Happy New Year to all. But 2009 will arrive a second later than we all thought. An extra second is being added to 2008 to keep things in sync.
If you want to understand why, check this out…
Category: Technology
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Google Sync Put to the Test
I woke up this morning to a dead Blackberry. Low level hardware failure. Not recoverable. OK. I’ve been using Google Sync to keep my calendar and contacts in sync with Google Calendar. The phone is insured. Should be no problem, right? In theory anyway…
Well for once theory meets reality. I go to Verizon, they hand me a new phone and get it connected. I immediately download Google Sync directly from the Blackberry and connect with my Google account. Before I got home, my entire calendar and contact list was restored. No issues.
Sweet.
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Google Forms
OK, this is cool. I’m thinking that I’ll use this to collect updated contact information from folks who want to be in my NCAA hoops pool. Create a spreadsheet on Google Docs, send out the form and voila, updated info.
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Open Source Blackberry Sync
I got my Blackberry Pearl to get work email. I do like it, even now that I’m unemployed (yes, the iPhone is much cooler, but I’m stuck with Verizon for the near future).
But if you aren’t on a Blackberry Enterprise server, the only thing that syncs wirelessly is email. What about contacts and calendars?
I had a trial version of Outlook on my home laptop. But you could only sync calendar and contacts via USB so that was pretty worthless except as a backup mechanism. And being unemployed I really didn’t see the reason to pay for Outlook.
I’ve used Thunderbird before and as a GMail client it is fine. I debated just using Chrome as an application window straight to GMail, but I do like to be able to use email and calendars offline occasionally. Thunderbird has a decent calendar add-on called Lightning and it has an address book.
But how to sync contacts and calendars? Hmm. It turns out you can use Google Calendar and contacts as a bridge. Lightning can act as a Google Calendar client. So those are always in sync. And there’s another add-in called Zindus which syncs Thunderbird contacts and Google contacts. Cool. So Thunderbird and Google are now totally in sync.
What about the Blackberry? Well Google makes a product called Google Sync which syncs Google calendar and contacts with the Blackberry. Golden! Desktop, Google and Blackberry all in sync for free.
There’s one tiny hiccup. For some reason Google sync actually syncs contacts, but only downloads calendar items to your Blackberry. So if I enter a calendar item on my Blackberry, it doesn’t sync anywhere else. Note to self, don’t do that.
Otherwise this is pretty cool. I can enter a contact in any of the three locations and it will find it’s way to the other two. I can enter calendar items from the desktop or Google and it will get to the others. And I can send and receive email from all three.
Next up, Open Office and Google Documents…
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New Instant Message Name
My old AIM screen name clearly had to go, so I’m simply using my email address as my screen name. I’ll keep the old IM up for a while but from now on, please use fish1964@gmail.com as my AIM screen name.
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Memory Science
An important discovery in the science of understanding how the brain makes memories…
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Officially Unemployed
As of the 31st I am officially unemployed. I thought it would feel weird, but it doesn’t really. I have the official severance paperwork and while I’ll have a lawyer check out a couple of clauses to make sure I understand the details, I’ll sign it pretty quickly. It’s not like I have a real choice.
The only bad thing about the agreement is the non-solicit clauses for current employees. For the next year I cannot solicit current employees. That’s a bummer since the best part about my former company is the people. But they did me a favor by letting the entire NY office go. Nothing stopping me from hiring them…
What’s next? Well, you may or may not hear about it on this blog depending on what I do. There are a couple of start-up business opportunities that are possible (but obviously risky). There are a couple of interesting positions out there that I’ve talked to people about. But nothing is particularly close at this point.
I’m strangely busy. I’m getting back in shape (swimming instead of running). I’m doing a lot of research on potential technologies. And there was Halloween and Danielle’s birthday, so I’ve had some fun with the kids.
Oh yeah, Halloween:
Danielle changed into her costume right at school to get trick or treating early. So since she rides her scooter to school, here is Alice in Wonderland riding a Razor (with her American Girl doll also in costume)
Victoria was Minnie Mouse:
The ears didn’t last long but Tori was a trick or treating machine…
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Twitter
A friend of mine got me back using Twitter again. I’m still not sure how useful I find it, but now I know the truth.
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Crackpot
I don’t know what’s funnier, this story, or the fact that there’s a village in the UK named Crackpot…
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Manipulating InTrade
I’ve posted before about my fascination with predictive markets. In an election season InTrade is especially fascinating. During the primaries you could watch how candidates “stock” would rise or fall on the actual primary day and get an early (and accurate) prediction of the winner before the networks announced anything (presumably people are betting based on some inside information on exit polls).
So this article was hugely interesting to me. Apparently a single “institutional” member on InTrade was deliberately bidding up the overall McCain for president contract value. There is one contract that you can trade for the overall chance of McCain (or Obama) winning the election and there is also a contract for each state for who will win that state. This person was bidding up the overall contract, but not the individual state contracts.
I do recall a point after the Republican convention where if you added up all of the states electoral votes based on who InTrade was prediction you would forecast an Obama win, but the overall contract was predicting a McCain win. Markets are supposed to be rational, but this one was clearly not.
Now we know why. But we don’t know why this person was doing it. A McCain fan with money to throw around? Did he/she really think that InTrade could drive the conventional wisdom and influence the election? There aren’t enough people as geeky as me for that to work…
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 