Archive for January, 2007

HTC Excalibur (aka T-Mobile Dash)

January 29th, 2007 by James Sullivan | No Comments | Filed in Blog

I purchased the T-Mobile Dash (aka HTC Excalibur). It’s a swell phone with a QWERTY keyboard running Windows Mobile 5. I was going to get a new BlackBerry but I had two requirements that BlackBerry couldn’t fulfill together:

1. QWERTY Keyboard

…plus…

2. Camera

They have phones that do one or the other, not the same together. It seems like a good move so far. The joystick is WAY better than the jog-wheel on the BlackBerry! Now, when in a grid, instead of using two keys, or using the jog-wheel like crazy, I just press the directional pad “down”. It truely is a revolutionary idea. WTF.

The must-have applications for the phone???

1. Google Maps (even though the j2me on this phone crashes and makes me reboot the damn thing)

2. Google Email (ditto)

3. Skype - Needs WIFI though. Lag? 1 second.
4. Windows Live Search Mobile – works like google, but by microsoft. No faster or slower. Just different.
Oh, and the manufacturer has a wiki for their product. That’s nice: Here.

Tetris for Xbox

January 10th, 2007 by James Sullivan | No Comments | Filed in Blog

Xbox Tetris.

It’s the most addictive game I’ve played since Grand Theft Auto Vice City.

Doubt it?  Play and you will see.  After 10 hours or so of game-play you get into a groove where you don’t even see the blocks and your fingers just move and guide the block into the right place.  The fun part is really that there’s basically un-ending levels of the game.  You can play basically forever (just like GTA) but it’s – I think – the most downloaded game to date on cell phones.  No wonder.

Helpdesk

January 10th, 2007 by James Sullivan | No Comments | Filed in Open Source

We’re implementing an internal helpdesk tool at a small business.  We reviewed a lot of the Open Source systems out there and found one that was just like an enterprise-level system but also customizable, runs on LAMP (easy setup/easy maintain), and is pretty popular.

Eventum

It’s used by MySQL as their external product helpdesk.  There were only a few points that we customized and made it a very slick offering for what we need:

1.  Project = Internal
2.  Priority = 1. Can’t Do Business / Mission-Critical to 5.  Project / Scheduled
3.  LDAP integration so people don’t need another password
4.  Email integration = Not perfect out of the box.

After having the system work for us in an all-internal aspect, we’ll look at offering it to our customers as our company helpdesk for our customers.  This could give us a central location to manage project work for both internal and external endeavors and a great point to integrate with our CRM system.  Plus, the per-seat license is $0 since we have LAMP expertise in-house.

GTD Contexts / “TODAY”

January 10th, 2007 by James Sullivan | 1 Comment | Filed in Blog

Ok, I’m a die-hard GTD fan. The system is really fantastic for me (an information worker) where it’s less schedule-focused and easy to adopt into technology with almost any tool. Plus, I feel like the system encourages you to feel better about your organization system being personal than forcing you into a mold. I have taken personal organization classes before. GTD is my favorite.

I write this blog entry with an offering of a little tweak that I use that helps me avoid procrastination and focus on daily priorities:

20070111screenshot.GIF

That’s my Outlook Task view grouped by Categories. That is all my categories. I found it much more straight-forward to adopt only the core contexts instead of lots of super-specific ones. Other than the little number of contexts, what else is different?

The “TODAY” context. Outlook allows you to assign a task to two categories. I use it in my morning review. I set some goals for myself in the morning that I want to accomplish this day (i.e. things i need to do to keep a project on schedule). So, when I do the review – I just right-click on tasks, enter the category picker, and ALSO check off the “TODAY” Category. This way a task remains in “Office” or “Internet” but also gets added to my “TODAY” context. I leave the “TODAY” category open and make sure that I’m working to accomplish them through the day. Of course, sometimes you don’t get to complete one of them – so it can sit there until tomorrow – or, if the priority changed, take it off the “TODAY” context.

For me, this has made a great difference in feeling bad about forgetting the important thing for the day, and it definitely beats the post-it notes that I used for this before!

Google Image Search

January 6th, 2007 by James Sullivan | No Comments | Filed in Blog

I love Google-Image-Search, not for how useful it is…

(one of my favorites is helping figure out what kind of person you’re supposed to meet later in the day – not sure if the name is a boy’s name or girl’s name? Perform a google search and see the images… more girls? probably a girl you’re going to meet.)

So, doing that search – from the mother of the baby that fell out of a window and was caught by passer-bys – i got this one:

http://www.pucpr.edu/fotografo/graduandos%20fotos_2006.htm

Chock full of really awesome icons to use in your favorite brand of instant messenger, email signature, desktop background (if feeling very ironic), etc.

  • Author

    Here you can provide some author or blog infomation.