Dear Retailer who sells very nice gift items in Lexington Green. When I snap a photo of something, I’m not here to scam you.

I’m not the front for a big Chinese manufacturer who is about to knock off your stuff and put you out of business. I’m not planning out an elaborate “Mission Impossible”-style robbery.

My wife and I are multi-tasking. I need to send her a picture of something I like and see if she wants to swing by and look at it. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars in your store and you don’t need to break the delicate positive brand image I have of you with some petty “We don’t allow pictures in the store” rule. I explained what I was doing, nicely, but it didn’t matter.

It’s amazing that I’m even in the store - with as much as I buy online. Since it’s an artsy-store, I flip the tag over on the item I’m photographing. … yep, URL. I surf to the address, yep. photos. Get a clue. This small, unique retail shop is one example, but not a unique one, and it’s about to collide with new technologies for comparison shopping we discussed at SMX Local Mobile in Denver last week.

If this were a one-time situation, I’d blow it off. But it happens to others, who blog about it too. I’m pretty fast with my camera, just hold it up and snap a quick picture, so I’m not making a scene or asking people to move, etc. I guess I could get better at it. I’m also not there photographing every thing on the shelf. I’m the best type of interested customer.

Seth Godin was busted for photographing oreos, and had this to say:

The irony of the Stop & Shop approach is that the people who you don’t want taking pictures–snoopy journalists or competitors–can easily conceal their cameras and you’ll never know. But the raving fans, the bloggers, the folks twisted enough to want to take and flickrize their supermarket experiences are your friends.

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Last year, eStarling came out with a clunker. Before that they came out with a joke. But today they announced a new 8-inch frame that looks quite nice in the photos and has a kick-a** feature set on paper. But if anyone read my post last November about eStarling’s deceptive and disappointing product launch, you could tell I was an unhappy camper. Well, almost a year has past, and I’m ready to give them another shot. Frankly, I need the RSS feature badly. Because that rocks. Big time. And anyway, we put up with Microsoft when they go through this kind of pattern, so why not eStarling. Anyhow. Big difference is that I *return* eStarlings for refunds when they suck.

Here are the features that make this thing one of the coolest gadgets (on paper) that I’ve lusted after for over a year now: (more…)

Ok, my Vtech ip8300 DECT6.0 infoPhone was supposed to be in my grubby little hands by April, and it STILL doesn’t seem to have shipped. This is the phone with Yahoo! Local built in making it, as far as I know, the first home phone that is directly affected by web marketing efforts. Well, you could argue that Google 411 is also* (speed dial #1 in my car - I love that service!)

I am also looking forward to seeing how the phone accepts news feeds. Hopefully it lets you use standard RSS and not some proprietary limited portal set. I’ll use Yahoo! Pipes to make a nice small RSS feed for family information (e.g. school closings, forecast, traffic) that we can glance at from any room in the house. GEEKY!

But first I have to get the damn thing in my HANDS. Where is it?????

Hurry VTech, my old home phones are dying!!!!

*Little known fact:Â With Google 411, once you find the thing you’re searching for, you can say “map it” and Google will send you a link to the map!

I was tagged by Bill Slawski in a Nerdiness quiz meme where he scored a measly 65 - or “low rank nerd” … so I pushed up my glasses, took off my wrist braces and stumbled up to the challenge!

Eighty-freaking five. High-Nerd. Woah. I was thinking like mid-grade. Thank GOD the quiz didn’t ask me if I owned a metal detector (I have a nice one), programmed IR emitters by hand to control devices (I have), or re-wired any X-10 devices to do odd things ’round the house (I have a secret box)

Now I’ll meme-tag a few others. Answer honestly.. I did!

Jason Bartholme
Guy Kawasaki
Jeremy Zawodny
Carolyn Shelby

(the quiz is really quick BTW.)

It’s long been my opinion that hourly consultants who work on-screen most of the time are plagued with a lack of billing consistancy, losing both money and client confidence. I see this all the time with sub-contractors, and in forums I’ve read there are few who demonstrate a consistant methodology for recording the time they spend on client projects. So, for years I’ve struggled with ways to improve my recording of client work. End of the day. End of the hour. Little reminder beeps. You name it.Â

The one thing that has made a huge difference, and that I recommend for you too is to purchase a 2nd LCD monitor, and dedicate it to Quickbooks Weekly Timesheet.  Don’t use it for your email. Don’t pop up windows there. At the start of the day open Quickbooks, Open the Weekly Timesheet, Select yourself, and leave it there … all day.  If you’re running multi-user version, each of your employees can do the same. The costs for a 17″ high quality LCD and cabling is less than $200, which you’ll probably recoup in a couple of weeks.Â

If you don’t want to run Quickbooks on the system all the time, you could use this with Intuit’s Time Tracker or MC2 anywhere’s web-based system  too. With this, you could just run Firefox in the 2nd monitor and be done. Â

PS: Occasionally exit quickbooks so your backup system can pick it up.

Notes to self:

• Raid 0 is not worth it for desktop apps compared to the safety of Raid 1. Even log analysis tasks that hit the drive a lot.
• If you leave your USB drives plugged in during RAID 1 array config your main, Windows logical drive will end up on drive “G” or something.
• It’s hard to change logical drives once you’re all set up.
• MOZY rocks. This let me grab a few key files. It “could” have saved me totally if needed.
• Secondcopy rocks. This cut hours and hours off of this task since I use it to dupe many files to external drives nightly.
• Dell Precision 670 machines are noisy, no matter what fans you install, especially with dual processors.
• Maxtor drives have failed me twice. These failed after 5 months. I’m trying Western Digital this time.

Questions:

• Why isn’t drive formatting built into RAID array configuration? It’s silly to have to sit there and hit “ok” every few hours. Why not have a “two new drives” setting that handles it and lets you just go to bed.

personalpost

Yahoo Pipes (beta) is a kind of RSS feed aggregator mixer board for creating mashups. It has debugging helper tools, great filtering, and then you can publish the feed to use in your favorite feed reader.

I’ve long used Geckotribe’s CARP and GROUPER to do RSS mashups, and always found there to be tremendous power in this technology. When you can group, adjust, filter and publish resulting data feeds you have enormous power - thanks to the standards of XML.  UNIX Pipes (geek warning) are a way to send the output from one operation as input to another, and while the concept sounds simple, it allows for a rapid build-up of powerful and amazing tools using nothing more than simple pieces.Â

About 9 in 10 times I mention RSS to someone outside of the Internet industry, I have to explain it, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing a flockage of users to the new service just yet. For me, I’ll be using it to visually construct mashups I can then deploy with Carp and Grouper.Â

Another unexpected suprise in the Web 2.0 space. Fun!

Warning - geeky post.

I had been putting off setting up an apache test server (Apache 2.2 with PHP 5.5) here in the “lab” until this week and allowed about 30 minutes to set it up. Two hours later I was still mucking about.

The Apache service kept colliding with another service on Port 80 - okay, freak out time. What could be running on port 80 on my machine…. After scouring to be sure that IIS was completely and totally GONE, scanning my httpd.conf and php.ini files until my head hurt, I finally got some wisdom and looked at the event log to find that SKYPE (of all things) is answering port 80. Whew… Nasty little option there, obviously meant to give those with laptops a way of bypassing hard-core firewalls when using Skype on the go.

With Skype running, Apache cannot start. The fix is to go in and un-check the “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections” box on the connections tab. Restart Apache and you’re good.

What made this so tricky is that it matters what order you load things up in. Whichever service binds to port 80 first gets to keep it, and neither one seem to do a good job of alerting you of problems.

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but the ZDNET At The Whiteboard page is probably one of the coolest, geekiest marketing ideas I’ve seen in a while. I found myself chomping to figure out how I might be able to use it someday. Why I like it?

a) it’s all content. No fluff.

b) it talks to me in a mode that I’m used to.

c) it’s well paced.

Check it out.

One of the most important priorities in my life is to, um, have a life.

As far as I can tell, most entrepreneurs also have this on their goal-sheet, possibly as their top goal for going into business on their own. So why is it that even the simplest technologies don’t support this?

Take soho office phones, for example. In order to get a basic “after hours” switch, I have to spend $600 on a Talkswitch24 (highly recommended.) Every other phone system requires that you remember to flip a switch at night. I don’t even know of cell phones that have after hours modes despite their full-featured OSs.

So now, I’m a heavy Skype user. More and more of my clients are using it, and for good reason. It’s cheap, it’s crystal clear, and the chat mode on it is fully encrypted. End of those praises, leave it at that.

Skype is really light on features (just look at Pamela’s offering and you get a feeling for what’s missing… VOIP voice mail, call recording, and voice memos are some incredibly useful things that Pamela allows.) But neither allow you to set your business hours and have Skype adjust your phone modes based on them.

I know, give and take, features are risk, etc. Few people probably want it. So what I propose to the Ebay-Skype empire is that you add several simple command line options. I will use Windows scheduler to send the right commands to Skype’s command line This should require almost ZERO code change for Skype Engineers.

Current Skype Command Line Options

/nosplash - do not display splash screen when Skype starts
/minimized - Skype is minimized to system tray when it starts
/callto:nameornumber - call the specified Skype Name or SkypeOut number
/shutdown - close Skype
….that’s it?

Command Line Wishlist Options To Support “having a life”

/mode=m - set running Skype into mode m
/forward=number - forward my Skype calls to this number
/forwardstop=number - stop forwarding my Skype calls to this number

with the “mode” command, I’d set up a scheduled windows event that would change it to “do not disturb mode” after 7:00 PM, and then turn it back to “available” at 7:30 AM. It would be unavailable Sat and Sunday.

With forward modes, I’d set up a shortcut on my start menu that would turn forwarding to my cell phone on or off. One click and it’s forwarded, one click and it’s not.

I really don’t want to add-on anything. Pamela gives me enough headaches with Skype. But if you know of something please speak up.