As I am preparing to leave for vacation I am realizing just how powerful one website has become in my life.  I had become very stressed out over the staggering amounts of tasks I had to complete each day.  Using the traditional “todo” list was not helping and my todo lists were spanning multiple pages.  I was pointed in the direction of a great book and after reading the book, “Getting Things Done” by David Allen I tried many different applications in order to organize and keep on top of my very busy work days.

An average day for me starts with many tasks and has more added on throughout the day.  These tasks must be prioritized, remembered and most importantly completed on-time.  On a day like today I have already completed 45 tasks.

The site I finally settled on is http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ .  I chose this site for numerous reasons.

1. It provides a very simple user interface which I as a minimalist at heart appreciate
2. It has a pretty decent companion iPhone app for adding tasks when you actually remember them; not when you get back to a computer and can remember what you thought about while in line at the store
3. It is platform independent.  I get the same UI on my work computer as on my home computer
4. Amazingly *knock on wood* it is not yet blocked by my corporates “Big Brother” proxy

This website has helped me organize my professional and my personal life.  I can easily create a “list” to tackle a specific large project (like our kitchen renovation) or use one of the numerous smaller lists I’ve created; like one for each of my accounts at work and one entitled “Pets” that reminds me to get cat or dog food, clean the litter box etc etc.

For anybody looking to get on top of things and to reduce what I found to be a good deal of stress give RTM a shot.  It’s even FREE!

Share on Facebook

This week I broke free of the jail created by Apple on their iPhone.  Overall I have to say I am very happy with it  While many break for things such as themes, no longer paying for applications, or using the phone for unsupported purposes; my reason was much different.

I made this decision because I learned that if I just simply modify a configuration file stored on the phone I can have different vibration patterns for different events.  No longer am I unsure if I have received a text message or an email while the phone is turned to silent mode and in my pocket.

Of course, as I’ve already taken the steps to do the jailbreak I have been exploring the other nice features out there.  I’ve modified my phone ever so slightly to give me a more accurate battery meter and add video recording as well as to allow me to more quickly enable or disable features like WIFI and GPS.

The final modification I’ve made was purely visual.  I added my background, but slightly muted, behind the icons, removed the dock’s background and made the dock icons reflective.  Overall I think it’s made my phone look very sharp and personalized to me without making it look lame and childish like most of the themes I’ve found posted around on the internet.

Now, the only bars that are jailing me are those of AT&T’s limited network.

Share on Facebook

I’ve always loved Firefox however in recent months I’ve cast this cute little animal into the refuge pile in /Applications and given its space in the warmth of my dock to Apple’s Safari 4 browser.  Firefox had developed a very naughty habit of eating all of my poor laptops free memory and CPU so when Apple came out with Safari 4 I decided to give it shot.

Safari is remarkably faster than the prior versions of Firefox and had a much lower memory and CPU footprint on my laptop.  The browser offered many other nifty features that I loved the glitz of when switching but over the past few months have all but forgotten as I never use them.  Such toys as “Top Sites” and “Graphical History” while being very interesting features don’t serve one well when they never use the “Top Sites” and barely ever check their browser history.

Today a friend mentioned how much he was enjoying Firefox 3.5 and I decided it was worth a shot to install on my work issued Windows laptop.  I replaced Firefox 3.0 with 3.5 and found it remarkably faster, sharper looking and much better with sharing the small amount of memory my work laptop has.  Since I was so impressed with it on the work computer I decided to give it a shot on my personal computer.

I installed the browser and after just about twenty minutes of usage noticed how much faster it was than prior versions.  It was as fast or faster than Safari 4.  The rendering is quicker than it used to be and Firefox’s use of large fonts has always been the most superior out there.  The results are in

Firefox has found it's rightful home

So now I am back on Firefox and quite happy with the performance thus far.

PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
983 firefox-bi  12.1% 13:59.60  24   249   1148  120M    52M   169M   577M

So now a question for all of you out there who actually read enough of this post to make it here.  Do you have any must have extensions I should look into?

Share on Facebook

Kate and I rarely have time to watch television in the evenings.  We both work full time jobs and after work between the gym, Kate’s MBA classes, my poker nights and us still having to find time to do household chores we get about an hour a night to watch TV.

Optimizing our time is important and ever since we purchased our first DVR in 2003 we’ve enjoyed being able to save time by fast forwarding commercials.  However now that we’ve gone to HD television we’ve run into a problem.  The DVR provided by Comcast just doesn’t have enough space!  We’re constantly at over 90% filled and cheer when we make it into the low 70s.  However it will never stay in that range long.

We’ve lost numerous episodes of television shows because the DVR fills and has to either delete something or not record something.  It’s really getting tiresome and I’ve started to seek alternatives to recording everything on my DVR.

First I decided to try the 100% legitimate way of watching TV and I decided to make use of the Hulu (http://www.hulu.com) website.  Hulu offers a wonderful service offering television shows by participating networks in your web browser.  It offers a SD resolution of 360p and some programs you can rock out on HD at 480p.  The 480p seems pretty good to me within the window however I notice that in a full screen display they’ll tend to be sluggish.  This could be a result of my over three year old laptop but I have no other way to test it as Kate and I have exactly matching laptops.

Thanks to Hulu I no longer need to record my animated shows like “Family Guy” and “King of the Hill” and the crappy TV series I enjoy because I truly am my sons father such as “Knight Rider”.  However when I went to add other shows to my subscription list I ran into an issue.  Shows such as “Scrubs” and “How I Met Your Mother” are not directly hosted on the Hulu site and instead it links you back to the networks own site with their own modified flash video player.  The problem with that being for some reason I am not getting the content.  Nor am I sure that my Hulu subscription will properly notify me when these sites update their content.

As of this moment no matter what I try I can not get the episodes directly linked form the Hulu site to play on my machine.  Yes, I know that most people are too nearsighted to realize that not everybody runs Windows and Internet Explorer so us poor Mac users suffer.  I just don’t think that should be a valid excuse for not being able to play video from a NATIONAL network broadcasting service.  Poor showing.

Hopefully I can figure this out and Hulu can work for my needs letting me only record the things we both watch on the DVR which currently has four things scheduled for the next two days with 14% free.  Those four items are NOT going to fit thus forcing us to loose episodes we can’t possibly watch as Kate wont even be home until tomorrow evening.

Share on Facebook

The World Wide Web started out as a purely text based medium for the exchange of knowledge by mainly government entities and Academia.  I don’t think anybody saw the WWW at it’s inception as being the living and breathing pulse of the internet that it has become.  I couldn’t imagine the framers of the first revision of HTML having imagined the likes  of Facebook, YouTube, eBay and to a lesser extent the web being used to solve the use of another set of protocols; email.

Yet there is no denying it, the WWW has grown well passed it’s pure text roots.  It is, in my opinion, the most rapidly increasing and advancing internet technology.  Much of our online time is now spent on social networking sites, online games, watching videos and corresponding in email.  But what connects us to all of these multitudes of sites?  Our web browsers.

While the web browsing software we use to interact with the web has surely advanced over time to support the new features of the WWW, grow with the operating systems they run on and even to add more robust features they all have some tragic flaws which I have discovered and grown to despise.  The issues I am sharing are my own, and I know my computer usage differs from that of other peoples.  The issues I have may not be shared by many, or for that matter, any of you.  

First and foremost I am a Macintosh user who is forced to use Windows during the day.  I do not believe Internet Explorer should even be discussed as a web browser as it is notoriously the least safe, most trouble prone and least compatible of all the browsers.  Furthermore as my work computer is locked down tighter than a bank vault and I am unable to browse personal web sites with it nor can I upgrade to the latest version I’ll skip it all together.  

When it comes to browsers on the Macintosh you’re left with two major competitors and a few minors.  Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.  For the past few years I have been a Firefox user however that has changed, at least for the moment, as of today.  I’ve had numerous frustrations with Firefox and have wanted to explore other browsers but have been tied in to Firefox as there have always been plugins which allowed me to synchronize my bookmarks with multiple personal computers and even a Firefox install on my work computer.  Today however Foxmarks, the plugin I’ve been using for the past year or so has released a version that is compatible with Apple’s Safari and I now have the freedom to break away from Firefox on the Mac.

I have numerous gripes with Firefox, but two that are the most prevalent and disturbing to me.  Firefox has what I can only describe as rendering issues if you modify the font sizes in its preferences.  This is something I do for any program loaded on my computer.  I increase the font size to be larger, in some cases like web browsers dramatically so.  Going from a default font face of 9 or 10 to 15 or 16 and setting the minimum allowed font for 14 or 15, depending on the font families used.  As I’ve pointed out in other posts, Firefox just doesn’t display a lot of sites right.  ESPN, New York Times and multiple others are nearly unusable with my choice of configuration.  Even Facebook has features I couldn’t use such as IM due to the text overlapping other text on the screen.  

Add to this Firefox’s insane memory and CPU usage and it was always an ugly picture.  I’ve spotted Firefox taking up more memory than even iPhoto which was importing photos from my camera at the time.  It often would freeze almost entirely or randomly crash for what seemed like no reason.  I’ve grown tired of being in the middle of a few articles, email drafts and the like and poof my web browser vanishes.  Even with session recovery some things just don’t come back.

Enter Foxmarks for Safari and my first day using Safari.  While I vastly enjoy it’s ability to handle my large fonts much better than Firefox, albeit not perfectly, I am left with an empty feeling in my computer heart for the numerous plugins and assistance tools I have left behind.  There seems to be very few add-ons for Safari and of them most seem useless or have so many horrible reviews I don’t even want to mess with them.  

I’ve left behind my plugins to control my tabs to my liking (making sure gmail is never closed etc), my excellent ad blocking and my tie ins to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.  I’ve also lost “control” as I feel Safari’s lack of settings in the preferences is a bit shocking coming from Firefox which seems to have much more user control.

Safari still sucks up way more RAM than I think it should but at least my computer seems to run faster.  The browser renders web sites a lot slower than Firefox but they all seem to look cleaner and function a bit better.  The OS X styled buttons and widgets of course help.  But I am still left with the one simple question?

Why are programs that are so often used, and used by so damned many, still full of such obvious flaws as memory consumption issues and usability issues?

Share on Facebook

Twitter is,

a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. (Wikipedia)

I first found this unique social networking site in January of 2007 and thought it was a very interesting concept.  However I found that I had no friends on it leading me to rarely check it which of course lead to me never updating it.  Recently Twitter has become more and more popular in the mainstream and has gained quite a strong following in the geek community; and as a card carrying geek I felt obligated to give tweeting a chance again.

I found a few people and organizations I wanted to follow, especially during the 2008 election coverage.  This got me hitting Twitter fairly often and I began to update.  It felt good to do these little 140 character tweets as I had stuff I wanted to share or vent about, but not enough for a full blog post.  You can access Twitter through their website, their instant messenger bot, SMS from your cell phone our a Twitter client on your computer or smartphone.

Well as I have what I like to think is the smartest of the smartphones, an iPhone, I figured I’d start playing with Twitter clients on that first.  I downloaded one, then another, and soon enough I had about seven of them installed.  Each has it’s strong points and of course it’s weak points.   Playing with the applications has become as much fun or maybe even more fun then actually using the service!  After a short bit of time using applications on the iPhone I ventured into the numerous applications available for the Mac.  I think I may have settled on my applications of choice, but I think half of the fun is playing with the new ones that come out almost every day.

For thsoe of you who haven’t used Twitter yet, give it a go.  It’s easy to setup an account and even easier to use.  You can find me on Twitter as dwaxman.

Share on Facebook

I’ve been on the internet for as long as I can remember.  My first web browser didn’t know what a graphic was, the computer had no mouse and the connection speed was slower than my iPhone with 1 bar of service.  Fast forward some 15+ years and the internet has become a major hobby of mine as well as my source for 99% of the news and information I take in.

I gave up print media, specifically newspapers, many years ago for their online versions.  I found the on-screen text to be much larger than the print edition and that the black on white text was a much better fit for me than black on grey with smudges.  I would frequent five or ten news oriented websites a day to take in my news on subjects from politics to technology and from sports to business news.  However in roughly 2005 many sites began to mature in ways that I find counter-productive to their nature.  Sites began to use very structured style sheets which allow them to fit more information and advertisements on a page; but they pay no mind to those of us who enjoy a larger font experience.  I pretty well summarized my complaints in my October 1st, 2008 post here so I wont go on and on about it.

Thankfully around that time a new syndication method was becoming widely popular on the internet.  RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, puts all the updated content from a web site into a “feed” and allows the “reader” application to then view it in any way it wishes.  RSS readers, whether online or as an application on your own computer usually offer you a lot more customization on features like font sizes and font families as well as whether you wish to see the included images or not.

With Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Livejournal and the numerous other personal blogs and blog hosting providers out there I have begone to run into the same issues I had of years ago with the news.  The content was there, but often in a way I didn’t find it to be pleasant to read.  Be it fonts that were too small, horrible choices of background images, themes that use horrible styling or just a poor choice of configuration I’ve come to the conclusion that these sites, jsut as the prior news sites, are not accessible for me.  At first I didn’t know what to do about it.  I ignored these sites for a long time however as they’ve become very popular, especially among the geeks of the world, I’ve been wanting to participate more and more.

Recently I spent quite some time with Google and found how to get all of my Social Media right into my RSS reader.  Some of it was as easy as just adding the feed, others required third party sites to interact with private communities to get friend only posts and some just required me to open my eyes and notice links to RSS feeds.  This has made my reading, following and staying in contact with friends much easier.  Now, if I could easily design a single site with my parameters to make updates to these sites I’d be rocking out.

Share on Facebook

It’s no secret that I have below average eye sight.  There are things people with bad eye sight do to get by in life.  I enjoy hard cover books rather than paperbacks because the font is larger, I pay more money for good seats to see a show, and I always increase the default font size on my computer to make things easier to read.  This has never really been a problem until recent years when web-design has become more important to sites than usability.  While I understand that asthetics are important to a web site I firmly believe that these looks should not be at the sacrafice of usability.

Because a picture paints a thousand words and I could literally waste thousands trying to explain this to you I’ve chosen to hilight two very popular and very visited websites.

NYTimes home page with large fonts does not present right

While this one is bad, the site still remains usable.  It is difficult to use some aspects of the site and on some stories the difficulty becomes even greater, but no section of the site is as bad as,

ESPNs site is almost completely unusable with larger than average fonts

Share on Facebook

Those of us in the Human Resources and Recruiting games have to make character assesments of our candidates.  But what do we have to go on?  Their resumes are crafted to speak to their professional accomplishments and attributes which tells us they’ve the skills to do the job we’re looking to fill however it tells us nothing about them as a person.  We conduct phone screening and in person interviews and they’re on their best behavior with the intent to impress us.  Many times we can spot the freaks, the crazies and the lazy losers from these screenings; but some of them are really good actors.

Whenever I’m in doubt I try to Google the person to see what they may have posted on the internet.  I’ve found numerous candidates, their photo collections, blogs etc.  Often these results are harmless and end up being a waste of my time; however there are some cases when they’ve turned out to be a real positive use of time.  Like the unnamed candidate who posted a blog entry about using his brothers urine for a drug test or the crime report for a candidate who was arrested for selling drugs in a High School parking lot.

Today I was playing with StumbleIpon which has “Human Resources” as one of my key search categories and I stumbled upon this page, Spokeo/HR.  This page allows you to enter a candidates name and search numerous social networking sites for their profiles and information.  It searches sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr, LiveJournal, Blogger and many others.  I randomly pulled some of the low-level candidates I had in the mix and searched them.  Found some pretty interesting pictures, some horrific choices in movies and music as well as some horrible political views; however so far nothing that made me say a candidate can’t work.  However in one case I saw way more of a female candidate than I would in an interview.

Share on Facebook

Today I installed DD-WRT on my fathers Buffalo router.  All seemed well however we’ve discovered a networking issue I could use your help with.  If you know Windows, DD-WRT and or networking please read on.  If not, boring geekiness you wont care about below the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Share on Facebook