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I’m currently on a business trip in Santa Barbara. It’s my first time in Santa Barbara and finding a place to have a nice dinner was one of the first things I had to do once I arrived. I had spent some time walking around the pier and I found what looked to be a decent restaurant called Moby Dick Restaurant. After I was finished exploring, I returned to my hotel, changed clothes and headed back to the pier for dinner. The view from the restaurant was amazing. It overlooked the harbor, and at sunset, the it was absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately, that’s the best thing I can say about my dinner. My meal was overpriced ($40 for a steak, 4 shrimp, chowder and a soda) and not very good.
Tonight I went out to dinner with my coworker and his family. Since they had their small child with them, I figured letting them choose the place to eat was the wise thing to do. As we drove up State Street, we passed a place called The Original Enterprise Fish Company. After a little navigational fun trying to find their parking lot, we went inside. I had a very good swordfish dinner that was under $30 including chowder, a salad and soda. As we were finishing up dinner, I was telling the waitress my meal was so much better than the previous night. She asked us if we had ever eaten at Brophy’s. We said we hadn’t and she went on to tell us that most people choose Brophy’s over Enterprise stating that their clam chowder is excellent.
As I returned to the hotel and walked through the lobby, I stopped by the concierge and without giving him any other details I simply asked, “If you are going out to dinner, would you rather go to Brophy’s or Enterprise?” He takes no time at all to explain, “Definitely Brophy’s.” Duly noted, I know where I’m eating tomorrow night.
Had I asked the concierge prior to dinner on the first night, I’d have skipped the tourist trap meal on the first night. Thankfully I wised up and asked before it’s too late. I expect my final dinner in Santa Barbara to be much better than my first. If it’s not, believe me, I’ll let you know.
I wrote a review of Moby Dick Restaurant on Yelp.com. You can read it here.
What’s missing from my iPhone
Now that I’ve had the new 3G iPhone for a little bit, I figured I’d write a post to complain about it. Not because I don’t like it. Quite the contrary. I love it. But, there are a few things still missing that would make my iPhone experience even better.
SMS MMS messaging
I know this isn’t an original gripe, but still. Come on guys, I want to be able to take blurry photos and send them to my friends. I also want to be able to receive drunken party photos from my friends while they are out at the clubs.
Copy/Paste
As much as I would love to be able to blog from my iPhone, until I’m able to cut and paste, that just isn’t going to happen. Most of my blog posts have links to sites/products/whatever, and there’s no way I’m going to type out some crazy URLs to product pages buried deep within a site. I may as well try to write in braille.
Delete All
When I check my work email address, I scroll through, deal with the important emails and then delete them. This way I know the next time I look, any emails in my inbox need to be dealt with. I also have to delete all the spam that accumulates. After dealing with the good emails and I’m left with all the spam, deleting all would sure be handy.
Mark All As Read
Same general purpose as the delete all, except this is more important in gmail accounts where, if you delete an email, it’s deleted on gmail, too. Not just from your iPhone. In this case, marking them all as read so you can see a proper count of new emails would be useful. I may be alone on this one, but it’s my post…
Ability to switch between programs
Why can’t I have two programs running at once and then switch between them. If I’m in the middle of a killer game of Sudoku and I receive a text message and need to respond, when I’m done, I need to start the Sudoku application from the beginning rather than just switching back to it. In most cases, the games remember where you were at. But, that’s not the case with all apps. Plus, why should I have to wait 10-30 seconds for an app to load that I was just using a minute ago?
Sync with multiple computers
I have a desktop PC and a laptop that I would like to be able to use the iPhone as the go-between for syncing my music and my contacts. When I go on the road, having access to my full set of contacts on my laptop would be convenient. And, while I’m out on the road, if I buy a new album from iTunes, I want to be able to move it to my iPhone and/or desktop when I return home.
A few of these are keeping the iPhone from being the “Killer App” for me. I love it, but I have so much more love to give…
Leave me a comment and let me know what’s missing from YOUR iPhone.
Goldmine Vs. Outlook - Round 2
It has to be nearly 10 years ago that I first got introduced to the CRM software package called GoldMine. I was working for a small company at the time and I quickly realized the power GoldMine had in saving information and attaching it to a person or company. When I started up a side business writing some software, I went ahead and purchased my own copy of GoldMine to use at the house to keep in contact with my customers. I ditched Eudora and GoldMine became my default email client.
By this time the company I was working for started it’s rapid growth. We now had something like 25 or 30 licenses for the software. The problem we had was that this growth sorta came on in fits and spurts so we never took the time to get GoldMine set up properly to handle such a large volume of users and because of it we constantly had troubles and the employees who had to use it began to hate it. Myself included. It wasn’t too much longer before we gave up using GoldMine entirely at the office, though I was still using it at home for my personal contacts.
Fast forward a couple years and I had sold off my little side business. All my customers and support issues went along with it. My need for a CRM was long gone. GoldMine became a bit too much to deal with when it came to using it simply as an email client. I had just purchased a new computer and it came with a copy of Outlook, so I decided to give it a try. I was able to set up some folders for keeping work and personal emails separate. I set up some rules for dealing with several types of messages. I set up distribution lists for sending out monthly newsletters. Things were good. Outlook was working for me just fine! GoldMine began to collect dust.
I always suspected I would have the need for a CRM again. That need showed it’s head this past week. As I’m starting to make several connections with people in order to organize the WordCamp:Las Vegas event, it’s quickly become obvious that Outlook just isn’t going to cut it.
The problem I was running in to was that I would send out 10 requests for information. I’d get a few replies and I’d reply back. The email threads would start to get jumbled as my inbox would have portions of all these conversations going on at once. And, if you have somebody you are emailing back and forth with who doesn’t quote the previous messages in the email, you need to go back and forth between the “sent” folder and inbox in order to piece back together what was said.
How GoldMine can save you time and confusion
With GoldMine, ever email to or from a specific contact is saved on their record. There’s a date stamp and an indication if it was an inbound or outbound email. Double-click the message to see what was sent, and then use the previous/next buttons to bounce your way through the email chain of events.
This weekend I decided it was time to make the switch back. I resigned myself to the fact that I had a BIG task in front of me. I didn’t want to just pick up and start using GoldMine again leaving a 2 year gap in email history sitting over in Outlook. I needed to import all the new contacts, update any existing ones that may have changed, import all the emails from Outlook and connect them all to the proper contacts. The task seemed daunting.
Getting Started
Knowing how big this task was going to be, before I got started I had to make sure that there would be a way for me to sync my contacts to iPhone. Currently, it doesn’t appear that there is. I did, however, figure out that I can export a group of contacts from GoldMine, import it in to Outlook and then sync from there. This is a one-way push, though. I’m not able to update records on the iPhone and have that information sync to GoldMine. I’m going to do some further research on this and hope to stream line the processes.
The process
The first thing I did was export my Outlook contacts and imported them in to GoldMine. I had to clean up a few duplicate entries that came from this process, but it was still quicker than hand editing a few dozen contacts. Next I went through all the contacts removed some unneeded ones and manually added a few that were missing. Next I added all my email accounts (I have at least 6) to GoldMine so it could check them all. I then removed them all from Outlook so it wouldn’t auto-check for email if I had to log in there for some reason. Then the fun part, I imported the entire inbox from outlook in to GoldMine. This process took nearly 30 minutes to complete. The final step was, of course, the most time consuming. For the next 3 hours I went through the inbox and linked email messages to contacts. I had sorted the inbox alphabetically by sender, so when I would update one incoming email to attach it to a contact, all other emails from that same email address would be updated automatically. So really I (usually) only needed to touch one email per sender. I could then highlight all their incoming emails and hit the “FastFile” button to store them on the record and remove them from the inbox.
Even though it was a healthy amount of time taken out of my weekend, I certainly feel it’s worth it. Being able to keep straight all of the email conversations without having to jump too many hoops would be a very welcome change.
WordPress and the 2.6.2 mandatory upgrade
Tonight was one of those frustrating evenings where you spend the entire time banging your head against your keyboard trying to figure something out that just doesn’t seem logical at all. It all started out pretty randomly, too.
This morning I realized that I wasn’t able to log in to the admin section of one of my blogs. I wasn’t getting an error message saying I had the wrong password, it was just returning to the login page. I told Jason about it and he says, “It sounds like you were hacked thanks to this security bug found in WP version 2.6.1.” So, of course I went and immediately upgraded the affected site. I then checked another of my sites. It, too, was affected. I upgraded it as well.
I got home around 5 after picking up my car from the dealership. (it had to have a little work done. blog post forthcoming.) We had dinner and then I headed upstairs to tackle the remaining upgrades. This is when the wheels fell off the cart.
I uploaded the new version of WordPress to the next site, modified a config file, updated a database table (all exactly as I had done this morning to the previous sites) but this time, the upgrade didn’t help. I still couldn’t get in. I tried a few more things with no luck. I did some searching online and found no real new information. It seemed like it was a pretty minor upgrade for everybody else and it’s only me that’s getting affected in this way after doing the upgrade. Just my luck. I can’t hit MegaBucks, but I can be the one in 4million who’s affected by some obscure bug.
Of the 13 blogs I manage, 10 of them upgraded smoothly. 3 are left in a state of limbo. The front end of the site works fine, so visitors will have no clue there’s an issue. I’m just unable to access the admin section. I’ve posted on the WordPress forum looking for help, so hopefully something will come of that pretty quickly.
Frustrated & beaten, I’m calling it a night. Hopefully the morning will bring better luck.
The Joys of Home Ownership
This past weekend, Chris and I headed off to Los Angeles to go see a couple bands; Reckless Kelly and Micky & the Motorcars. If you follow my blog you may be saying, “didn’t you just see these guys last weekend?” The answer would be “Yes, yes we did.” But that’s for another blog post coming later. For now, let’s get back to the story at hand…
Chris picked me up at work and we head straight to the 15 freeway. We are about 1 hour in to our trip when we get a phone call from Chris’ sister-in-law, Tara, who is staying at our house for a few weeks. It seems the the toilet in the downstairs bathroom has backed up and had continued running while she was upstairs for a while. By the time she found the problem, our downstairs bathroom, hallway, bar area and guest bedroom are soaked. She had turned off the water to the toilet and was in the process of cleaning up the mess with the help of my mother-in-law. Since there wasn’t much we could really do over the weekend anyway, we continued on our trip.
Saturday morning we got another call. My mother-in-law’s garage flooded. Apparently the washing machine overflowed and filled up a portion of the garage with water. Tara went over to help her clear out the boxes and clean up the mess. After she was done helping, she came back to our house and went upstairs to take a shower. When she headed back downstairs, all the water from the shower had come up through the floor drain in the downstairs shower and caused another minor flood. So back they went to cleaning up the mess.
We called the plumbers and set up an appointment for Monday morning. When they arrived, the first thing they did is tried to run the snake down the toilet. The pipes were clear and they found no blockage. They snaked the shower and again found no blockage. The next step was to check the main pipes in the front yard. The started running the snake and couldn’t get too far. Unfortunately it wasn’t a blockage, it was actually a broken pipe.
When they dug out the area, it appears that there was a leak that was keeping the dirt wet. This was causing it to continue to settle and was building up a gap. Then, at some point a piece of concrete slipped and fell on to the PVC pipe below and busting it. This started to let in dirt and rocks. As more and more dirt built up, it started causing the backup and before long, we have a big problem.
It’s weird to say, but we were actually pretty lucky. The broken pipe was real close to wear they started digging. If it hadn’t been, they would have needed to bring in a back-hoe to dig up our front yard until they found the broken pipe before they could even fix it.
Once they had the pipe fixed they had us fill both bath tubs and then drain them at the same time to make sure there was no leaks and that everything was flowing smoothly. When that all turned out OK, they put the dirt they had dug up back in the hole. The only problem is, so much of the dirt has either gone down the drain or been compacted in to the ground, the amount they dug up only filled about half the hole. I need to go to Home Depot and pick up 4 or 5 bags of sand/dirt to fill the hole back up and then deal with the rocks on top, etc…
You can see photos of the mess over at flickr.
ahh, good times.
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