to sell internal and external advertising on. If you're running a …
My personal feedback loops
As a sort of companion piece to the previous entry, I figured it might help other web writers to know what tools are available to them, as well as to possibly fill in some gaps I have in my own process (I bet someone reading this knows how to find info on the things I'm …
Broken feedback loops
Last summer I wrote this quick quip on twitter about my frustrations with Google Reader and Facebook comments: Many years ago, people started building weblog ranking lists and then weblog search engines and eventually we had a rich set of tools that let you know what someone was saying about something you posted online. At …
Fun with Foursquare
I know I'm about two years late to this, but I'm really digging Foursquare. I remember meeting the guys behind Dodgeball in NYC before it was acquired by Google, and seeing how people used the service, but it seemed like an idea that could only fly in a densely populated place like Manhattan with its …
Notes from the Future: SSD instead of hard drives
I'm writing this on my Mac Pro that feels like a new computer thanks to the SSD (solid state drive) memory that replaced my existing hard drive. A friend of mine used to talk about this idea ten years ago — that someday RAM and flash memory would get so cheap you'd be able to …
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Odd Technology
I discovered a new first world problem. I called a friend's mobile phone while he was at home and we were discussing things for ten minutes or so. Then his spouse arrived home from a trip to the store and parked the car inside their garage. My call ended suddenly and I was a bit …
Scalable personal IT for non-geeks?
Last month, I hung out with a friend from college that was impressed by the gadgets I carried and how I used them, but didn't have the spare time necessary to set everything up like I have (stuff like moving downloaded movie files to a TV for viewing, being able to check 5 email accounts …
A Whole Lotta Nothing 