Averbuch.NET

<This post is cross-posted between my old blog at Windows Live Spaces, and my new one, at Averbuch.net>

With my transition to Averbuch.net, a few key settings will need to be updated on your end, depending on how you follow my postings.

1. If you just visit the web site: Change your bookmarks to point to http://averbuch.net
2. If you follow the RSS feed: Change (or add) http://averbuch.net/feed/ to your RSS reader
3. If you like receiving email when I post, click here to signup.
4. If you read my postings on Facebook, I already updated the link, so you have nothing to change here.

Please contact me if you have any questions about changing over or something doesn’t work for you.

NOTE: I will no longer be posting at http://averbuch.spaces.live.com again; all new postings will go to http://averbuch.net only.

I just realized you can automatically import blog postings onto Facebook notes – so if you are on Facebook, all of these postings will be cross-posted on there, under the "Notes" category, as they are posted. Of course, they bulk-imported the first bunch once I got setup.

By the way, if you are on Facebook, and are not marked as my friend, feel free to add me; if I know you, I’ll accept. If I don’t, I’ll ignore…. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=694272115 

Steps to do this if you have a blog and are on Facebook – posting since it took me a while to figure this out:

1. Log in (duh!)
2. On the upper-left side, under applications, click more
3. Click "Notes"
4. On the right side, under "Notes Settings", click "Edit Import Settings"
5. Type in the RSS or ATOM feed of your blog, and check the "this is my blog" checkbox.
6. Click OK.
7. Confirm the preview matches your feed
8. You are good to go!

(this post was written while I was flying and will be posted once I get online later)

I went on a business trip today, so I spent some time using my phone’s mobile capabilities while waiting for my plane to take off this morning.

For the record, I have an IMATE SP-3 on T-Mobile, which I bought unlocked from EBAY earlier this year. It’s a couple year old model of a Windows Smartphone (actually it’s a European model, but it works fine in the US due to the power of GSM). I wanted an unlocked phone, and I’ve stuck with T-Mobile due to the super cheap data plan.

There’s a few sites I usually checkout, so I’d thought I’d write my thoughts up on each while flying back. I’ll actually post this up when I get online again, so it will be a bit delayed…

• Google Reader - I started playing with Google Reader for doing my blog reading in general late last week (instead of Bloglines), and using the mobile version convinced me to switch permanently for all. It’s much cleaner and easier to read (and scan through headlines, which is what I most often do), and they have some super-nice keyboard shortcuts. Pages load fast, and all around, I love checking RSS on this system.
  • Side note: The normal web google reader doesn’t have a personal blog-search, which I find wierd for Google. Why can’t they quickly search all posts I’ve already seen?
  • Side note2: their "trends" report on the live Google reader is pretty darn nice for tracking what I’ve seen/read. I guess it means they are tracking the data on their side as well, but I am sort of used to that arleady.
• Mobile OWA – I tried using (again) OWA to read my company mail, as I haven’t set up auto-syncing. Alas, this didn’t work, as it’s the one downful of a couple year old version – no frames support in the browser, so I am blocked. You’d think they’d have worked around this in Exchange, but nope.
• Mobile Hotmail – I have a love/hate relationship with mobile hotmail. It’s actually pretty nice and snazzy to read on, but as I don’t have a full keyboard on my phone, I never spend much time actually writing; I’ll just call the person if I need to respond. I hate the login – it’s cookies are about 60 minutes long, so I constantly have to relogin, which is a pain on the phone. Why can’t I choose how long to let my session last?
• Mobile CNN and Mobile ESPN – nice, clean, easy to read. I find they don’t update nearly as often as the normal web sites do though.

Anyone else have any must-checkout sites?

Lisa followed up on a couple of our postings with a posting herself talking back to Greg and I about seattlest. I happened to know about since I’ve set up a free RSS feed for her site through http://www.feed43.com in order to get bloglines-based notification of new postings off of her site, since she hasn’t turned on RSS feeds from blogspot yet (or purposefully, if you ask her ). Which is weird, in my book, since she’s okay with asking me to give out the feed43 feed to people, so it’s not from an opposition to sharing that this is done.

It turns out the lack of having an RSS feed confuses Google Reader tremendously. When you search for her blog to add as a feed, it ends up subscribing you to my RSS feed for my blog. I have no idea why. I asked around to my most-RSS-savvy employee at work, and he also was perplexed to no end. It’s just plain strange. Having an RSS feed directly would fix their RSS-feed-finding algorithm, but since we know Lisa doesn’t want to add one, I have no idea on how to fix this.

For the record, the other major players don’t seem to have this problem:

• Bloglines points you to the free feed43 hack-feed I set up, which makes sense, and is actually sort of cool.
• Newsgator doesn’t find anything, which also makes sense, since there is no true RSS feed.
• Neither IE7 nor Firefox show the little RSS icon in the address bar, so they also don’t find anything.

Any ideas?

My other feed-reading issue is that I have a friend (who just moved to Spain, and for that I am somewhat jealous), who has her blog up on spaces. She has it private, so you need to be logged-in through passport and be authorized to view it. Which is all well and good for keeping things private. However, this also means you can’t access any RSS feed or do any feed43 magic due to the authentication needed, which means (gasp!) I actually need to check out the site manually. I hate having to do extra work here!

Unable to sleep before heading out of town for the weekend (vacation day today!), I spent some time looking at Friendster and LinkedIn this morning.

Thoughts:

1. I refuse to use myspace; I am convinced bad things will happen if I even look at it (or so the news tells me, and the news is never wrong!)
2. Friendster used to be cool and hip; I haven’t had anyone try and add me as a friend in a while there, but I do see some activity; people update their profiles, add new friends, etc… What’s amazing is the number of profiles of people who say "I never really check this, but just have it for the people who aren’t on myspace." Of course, they are all listed as being online in the past day or so, so they are just flat lying.
3. LinkedIn is much, much better for professional networking. Most of Pure Networks‘ employees are on there, along with a bunch of old contacts. I actually find this one fascinating to see people’s job titles and companies change, along with reconnecting with old colleagues. Downside is that it’s very much only used in certain businesses (computing and legal for the most part). Maybe this is a positive; some of the constant chatter myspace/friendster people are not part of it.
4. I’ve never tried Facebooks (my brother uses it though), and Classmates.com is way too spammy and non-useful (they are a local Seattle company though, which is one plus).

Speaking of which, and this is meant more as a reminder to myself: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_delete_a_contact_in_linkedin.html has instructions on how to remove a contact from http://www.linkedin.com – that was remarkably difficult to find in their user interface, since they hide the option way down the scroll list on the bottom right of the page. Now I know! Other google searching leads me to believe that even this was a recent add; you used to have to email their customer support to remove old contacts. My networking list there should be a lot more accurate now that I have cleaned up some old non-contacts that I somehow accepted at one point in time.

If you’d like to connect with me on either friendster or linkedin, just let me know!

• http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/03/21/the_sanity_check.html – I have been doing a bunch of phone interviews/screens of job applicants, and I have been looking for a good set of advice on how to do these. While this post is written from the applicant’s perspective, it gave me a lot of food for thought on how to do the screening side and what to look for in a candidate – must read if you do phone screens.
• http://www.chowhound.com/boards/4 – Good Seattle food board. I wish they had a Seattle-only section though. I am not so interested in Portland’s food scene.
  • Specifically, I really want to try a bunch of these – http://www.chowhound.com/topics/383207 (Unique Ethnic Cuisines of Seattle)
• http://feed43.com/ – I use this to build screen scrapers for various friends’ blogs who don’t have RSS feeds (you know who you are!). I can’t stand actually having to visit each website. Pretty easy to use, if you understand regular expressions. Of course, most people don’t, so it’s a non-starter for them. But for me – it’s perfect. and free.
• http://www.bloglines.com – I am not sure what the pingback relationship is between MSN Windows Live Spaces and Bloglines is, but it’s amazingly fast to pick up any posts on it’s RSS Feed list. Nice to know that it keeps up to date so quickly.
• http://apnews.myway.com/image/20070327/AUSTRALIA_MONSTER_TOAD.sff_DAR102_20070327040316.html?date=20070327&docid=D8O4GS7O0 – That is one large toad! Scary!
• http://www.sitemeter.com – I’ve posted on this before… I like it’s stat tracking service – for my usage, I like to be able to get detailed usage and information on every user who visits. That said, what it doesn’t do is track all out-clicks (i.e. what URLs the user clicks on to leave the site). It just tracks one per user. Anyone know of a free metrics service that tracks all out-clicks? Google Analytics doesn’t seem to track any, which is very, very surprising.

The last 100 people to visit this blog (note: this doesn’t count RSS reading) are located at:

Who are all of you people in weird places? For example; who’s in Africa?

And yes, being able to find this stuff out about readers is pretty common on the web for all sorts of servers; I don’t know who you are, but I can easily find out basic information:

1. How many people visit
2. Basically where you are located
3. What web browser you are using (Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, etc…)
4. What OS you are using (Macintosh, Windows XP, Windows 98, Vista, etc…)

I can’t find out anything about you particularily, such as:

1. Your name
2. Your address
3. Your phone number
4. Other sites you visit

So nothing major to worry about!

I use sitemeter.com, which does this sort of stats tracking for free. I’ve been looking into using different services; any suggestions?

I am a huge Tivo fan – I love that it automatically tapes shows for me, it’s easy to use and setup, and it’s an all around life-changing utility.

That said, there are a few improvements I would love:

• Allow me to set up shows that I want to be emailed/IMed about if they tape (I really wanted this the other day – West Wing was back on the air after a hiatus, but I didn’t know about it)
• The reverse – IM/Email me about shows that are usually on every week, if they are skipping a week (How I Met Your Mother wasn’t shown last week, for example)
• Better handling of sporting events; taping an NCAA Tournament basketball game is hard, since the game schedules are decided too late for the Tivo Scheduling engine.
• Dual-tuner would be great (though I worked around that with a cable splitter)
• Undelete and One-button-delete (Update: It’s part of the 7.2.2 download I just got – to sign up, see http://research.tivo.com/72.2priority/, or just wait for it to get to you)