Enemy of Entropy

Archive for November 2009

Whoops!

26 November 2009, 10:58 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Geekery.

I’ve dis­cov­ered that my blog posts stopped cross-​​posting over to my Live­Jour­nal acc­count at some point in Sep­tem­ber. Many of my more vocal friends actu­ally read my posts over there, so any­thing I’ve said since then might as well have been tossed into the bit bucket. I’m going to rework those posts and re-​​do them. Some were rather time-​​sensitive, like some impor­tant birth­day wishes! Sorry James, Dean, Michelle, Jeff, and Will! (Not that my nephew actu­ally reads my blog, but it’s the thought that counts, right?)

At least I wasn’t the only per­son hav­ing the prob­lem. It seems that every­body using the Live+Press Plu­gin had the same issue as soon as they upgraded to Word­Press 2.8.x. I’m sure Live+Press will be fixed soon, but I’m not a coder and I have all the patience of a two-​​year-​​old, so I’m try­ing a new plu­gin now, Jour­nal­Press. If you see this on LJ, it worked!

ETA: Well, it didn’t work. Grrr. I’ll cross-​​post manually.

That’s It. I’ve joined the cult.

16 November 2009, 3:43 am. Comments Off. Filed under Family.

Of the iTouch, that is.

It started rel­a­tively inno­cently. I got my first iPod this sum­mer, finally giv­ing up the wee lit­tle mp3 player that has served me fairly well for years. That and an older Palm PDA were all I needed, right? I mean, I’m not the pod­cast nut, and I’m at home most of the time any­way, so I’ve got all the music I could want at my fin­ger­tips any­time I want it.

I finally admit­ted that I’d out­grown those solu­tions and per­mit­ted an iPod clas­sic into my life. I was shocked when I real­ized just how much music would fit into 120gb, believe you me! Then I got some­what obses­sive about get­ting every­thing tagged prop­erly. And adding cov­ers. I’m try­ing, very, very hard, really, to resist the feel­ing that all the albums should be com­plete and all the songs should have lyrics. They don’t all have to be per­fect. Right?1

I refused Sam’s sug­es­tion of an iTouch at the time. Nope. Didn’t need one. No way, no how. Couldn’t imag­ine it. The Palm T|X I’d inher­ited from him was more than suf­fi­cient, thank you. Con­tacts, cal­en­dar, med­ical infor­ma­tion for all of us, first aid ref­er­ence, an entire library of books, Pocket Quicken, Bejew­eled, Glyph, Mahjongg, migraine and mood track­ers, WWCalc, Doc­u­ments to Go, jour­nal, ear train­ing coach, pho­tos — yep, got it all, thanks. The PDA had occa­sional con­nec­tion foibles, and Pal­mOS absolutely will not sup­port WPA2, so I can only con­nect via Blue­tooth on one of our PCs (I’m not self­ish enough to demand that the wire­less router be left unse­cured so that I can play with my PDA!). But I was home pretty much 24/​7, so it still wasn’t that big a deal.

I res­olutely avoided even touch­ing Sam’s pre­cious, partly because he wanted me to fall in love with it so much. He praised it. He waxed enthu­si­as­tic. He got more effi­cient because of sweet lit­tle things like Gro­cery Gad­get.

I have to say I’ve been very, very glad of the iPod over the last week, as the power sup­ply on my desk­top died, and with­out the iPod I wouldn’t have access to most of my favorite music! We had to ship the power sup­ply back to the man­u­fac­turer to get it replaced, and are still wait­ing for the new one, so I’m using the lap­top for now. I adore my lap­top, but that’s not where I store the music most of the time. The iPod has saved my sanity.

Any­way, things have changed a bit from this sum­mer to now. I’m out and about more, going to sev­eral appoint­ments a week. That’s partly thanks to hav­ing a newer, more reli­able car, and partly thanks to hav­ing a sweet lit­tle scooter that greatly improves my mobil­ity. In any case, I’m not at home as much, so hav­ing reli­able infor­ma­tion at my fin­ger­tips is more impor­tant than ever — as is portable music to block out the noises of the world around me while in all those wait­ing rooms.

And the PDA is get­ting more and more annoy­ing. Airset, the ser­vice we’ve used for the past few years to share fam­ily infor­ma­tion, has got­ten really annoy­ing recently and just will not put con­tacts into the address book I spec­ify when I syn­chro­nize. I end up with mul­ti­ple copies of them in my per­sonal address book with dif­fer­ent tags, and none in the shared address book, so Sam and Katie can’t get to the infor­ma­tion when they need to do so. I got fed up enough this week that we started up the lat­est round of the quest for work­ing, afford­able fam­ily group­ware. And hon­estly, being on more than one plat­form just makes that more com­plex than it needs to be.

So as of tonight, I’m the owner of an iTouch. It’s syn­chro­niz­ing now. It won’t have every­thing I’ve come to expect on the PDA — for instance, Read­er­Ware doesn’t run on that plat­form, but there is a sug­gested workaround for it. It has some things I couldn’t get on the Pal­mOS, like the new offi­cial Weight Watch­ers appli­ca­tion, and Gro­cery Gad­get, Pan­dora, etc. I haven’t found any­thing that comes any­where close to the func­tion­al­ity of Health­Files Plus, unfor­tu­nately. There are iTouch/​iPhone apps which might come close, but there isn’t a com­pan­ion desk­top appli­ca­tion for any of the ones I’ve seen, and there’s sim­ply no way I’m going to sit down and enter all of my and Katie’s med­ical infor­ma­tion and his­tory into any portable device!

So speak to me, oh fel­low cultists. What are your favorite appli­ca­tions? (I’m not one for games so much, except the puz­zle sort, hon­estly, although I did grab some of the free ones.) And while we’re at it, how do you and your spouse/​partner/​kids keep your cal­en­dars and shared con­tact infor­ma­tion syn­chro­nized? How do you han­dle tasks and lists? Or are you back­ing away very, very slowly from the con­trol freaks who would even con­sider fam­ily groupware?

I know what my fam­ily did when I was grow­ing up, and what (I think) my par­ents still do. Mom kept a cal­en­dar on the kitchen wall, and some things went on it, and some things were for­got­ten. Peo­ple made appoint­ments while away from the house and if they con­flicted with some­thing already on the cal­en­dar, there was a big to-​​do with mak­ing calls and chang­ing them. Num­bers and addresses were scrib­bled in a book that was kept in the microwave cab­i­net, or on pieces of paper stuffed into that book, or some­times on scraps of paper stuck on the fridge with mag­nets. Or maybe they were in Daddy’s pock­ets, and he’d empty his pock­ets at the end of the day, and they’d live on his dresser for a while, and…you get the pic­ture. In any case, every­body asked Mom about how to con­tact so-​​and-​​so and what was hap­pen­ing when, and if she could find the infor­ma­tion you were in luck, and if she couldn’t you were out of it, and if it was a bad time, oh well. So Mom had to put up with peo­ple who really should have been able to look all that up them­selves bug­ging her when I’m quite sure she had plenty of other things to do. In fact, to this day, if I want to know how to reach most of the extended fam­ily, I have to call Mom! After I became the Mommy, I decided pretty early on that I didn’t want to be the keeper of a book under the microwave or any of that stuff, so I focused on set­ting up access to infor­ma­tion rather than being the source of it myself.

1 OCD? Who, me?

 

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