Will's Standing

I have been an AT&T wireless customer for more than 10 years. Unlike many cellphone users, I have actually had a satisfactory time and have not even considered leaving.

NOW EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED.

 AT&T changes wireless data plan terms.

I have been neglecting Vox recently, but want to try to correct the situation.  I have written a few blog posts recently at TheStanding.com that you may be interested in.

Cross Platform Syncing
Book Review - Pushing Ice
To-do Lists
Excel tip

I will try my best to do better with keeping up with the Vox family as I do love this place. - Will

I have to give Kudo's when I run across the rare instance that a company meets or exceeds my expectations.

Quite a while ago, I was having connection issues with my internet provider, Sprint DSL.  I contacted them and went through the ringer trying to get them to replace the modem.  They would not do it unless every conceivable issue OTHER than the modem was ruled out.  Talking about a pain in the A$$.  After hours of testing and ruling eveything out, I ended up buying my own modem off the shelf which fixed the issue.

Fast forward about 2 years, and once again I am having connection issues.  Sprint has since been purchased by Embarq.  I Twitter my Embarq issues and am contacted by an Embarq employee with advice the same day.  I also submit a support email and immediately they send me out a new router based solely on the email.

Now I have not gotten the new DSL modem, so I do not know the final results of my issue, but based upon the reaction and response of Embarq, I have to say Thank You!

My doctor has put me on a 6-week gluten free diet to see if I have Celiac Disease.  Moving to a gluten free diet is not easy.  But thank you to the internet, it is much easier than it use to be.  The documentation and information given to me by my Doctor was not enough to truly understand what is and what is not available for me to eat.  But I found a few sites and downloads that help quite a bit.

• http://www.celiac.com/
• http://www.foodfacts.com
• http://www.clanthompson.com/celiacstore/

The ClanThompson site provides a database that makes it simple to look up foods by type or brand and tells you if they are gluten free.  This was a lifesaver and worth the $$ to purchase.

I have also gone to many of the websites of restaurants I frequent to see if they have gluten free menus and some do.  I have downloaded all the pdf's of these menus and emailed them to myself to access via my iPhone.

Whole Food Market has a complete downloadable list of all gluten free products (and any other special diet) they sell so you can easily make a shopping list.

As I find more, I will update this post.

Here is my situation. Most all I do and want sync'd to the iPhone is on my Macbook. This includes my personal contacts, music, video, podcasts, photos and bookmarks. What is on my work Windows XP computer is my schedule in Outlook.

I have tried multiple solutions. First, I connected to the work network via Entourage on my Macbook and sync'd the calendar via Entourage. Entourage had issues with any Outlook event that was and all day event. It put part of the event the day before and created duplicates. So that did not work.

Next, I tried the new Outlook to Google Calendar sync to get my schedule in Google Calendar and then subscribe to the calendar in iCal. However I could never get the Outlook to Google Calendar Sync to work. I may be due to the corporate firewall.

So I decided to try syncing just the Calendar on the Windows PC. I plugged in the iPhone, made sure no syncing at all would take place. Put a check mark only under syncing Calendar with Outlook and pressed sync. It gave me a notice that the iPhone was paired with another computer and did I want to merge or overwrite the data. I clicked on overwrite and prayed. It worked. I have my Outlook calendar on the iPhone and no other data was messed with.

I then connected the iPhone with my Macbook. I made sure everything was selected correctly EXCEPT the calendar. I also got the merge or overwrite question regarding the contacts and bookmarks. I believe this is due to the calendar, bookmarks and contacts all being on the same tab in iTunes.

Therefore, whenever I move from the Macbook to the Windows PC, it will ask to merge or overwrite. Not the most elegant solution, but it seems to work so far.

Received my Chumby via UPS direct from China yesterday. Did you know that when they ship from China, it actually arrives in the US before it was shipped?

Anyway, I ordered the white version since that would look best in the bedroom where it will reside. Upon opening the Chumby packaging, the "white" is more of an off white or light tan color. But it still looks good next to the bed.

It is fun checking out all of the widgets and adding them or removing them from the Chumby. You can view what is on my Chumby here. Set up was easy including the networking. Putting in my network passphrase was a bit tough based upon how the Chumby virtual keyboard works. Other than that, it is simple and quick.

So far my only complaint is that there is no SmugMug widget. I am sure other widget wants will arise, but new ones are being added all the time. Looking through the Chumby forums, it looks like a pretty active community as well.

This morning, the Chumby woke me to a pleasant alarm and immediately I was viewing my Twitter feed and weather before crawling out of bed. I just love this thing.

I have been using Twitterific for a while on my Macbook, but have gotten sick and tired of the constant errors, how it loads, lack of tweet history, and the overall feel of the application.

So I went on a hunt.  The first application I found was Snitter at http://snook.ca/snitter/.  It is an Adobe Air application similar to the Pownce App.  So you need to install Adobe Air first to run this application.  I would encourage everyone to install Adobe Air because of the many good multi-platform applications being developed.

Snitter

Upon installing and running Snitter, it is the familiar interface you get with these types of applications.  Looking at the basic interface, there are a few things of note.  First is the small link icon in the lower right of the text entry portion that you can click and make a webpage url smaller.  Although Twitter itself has this ability, it makes me think I have to use this button in Snitter vs. relying on Twitter itself.  Since I don't like "test" tweets, I am not testing it, but will find out one way or the other via my everyday use.

From the drop down menu, it gives you direct access to alot of choices including Following, Followers, Search, Profile, Options and help.   So I selected Options.  Here you can control Snitter's polling of Twitter, Whether you want to view the Public timeline and something called Search Tracking.  The options under Search Tracking is time based and there is a Keyword search field. Not sure what this is yet.

You also have the ability to change the display of Snitter with a number of built in colors (I picked Terrific Gray), Always on Top and determine transparency %.  You then have Desktop notification preferences and General preferences that includes sounds, emoticons, and "fortune cookie" tweets.  Interesting.

Last it gives you the ability to use user-defined styles and edit user styles.  This makes it quite interesting.  You can view some of these at a flickr site. http://flickr.com/groups/snitter/

I did have a few issues.  When I tried to select Always on Top, it would not let me. Nor would it let me change the transparency from 0%.

Snitter also loads at the bottom of the tweets you view about 20 replied tweets to you which leaves about 25 current tweets.  I would rather have the last 45 tweets to view.  When you hover over a tweet, 3 options pop up to make it easy to reply to that tweet, do a direct tweet or to mark as a favorite.  I call the "favorite" button the Merlin Mann button.

So far overall, I do prefer Snitter to Twitterific.  I wish I could get some of the user defined styles I have seen.  Specifically Brian McNitt's Glass of Milk theme.

Twhirl

As soon as I posted on Twitter that I was giving Snitter a try, I received a tweet to try twhirl. http://www.twhirl.org/

Twhirl is also an Adobe Air application such as snitter.  Upon launching the program it looks like you can have different accounts loaded in Twhirl, so those that pose as themselves and as their pet, or even as Darth Vader, can have one interface in which to log in and out from.  Twhirl also allows your to change the interface color (I picked Into the Dark), as well as Twhirl allows you to select a language. Currently it only allows English, German, Italian & Spanish.

Wheres Snitter has the input section on top, twhirl has it on the bottom with a rollup screen to view timeline, replies, favorites, archive, directs, friends, followers, lookup and search.  I am not sure what Archive does.  I selected archive and it showed both my tweets and replies to my tweets for that day.  There is also a shorten URL link as well as a filter button to filter the tweets you are viewing.

Within the configuration section there are 3 tabs, Appearance, Notifications and Connection.  Under the Appearance tab it has options for opening this account when twhirl starts (why is that here?), always on top and hide when minimized, auto-hide tweet input area (like this), and prefix tweets with sender name.  It has defaults for profile lookups, what opacity and when (such as when inactive), font styles and Retweet format.  ON the notifications screen it has the sound, notification windows etc...  And under the connection section is where you can set the number of requests sent per hour and fine tune your auto-refreshing.

When you hover over a tweet, it gives you 4 options - Reply, Direct, Favorite and something called Re-tweet.  

It as wells shows the last 20-25 tweets in addition to about 20 reply tweets to you.  I do not like this that much, but it looks to be in all applications.

One unique thing twhirl does, is when you do send a reply to someone, it shows both your icon as normal with a smaller icon of who you replied to in the lower right of the icon space.

Overall, an excellent app which I like better than Twitterific as well.

Bottom line, one of the things I dislike the most in Twitterific is not fixed in either of these applications - the ability to view more history instead of older tweets that people replied to me regarding.  If I do not use any of these apps for longer than a day, I can not go back far enough to catch up.  I must go to the Twitter website directly to do this.

I know it has been awhile since part 2 of this review, but I have not had as much time as I would like to devote to the Vudu. It seems, that when I ask my wife what movie she wants to watch since we can watch almost any movie with the Vudu, she answers by wanting to watch one of our Netflix DVD's. This, in fact, may be important as you will see later in this review.

I am still having the yellow network light issue, as well as my network connection is always full-on active sending and receiving packets. I have confirmed that this activity is due to Vudu and can only assume it is downloading and sharing movie content all the time.
I did have one experience over the last few days. After work one evening, I was searching through the Vudu catelog to find something to watch as I had an hour or so free. I found a Babylon 5 movie that I was not sure if I had ever seen and it was only $2.99 to rent, so I went for it. It initially said that the show would be ready to view in 15 minutes. Hmmm. I thought I could view immediately. After about 10 minutes it did switch to view mode so I began to watch the show. It was in widescreen and filled up my HDTV nicely, however I could see a lot of artifacts similar to standard definition tv - not as nice as DVD quality. After the intro of the movie, my wife came home and needed some help so I paused the movie with the intention to finish it later. Later ended up being after work the next night. I turned on the Vudu, went to "My Movies" and guess what? No movie. It expired. It seems that anything you rent expires within 24 hrs of starting the movie! Yes, Vudu gives you 30 days to watch it, but once you do, you better finish it!
Needless to say, I did not know about the 24hr rule and I am not happy. I look at the Netflix DVD sitting on the table in front of me and think about how I do not have any such issue with it. Although I do not have the ability to watch any netflix movie within 10 minutes unless I use their streaming service, I do have the flexibility to watch the DVD's I have rented when I want to watch and start & stop anytime without the DVD going bad. Even in the old days of renting movies from Blockbuster, you had 3-5 days with the movie to watch as much as you wanted when you wanted. Vudu needs to change the 24hr rule to 72-120 hrs. Otherwise I feel it looses alot of the value it could provide. Especially if it wants to compete with Netflix. Even On-Demand movies via cable or satellite can be rented and recorded with your DVR to watch when you want. Vudu is the most restrictive regarding the "life" of rented movies.
Part 4 will be the final part of this review. Stay tuned.