Technology Plumbing: 8/30/09

Saturday, September 5, 2009

There is work to be done on Labor Day weekend

The good news is many of us have a 3 day weekend starting today, but there is still lots of technology work to be done this weekend. Here is what I will be doing this weekend and of course sharing with the Technology Plumbing community as I do so:

Installing the Snow Leopard upgrade on my 2 home Macs. I have had it for a few days, but wanted to wait for the weekend to do the upgrade. Not expecting any issues (we are talking Apple after all), but figured it made sense to have some time just in case.
Applying all of the non-Microsoft updates to my Windows Vista. I have a Windows 7 upgrade on order, but that will be for another weekend.
Do some research on Netbooks. I see more and more of them in my travels and want to figure out if it is time for me to make the switch to something more user friendly on crowded airplanes. Need to found if they can operate effectively in the many conference rooms that have no Ethernet or power access, given the size and computing power trade-offs. Note to office planners: please design your conference rooms with power outlets near the conference tables.
Continue my research on web calendars. I recently added my favorite sports teams calendars to my Google calendar. While they work nicely with my personal Google calendar, they won't sync up with my family's Cozi calendar. I know this is mostly a Cozi issue, but want to see if there is a workaround.

I am sure in the course of doing all of this I will stumble onto many other interesting ideas and projects. Some of which will be pursued or at least shared (via Twitter, a blog post or on Facebook), but many others will just be big "time sucks", such is the nature of the web today :)

So enjoy the long weekend and good luck in doing whatever you are doing, technology-wise or not.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Sometimes a Tsunami is OK

I prepay a year's worth of service from Vonage, my VOIP provider because of the nice discount they provide for doing so. Recently they started providing, at no extra charge, their Visual Voice mail product to customers like myself that prepay, so I followed the directions and turned it on.

In a standard Vonage account, when you get an voice mail, it sends out an email with the phone number of the person leaving the voice mail and .WAV file version of the message that was left. While this is certainly usable, it is not always convenient listening to the voice mail either by dialing into my account or playing the .WAV file.

With this new service Vonage attempts to convert the message that was left into text and place that into the email that is sent. My first few experiences getting my voice mails this way have been acceptable in that you can get the general idea what the caller meant when they called, but I wouldn't want to rely on the details as they sometimes take guesses as to what the caller said.

In some cases, the translation is more comedic then accurate, but after I stopped laughing, I figured out that the message below was actually referring to the Salvation Army vs. the mysterious "Salvage Tsunami"

While I am usually looking for services and technology that are better then the usual "good enough", that Corporate America normally delivers, the "free" Vonage visual voice mail is OK with me and that is not just a lot of rain on your parade.

1xxxxxxxxxx@vm.vonage.com wrote:

Date : Aug 26 2009 07:10:27 PM

From : 1xxxxxxxxxx

To : xxxxxxxxxx (1xxxxxxxxxx)

"The Salvage Tsunami is doing our best to help the community. On Friday and Saturday August 28th and 29th, we will be holding a donation event. Please bring your usable items to 1520 West 75th st., in (Donor's Grove?) or you can always call 1-888-xxx-xxxx for home pick up service. Again that is 1-888-xxx-xxxx for home pick up service. Thank you for supporting the Salvage Tsunami."

--- Brought to you by Vonage ---

This email was sent from a mailbox that does not accept replies.

If you require assistance from Customer Care, please visit our Contact Us page at http://www.vonage.com/help_contactUS.php

Vonage would like to know what you think about this Vonage Visual Voicemail message.

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Sunday, August 30, 2009

Social Networking and your Community Projects

One of the fun parts of this blog is keeping current on trends in the industry and passing them on the readers of this blog, who hopefully enjoy them and pass them on to their friends and associates and so on. Today I want to pass on how to use social networking to better promote your community projects.

In this case they are promoting a local farmers market and while they have done all of the normal promotions such as sandwich boards, flyers and even e-mail, they have also brought in Facebook, Twitter and Blogging (#ftb) as well as pictures via Flickr. The use of social networking, especially Twitter, made the communication interactive and viral and brought the community events to the attention of many more people than would have been aware of it had they relied solely on traditional means of communication.

The fact that some of the more esoteric items (e.g. zucchini flowers) sold out (that usually don't) after the social network started talking about a great recipe for them, is testament to the power of social networking and a good reason for you to leverage these tools in your community project.

Key points:

Take the same content you would use in traditional communication methods, as well as the kind of things you would talk about with your friends and neighbors, and push them out via Twitter in small chunks. This will take you from broadcasting to conversation.
Capture what people are doing as part of your community project (potato salad recipes using food bought at the farmers market) and blog about it, which can be pushed out to Twitter (as I have previously written about).
Use the interactiveness of social networking to evolve your community event and your communication on it. Post those pictures of that nice cherry pie!

For more details on how they promoted their local farmers market check out the video