So between not having my personal laptop and then Internet access being a car ride away, I discovered some items along the way.

• Backing up Data is important, but one also needs access to the data

There are a few other tangential things I have found out as well, such as changes to my photography workflow, online instructions should not be the only instruction, unfettered Internet access can be a key item but those will be separate posts.

Using my backup solutions none of my data was in jeopardy, however using that data was the challenge. I have been using JungleDisk as my incremental off site backup solution. It works very well for me, but has some choices along with it that I was not fully aware of when I made them. Using a block copy approach I could reduce the amount of bandwidth and storage space I use, however this does not come without its tradeoffs. By making this choice I would be unable to browse the files online, I would have to actually restore them using the client software. At the time I did not think that it was a big deal as I figured I could always just install the client on another computer and get all the data back.

A key item here is that it is my off site backup. Too many people think that just having a backup is sufficient. It is not as there are other things to consider than just a hard drive or computer failure. One has to think of other ways that Data can be destroyed: “Someone stole my car! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts!!“ Having the data off site makes it much less likely that Data will be lost.

I could have just installed the client on another computer and get all the data back that still was not going to solve all my issues. As a result of not being able to browse the contents, I am going to change my approach yet again.

Some items will be backed up using block copy, other items will be backed up using file copy, and still other items will be backed up to either Mobile Me’s iDisk or to my Dropbox account. You might wonder what data would go to what place and how to keep it all organized, well that is actually fairly easy as long as I make the right decisions when starting. Just by putting files into different locations on my computer they will be backed up in different ways. Placing items into the Documents directory will place them on JungleDisk, placing items in the Dropbox folder will be on Dropbox obviously (still waiting for selective sync before 100% happy with it), and items stored in iDisk will be on MobileMe iDisk.

The key to this approach is to make sure that a file is stored in one location and only one location for live Data. I have often encountered problems where two files have the same name, but different time stamps or on different computers, so how do I know which one is current. Since all of these items are backed up to the “cloud” of the Internet I do not have to worry greatly about the loss of data. I still do backups to DVD and secondary hard drives every so often so that I am not completely at risk. For items that I want to make sure I backup in more than one location, well I have not hit any yet, but using ChronoSync to keep a “Backup” directory in sync is my plan. This will allow me to create a directory in one of the other storage locations that is labeled KeyJDBU (Key JungleDisk Backup items), then I can use ChronoSync to decide what to copy into it and keep in sync.

This approach of also having the key items in iDisk or Dropbox will also allow for the items to be browsable without having to restore all the data. It still does not solve another key issue, do I have the access to the programs to use the data once restored? I found that quite often the answer was no. Most of this situation was my own fault as I chose what format to store the Data in. Once again I could reinstall and have the data back, but that would take a while; especially with the licensing headaches some companies have put in place (that means you Adobe). I am now considering how to handle that issue.

I am so paranoid about losing images and data I backup quite often. However my backup system was flawed, I had too many and I did not know what was current. Very difficult to be able to tell what images I should be reviewing and to make sure that I am not losing any. Now I am using ChronoSync to address this issue, but that is another blog post.

I tried to use LightRoom to help with this process and it did help quite a bit, but I still had to go through many images on my own due to an improper choice on reimporting after updating to SnowLeopard. It was operator error. When I started on January 1, 2010 the statistics of the image catalog were:

• 41,880 images, 250.34 GB, backed up on 46 DVDs
  • 27,740 JPG Files
  • 2,248 CR2 Files
  • 718 TIF File (Scans)
  • 1,197 CRW Files
  • 9,964 DNG Files
  • 13 PSD Files
• A date range from 2000 to 2009
• Not all of these images were taken by me, so I want to remove them but keep them
• Duplication was an issue
• Duplication was an issue
• My photography skills have improved over the past 10 years, so some of these images are just poor
• Duplication was an issue
• Some images are memories and it doesn’t matter the quality

Many of these images were available online through my SmugMug account. It has unlimited storage so I was using it. If you don’t have to delete an image, why would one? However the downside to this was the fact that I had no organization of the galleries, categories, albums, and too some degree keywords. I also was not doing a good job of synchronizing the two collections. So I decided that while going through this exercise I would do the same thing for my SmugMug collections.

The question I had to decide was which would be the leader and the follower. There really was no definitive answer to that one. Within SmugMug I had many images in JPG format at 80%, some of them were sized to meet the maximum sizes. Within the LightRoom Catalog some images were RAW Images with their original name straight out of the camera; some had been renamed, some had been resized, and some had been editted. So it was a variety of conditions. There was also the issue of what processing I ran the images through for how much EXIF information they still contained.

What I figured I would do is rename all the images again. Yes, ALL the images. The idea was to have LightRoom set the name to be the capture time, it would be formatted as “YYYYMMDDHHMMSS” and I figured that would be pretty good. After renaming them all, I found that I had lots of duplicates, which I know I would, but I had no easy way to identify them. I tried a new structure “YYYYMMDDHHMMSS – W x H” so I could quickly see which ones had been resized for various reasons. However not all of these images had the capture time still contained in them. I then would check on SmugMug and see if I could figure out the date and time from the EXIF information that was available.

I have not yet started to integrate the two collections yet. The reason for this mainly is that I am trying to keep the process moving in small steps as it can very easily become overwhelming just based on the amount of data I have. There is also the matter of how the files are organized. Within LightRoom it is stored as follows:

• Year (YYYY)
  • Month (MM)
    • Day (DD)
      • File Name (YYMMDD-hhmmss.ext)

Within SmugMug it is not nearly as organized, really. The formatting is as follows:

• Category
  • Subcategory (Optional so this might not be here)
    • Album

There are 206 albums, some have one image, and some are duplicates for different usage (such as Blog Links and Twitter Links). So it is not a simple option of simply combining the two together. Now I could do the Lightroom trick again, but I am hoping I don’t need to as I should have the originals and SmugMug is just copies. I know better than that, but I can dream can’t I?

Of course into each project something unforeseen must happen. Mine happened today, and it is just a huge time waster more than anything. My local mirror of my SmugMug account decided to fail; actually the hard drive that contained it failed. It was “only” a 60GB USB drive that was 3 years old. The most amazing thing is that for the same price I now have a 500GB FW800/FW400/USB2 drive that is much faster and reliable. I also have that backup once a week to the desktop 500GB drive.

As I write this I have two Windows “machines” downloading the images again for me. One is a headless Windows XP machine that I am controlling via RDC from my MacBook Pro; the other is a virtualized machine running on the MacBook Pro. Yes, it does get a little confusing to keep it all straight and have the files download in order, but I don’t mind that the overall speed is slower since I have two machines downloading at the same time. I also have the issue that if one stops while I am not watching it, the other one keeps going so the overall throughput is better.

I will share the results of the process over the next few days. The part that has me the most interested is the way that different programs handle tasks and how to manage that.

I am well aware that often times I am a power user and I understand operating systems and networking very well. The goal is to find a solution that is easy to use that I don’t have to manage.

The questions and challenges I was having do not seem to be that far off the beaten path from a typical use case in my opinion. First a little background on the hardware, operating systems, and services involved with the issue. Using my frequent traveller reward points I recently purchased two iPod Touches, my wife has an iMac, I have a MacBook Pro, and we are using an Airport Extreme to connect all this together at home. While I am traveling I often use iChat to talk with the wife. She had a MobileMe/mac.com paid single user account and I had a complimentary mac.com account for use with iChat. She also uses the iDisk and backup tools included with MobileMe. We tried sharing documents using the iDisk but configuring it for a secure connection was not as easy as hoped. So we changed to the free version of Dropbox (I get a referral reward of more storage if you use it; even the free version) to allow for easier sharing.

I did not think anything of this decision to use Dropbox, then came our iPod purchases. The iPod Touch feature set had some things that we thought would make our lives easier. It appeared that MobileMe was going to be the service that was going to make all these things work. The goal was to be able to do the following:

1. Share calendars
   As alluded I travel quite a bit for work, so being able to keep my comings and goings straight can get to be tricky
2. Share files
   Already handled via Dropbox but if we could integrate it with MobileMe and make it easier, even better
3. Share contacts
4. Continue to use iChat
5. I also had additional uses:
   1. Ability to read and write personal email from the iPod
   2. Keep the contacts and calendars on the iPod synchronized
   3. Have some basic files on there as well
      Once again previously done with Dropbox but looking for easier integration
   4. The fun feature was to be able to have palindromic email addresses
      I am not going to publish the e-mail addresses here for fear of spambots, but my more astute readers can probably figure them out. My domain is bradfordbenn.com, the domain for MobileMe is me.com. Get it?

So far after a week of “use” the following the results have not been as hoped for. Perhaps my expectations were too high but for being the “easier” solution in terms of marketing positioning, it does not meet my expectations. However before I go into the entire diatribe, I do want to give Apple credit and kudos for their technical support, when I have hit a problem contacting support has been quick and easy.

The first sign of trouble came when trying to register under the wife’s account after expanding it, and paying more, for a family account. This process took over 40 minutes with Technical Support. I know this time is correct as the transcript contains time date stamps. I wanted to transfer my complimentary account name to the paid account, the online help indicated that it would be possible. So I went ahead and tried to register it, rejected, “invalid username or password”. Maybe I “misremembered” my information, but being that my username is my name, and was active as a complimentary account, I did not think that was possible. I checked the Keychain application on my MacBook Pro and verified that I had the proper password. The combination of username and password still did not function. I thought, okay maybe I was confused as to how to register. My complimentary account was under mac.com and MobileMe uses me.com, so maybe it wasn’t adding an existing account, perhaps it was create a new one. The directions said “use the button” so I was using the button, but things can be wrong or unclear. So I tried again with the creation of a new account; sorry that account name is active.

Time to contact Technical Support via their online chat. I follow the directions and connect and write the question, the queue system says it will be eight minutes waiting. A reasonable amount of time given the wait times on other Tech Support contacts. The agent came on after about a minute. I explained the problem I was having. The chat starts off reasonably enough with the standard exposition, I did not feel as if I was being talked at except for when the webpage address of help was sent back to me. I was following the directions on the help file and by the user agent. I was able to recover the password for the complimentary account through the self serve web application. I then took that and went to the page Set Up Family Member Account > Convert existing> and type into the Member Name “BradfordBenn” and the password into password and it responds “Unable to convert account This is an invalid membername or password”. The agent indicates that the username “is not a valid mobileme account. You should be able to add it as a sub account. You will choose to create anew account.”

So then I tried that again, and it still comes as the username as “unavailable” Hmmm the two results seem opposed to each other. The agent agreed, but I could tell he was a little incredulous of the problems I was having. He suggested creating a test account, so I used our dog’s name. That was the first sign that there was something odd going on. When I set it up with Proper Case, the MobileMe system response was username “is unavailable but the suggested member names are …” with one of them being the exact same name however all lower case. I then tried the username I wanted all lower case, that worked. However at no point in the documentation of the user creation process or the first 35 minutes of the chat was this mentioned. I do not think the agent knew the fact either. When I send an e-mail to the new account it is case INsensitive, so the case sensitivity does not seem to be through the entire system. We all know that there are tools that can convert a mixed case phrase to a single case, so that could have been handled behind the scenes more elegantly.

That was an inconvenience but we got it straightened out, and I was signed up. All should be working now, right? Wrong. But you already know that or else I wouldn’t be writing this post.

I wanted to share my calendar with my wife. Now by share I should actually say collaborate with my wife as that is more correct. So I created a calendar using iCal 4.0, I clicked the Publish button and got the resultant link which iCal queued up for me so that all I needed to do was select her e-mail address for Address Book using Mail. I figured that would allow her to make and add things to the calendar as well. After all the page http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/ said “Add an event on your iPhone and it appears in the Calendar application on me.com in seconds, then syncs to your computers. You can even manage multiple calendars. So you’ll never miss a lunch date, soccer game, or important meeting again.” In fairness it does not indicate that multiple people would be able to collaborate with each other, I took that from “manage multiple calendars” coupled with the fact that the free Google calendar allows for the sharing of calendars. I figured that MobileMe as a pay service would offer that feature, it did not.

I figured it was operator error and I was doing something wrong, so off I went to the online documentation again. The MobileMe help page only has documentation up to iCal 3.0; however the documentation that is there (for iCal 2.0) indicates: “With MobileMe Calendars, you can view your iCal or Outlook calendars online and make changes online at any time.”

You do not need to share your account use name and password for others to see your calendar data.  Instead, you can publish and share your MobileMe Calendar as read-only.” In my opinion the verbiage implies one should be able to share it as read only or allow a user to make changes online. So I continue digging going to the article it references for more help that one is about iCal 3.0. So once again I go to online Chat Support.

I ask how to setup the iCal share so that it is not just view but has the ability for authorized users to make edits to it. This feature is supported in the MobileMe Address Book integration. The support agent informs me that I “won’t be able to do that unfortunately unless she just uses your account on her phone and computer.” So I ask a few more questions “When I publish through MobileMe is my calendar public or can I restrict who can see it?”

Support Agent “no you can’t restrict who can see it however the person would have to know the exact address of the  ico feed just to even gain access to it”

I do some more thinking and ask about placing on secure network sites such as DropBox or JungleDisk. I can export to it, if I figure enough I might be able to publish to it. However they would still not be able to make changes.

So I am now thinking about this some more and realizing that MobileMe is not really a good value for the performance given what one gets for it. It really isn’t even secure with sharing your information. The calendars are wide open, one would just have to run a directory search or guess at some of the names. I am sure that there are plenty of people with the default name of “untitled calendar” or “My Calendar” selected.

Now to their defence, there is a feedback page http://www.apple.com/feedback/, But I figure I would overflow the pages.

After thinking about this situation more, I can share a calendar using Google but I have not figured out how to do contacts yet. I can purchase hosted Exchange services that will allow for the sharing of the calendar and contacts, while not free; neither is MobileMe it is $150 a year for a family, $99 for an individual. Is it really the best solution for the money?

MobileMe does integrate fairly well into the Mac environment, but it does not seem to have all the features completed.

My next rant will be about the software functionality of Apple’s offerings… but that is the next one. Part of it was posted here

The comment came in response to the post “Offline Writing“, I have gotten a comment or two from people I do not know, but this one looked a little too generic to be a real response. The response was

“Well, the post is actually the greatest on this worthy topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your upcoming updates. Saying thanks will not just be adequate, for the exceptional clarity in your writing. I will directly grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Gratifying work and much success in your business endeavors!”

The e-mail was from Gmail, the author’s IP address was from France and the URL for their website is from Czech and about money transfers and advances. So I think it is spam, and marked it as such. The reason that is seems to be spam to me is, They commented in December saying they were looking forward to my upcoming updates, from a post in March that I have already made follow up comments on. That plus the fact that the last sentence does not apply to a personal website. The approach is unique and a new way to get the website links up. Just something to be aware of. for those of you out there.

After getting this spam, I decided it was time to update my purging of my Twitter spam followers. I then thought about it, do I want to have it still be public of should I make it private. The main concern is the privacy and security for the physical world by people knowing where and when I am, but then I shoot a big hole in it by having a website with a blog on it. I guess I could simply make my blog password protected, and only have invited people know about it. The thought spoils the aim I had in starting it in the first place, to share ideas, thoughts, events… etc. Then I thought about making it so that one has to register and then once registered the blog is open. I think anyone who has administered anything with a password knows that there will be an additional effort as people constantly lose them. The logic starts to wrap itself up pretty well in a circular form. What to do? I started thinking about perhaps having some blog posts protected, and others not. I wanted to look to see if WordPress can do that, however I am in a place with no internet access as I alluded to previously. (see, a little vague as to where I am; eh?)

I am still trying to figure an easy way to virtualize a LAMP server so I can travel with it and run it as a virtual machine under VMWare Fusion. I do this for the Windows OS I still use for a few applications that don’t work under Mac. I do not want to become an expert at installing and configuring a LAMP server, I want to be able to have a testing server that can travel with me. I do not want to simply turn on the server in the Mac, as there may be some idiosyncrasies between the Mac OS and the LAMP server. It has not been easy to find a simple solution for this one yet, but I have not given up yet. I am going to wander over to the VMWare forums and see if anyone has a solution.

I have both Parallels and Fusion to allow me to virtualize an OS for my Mac, and have found that the VMWare forums have better signal to noise most of the time, however I like the way that Parallels has decided to handle USB Human Interface Drivers a little better. I also do like that when I called Parallels about a work issue I was troubleshooting, Parallels connected me with a real program that worked through the use case process with me and called me back with answers and contact information if I hit the issue again. Then again, I have not had to call VMWare yet. So you may ask, which is better? I can’t tell you, I can tell you to try both and decide for yourself. Mine came down to the fact that VMWare ran a little faster and I knew more people who use it if I get stumped.

These type of questions come up very often and there is often no one answer that applies to everyone. An example I use is a question that came up a few days ago on the Digital Grin Forum, which is better for running Adobe Creative Suite; Mac or Windows? The answer is that of course it varies on your needs and other things to consider, but people often expect there to be a definitive answer. I wonder if people are looking for reassurance or an answer when they post some of these questions.

The Adobe Creative Suite issue is still causing me heartburn, as the speed at which they ran from supporting a product is disappointing. From a technical standpoint, I understand how they decided to not update previous versions of Creative Suite (anything before CS4) to support Mac OS X 10.6; a.k.a Snow Leopard. But the fact that when CS3 was the current version they had some challenges when one updated the Mac OS X to 10.5, a.k.a Leopard. I was patient and waited for them to fix the issue. I was disappointed but understand how it can happen. Under Snow Leopard, I cannot use Adobe Acrobat Distiller, basically the printer emulator, at all. (Acrobat was the package that had trouble under Leopard.) This coupled Couple this with the fact that the “Updater” that Adobe launches each time the application is launched, it is extremely frustrating. Luckily Mac OS X has the ability to create a PDF built in.

I did the searches to try and figure out how to turn off the “Updater” under Mac OS X; as there is not a simple preferences box to check or uncheck; one has to create a custom file and place it in the proper location. The directions are less than helpful. The directions are as follows:

1. Using a text editor or plist editor, create a new file named “com.adobe.AdobeUpdater.Admin.plist” in the folder /Library/Preferences
2. In this new .plist file, create a child at the root named “Disable.Update”
3. Set the Class of this new child to Boolean with a value of “Yes”

I was stumped, so I asked a programmer friend of mine, HanClinto, who is actually doing development of a gaming tool on his Mac. He was stumped as well. even once we got it figured out, it was to functioning, so I once again asked at DGrin and they suggested another location.

What truly irks me about this situation, is it is not an inexpensive software suite. I have been a customer with them since Aldus Pagemaker, Macromedia Freehand, and Adobe Type Manager – early 1990’s. I have tried to keep up when I can afford to. However I have not seen any real reason for going up to CS4 and a very steep upgrade price. Couple this with the fact that in my opinion Mac OS X going from 10.5 to 10.6 is not a major revision, that would be going from 10.5 to 11. This is akin  to a service pack in my mind. One should not expect this to be such a faster turn over rate nor so expensive. I believe that Adobe, as is many other software developers, to a subscription approach, keep updating the software to keep the revenue coming in. That is understandable; however the pricing structure is not. It is more expensive for me to upgrade my existing package (Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium) to the current version of it, than it is to purchase the Complete Package (Adobe Designer Premium) as a student.  So I am very much stuck. Being that I don’t use these tools professionally (I do use them at work under Windows XP SP 3 and a different license) I have a hard time paying as high a fee for an upgrade. The reason I got the suite is that I want to work in the same software environment at work as I do at home. It is advantageous in both directions, I hone my skills and can apply what I learn in my personal time at work. Our official graphics artists and I have even been trading tips and tricks, so it does work.

I will say that I do like how similar the environments are in both OS’s for Adobe’s products. Microsoft among others could learn a lot from them. I have stopped using Microsoft Office for Mac as it is so different from the Windows version. I am still disappointed with iWork under Mac, there are some features (pivot tables for example) that just aren’t there. I even tried to do the trial of the updated version iWork 09; however I could not see if it addressed just the basic thing of working with Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows better as I am some what of a power user in there. However that even failed. It can open an Office 2007 format document, but it can not save into one – you have to export it. If I do the same thing in Microsoft  Office 2007 opening a 2004 document, it allows me to save it in the older format and tells me what the problems will be, it allows me to work with it just fine.It also does not support many features I use often. So I can’t really interchange my work easily with others from Mac and once again, a different environment. Good thing I got Appzapper, time to get rid of iWork ‘09.

It seems cranky, I know, but these are the things that have been kind of irksome over the last few weeks to me. Aren’t computers supposed to make things easier? I have no problem with people making a profit, I have a problem with people gouging. I have no problem with wanting things to be a little different and unique between application, but if you advertise that one can exchange files with other applications, do not have some many problems; make it transparent to the user.

Let me explain a little. I was thinking of posting a humorous post about the magnet that was distributed during the health screening at work. I understand that they are trying to have some fun and to make sure that we have all the pertinent numbers. I wanted to scan the fun part of it. I placed it on the scanner section of my Canon MP600, and pressed the buttons on the control panel as, nothing happened. I tried a few different things; nothing worked. I figured I had Windows XP SP 3 running under VMWare Fusion already, I will try it in there. Connected the printer/scanner to the Windows OS and it popped up asking if I wanted to install the new driver; it did that three times: printer, scanner, and card reader. After that was complete I simply clicked on the scanner in Explorer and started scanning. It cropped to the proper area, asked me where to save the scan and that was it.

I still wanted to get the drivers installed into Snow Leopard, I figured that perhaps I did not update the drivers when I did the installation. Sure enough when I went to the Canon website I found that the drivers I had installed were out of date. Wait, I had to manually go there and look, Windows prompted and asked me about drivers. Then the Canon website navigation approach was more complex than needed. One could see on the download page that there were four things to download; they were not available as one download. When one clicked on the link, it actually spawned a new window via Java so that one could accept the user agreement, then download it. However it also navigated you aware from the page, so I had to keep going back to it. Not very fast, not an Apple issue, a Canon issue.

After that I figured I would read through the documentation for the things I downloaded to see what I needed and what was superfluous. So I opened up the read me files. The one for Easy-PhotoPrint EX was not very helpful or even worth including. Here it is in its entirety:

*******************************************************************
Canon Utilities
Easy-PhotoPrint EX Version 3.0.5 for Mac OS Instructions
Copyright CANON INC. 2007-2009
*******************************************************************
——————————————————————————
CONTENTS

Before You Get Started
Introduction
About Trademarks
Product Contents

*******************************************************************
Before You Get Started
*******************************************************************

Introduction —————————————————————

Thank you for using Canon Utilities Easy-PhotoPrint EX.
This product is a handy application program that allows you to create and print your own album, calendar, and stickers using the images you recorded with your digital camera. And furthermore, you can easily print borderless photos and so on.

About Trademarks ——————————————————–

- Macintosh and Mac are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in
the U.S. and other countries.
- All brand names and product names mentioned in this document are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Product Contents ———————————————————

This product includes the following items.

- Canon Utilities Easy-PhotoPrint EX
(hereafter called Easy-PhotoPrint EX)
Easy-PhotoPrint EX is an application program that allows you to create and print your own album or calendar, etc. using photos and other images.

- ReadMe
This file. It provides important information about Easy-PhotoPrint EX.

I am still looking for the important information. I also had to do two restarts of the Mac as part of the process of installing the Canon drivers. Did I mention yet that doing it under the Windows XP environment under VMWare Fusion it simply connected and worked? The buttons still don’t function under either OS, but I can now scan under both environments. To make things even more fun, the auto cropping and color is different between the two.

Macintosh Scan (Click for full size):

Macintosh Scan - Click for Larger

Windows Scan (Click for full size):

Windows Scan - Click for larger

The Tweet from Baldy stated:

“Whoa! Vincent LaForet’s new Canon Mark IV vid on SmugMug used over 20 terabytes of bandwidth in 300,000 views in 14 hours.”

So I started to try and figure out how many megabits/second that was so I could compare it to typical network connectivity that I am more familiar with, 100BaseT or Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet. Well it just became amazing.

• First I converted 20TB to megabits
  • 20TB= 20,000,000,000,000 bytes = 160,000,000,000,000 bits =  160,000,000 megabits.
    Yes, that is 160 Billion megabits
• The next thing was to convert hours to seconds
  • 14 hours = 840 minutes = 50,400 seconds
• Now to convert to megabits/second
  • 160,000,000 megabits/50,400 seconds = 3,174 megabits/second = 3.2 gigabits/second.

So that is pretty freaking fast at to how quickly the data is coming out.

Wolfram Alpha had cool comparisons to put it in context. It is approximately equal to the text content of the Library of Congress. It is approximately equal to 1/8th of the  estimated data content of the surface web (~~ 170 TB ).

Dang no wonder they are in need of 2 TB  of flash memory for a server. You can see the picture and Don MacAskill CEO of SmugMug here http://bit.ly/3HlXzH

• I downloaded (very small installers) and installed the client on both my Windows and Mac computers
• On my Windows machine I copied over four PDFs for my trip to AES this weekend (I am sitting on a panel and a technical council)
• They appeared within about 30 seconds on my Mac machine
• On my Mac machine I renamed the files
• The updates appeared in about 15 seconds on the Windows machine
• I did not have to do a forced sync or anything, it just occurred in the background and worked great.

It was so easy I am thinking of using a bigger size that has a subscription fee and using it for more stuff. The interface is very easy, it was a very simple setup, it was done right. I am going to try the sharing next (even though I have my own FTP server I figure this could be faster and easier at times)

I also found that I could share the directory Dropbox on my Mac to the VMWare Fusion instance of Windows, copy the files I needed over, and voila they got synced. So now when I need my copy of Star*Explorer for uploading photos to SmugMug while I travel, it is easily available.

• Is it the content is different?
  I am not sure that is the case as I am aware that one can take something out of context and the idea of some obfuscation on the Internet.
• Is it that I take more time to craft a blog post so it has more “content”, more signal to noise, so I am prouder of it?
  That could be, but I am sure that Malcom Gladwell would say I am doing it wrong. But then again I disagree with Gladwell.
• Is it that it is easier to protect a Twitter feed than it is a self hosted blog?
  I am sure I can find a solution for that, make it a forum feed, require logging in… etc.

Any ideas or comments as to why? Should I unprotect my Tweets?

I figured I would post here what I learned from a quick study over the past week.  I am following 40 streams, 32 posted something in the past week, there were a total of 522 tweets, or an average of 16 tweets over the past week. However there was one person who posted 208 Tweets in one week, the vast majority of which were very repeative and redundant. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a graph worth?

40% From one stream

In addition the person also put down an identifier so that they would trend and are getting much of the information from AlertDeck. So that person is now not being followed now. The disappointing part is that they actually have something valuable to say; they have just started adding to much noise in trying to market themselves.

So my warning is that marketing via Twitter can be done, but if there is no content everything gets turned off. Stay tuned… I might decide to reveal who the offender is.

Oh yeah, I have also decided that Apple’s iWork’s Numbers ‘08 is not very powerful when it comes to collating data as I still had to do much manually instead of just doing a Pivot Table in Excel. I also still can’t activate half my applications…

So I had decided to upgrade the operating system on my Mac Book Pro to Snow Leopard. When I did that I received a warning on the battery being in need of service. So I checked the Apple site and was prepared for it not to be supported and having to buy a new battery. However since I have AppleCare, which is still in effect, after answering a few questions over the phone they indicated that it would be covered. The downside was that I would have to go into a store to verify it and find time to do that. With all the traveling I would be doing, I would not be able to do it for a few weeks. They indicated that as long as I kept it under 300 cycles on the battery it would still be covered – I was at 179 so it was not a problem. I made my appointment with the Genius Bar for last Friday, I showed up, was greeted at the door and signed in. About five minutes later I was talking with a Genius, explaining my challenge, and getting a brand new battery as well as instructions on how to condition it. I also got a few minutes of Snow Leopard questions since I was done early…. I was figuring I would not have that option I would have to do a 1:1 appointment but they volunteered. It was very easy and fast.

So the other challenge was my Jawbone headset, and replacement parts not being available. I sent the e-mail and got a response on Sunday, one day later. The response was very generic so I was not excited:

Hi there Brad,

Thanks for your e-mail!

While the accessories for the Original Jawbone are no longer available for sale, we would like to try and find a solution for you.   Please call us during the week at 1-877-254-7426 and press 2 to discuss further options.  Any of our Customer Service Representatives will be happy to assist you with this — we open to take calls from 6am PST to 9pm Pacific Standard Time.

Thanks!  Have a nice day.

So I got around to calling today, the person was very apologetic and explained how the parts were obsolete because their supplier stopping building them. However they were going to send me a demo set of the suggested replacements (a $10 value on their website) that should fit but are not a direct replacement. No charge. They even sent me a confirmation e-mail indicating what we talked about and closing the loop. Completely different than I expected.

Hi Brad,

Thanks for calling! It was a pleasure speaking with you today.

Your accessory replacement has been initiated and you should receive it within a week.  If you do not receive your package in a week, please reply to this e-mail and let me know.

Thanks again, Brad. I hope you enjoy the rest of your week!

So maybe Customer Service isn’t dead. I know that SmugMug proves it isn’t dead, but then again based on a friend’s experience Comcast is proving that it might be hiding.