Tatum and Denim blog

One of my co-workers at Gen-i Australia has started a
new blog.  His name is Ashley
Armitt and he is a Blackberry guru and a self confessed Blackberry nut. 

Should be a good one to watch. 

I spent the day today with Knowledge Management expert, Steve Barth. We’re preparing for our upcoming KMWorld presentation: Knowledge Worker Productivity: Strategies & Techniques.

Now there’s a unique birthday card!
Upon checking my email, I found that Shelley and Harlan had sent me a birthday brain:

Seeing my name misspelled, I Skyped Shelley to ask if she spelled my last name as “Mac” on purpose.

She apologized and said it was a typo.

I’m not so sure…  I think it’s a conspiracy and I think I just might know who’s behind this.

Yes, Michael, you do smell cake…

I celebrated my birthday with Steve and his lovely wife, Ana.

They cooked a nice dinner for me after which, they presented me with not one but four mini-birthday cakes!

Thanks, Steve!

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

It’s hard to hide from the web.

Thank you, Michael, my friend, for your kind words and birthday greeting.

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

Unified Communications is becoming a pretty hot buzz word in the industry these days. 
On my other blog I recently posted
about how and why UC
and Mobility are converging. 

This is something that mobility professionals should have on their radar.

The good folks at TechSmith have a cool new
project called Jing.  What is it? 
Good question as I have not installed it yet…  but the concept sounds great. 
From the website:

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares
images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how
you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else. Tell
us what you think so we can figure out what that is.

Try it, you’ll like it. Find
out more.

I’m in the process of installing it now so I’ll feed back my thoughts when I’ve had
a play.

One of the neat things about consulting for The David Allen Company is that I get invited to some really nice banquets. Tonight, we dined at the Ojai Valley Inn where we got to see a “pink moment.”

Situated in an East-West orientation, the Ojai Valley provides for awesome sunsets. Most remarkable is how the low rays of the setting sun paint the tops of the mountains surrounding the valley, causing them to briefly glow purple for about 10 minutes -  the “Pink Moment.”

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

I learned a very painful lesson today about sitting on your wallet and I’d like to share it with you and perhaps save you the extreme pain and a visit to the doctor’s office.

When I got off the plane in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, two weeks ago, I was barely able to walk. The pain was almost unbearable - so much so that I even called my wife and mentioned that I might need her to fly to Boston to help me return to California. My roommate, Michael, got me some Motrin and ice packs and I rested for the night. By morning, I was feeling a little better, and I was able to make it through the conference with small recurrences during the week. I was even able to blog the conference with Michael.

The flight home was a only slightly easier; I made sure to get up and walk around during the flight. However, getting out of the car after my two-hour drive from LAX to David Allen’s office in Ojai was again extremely painful as was the case on my return trip home.

Today, after church, I could again barely walk, so my wife took me to Urgent Care; we were concerned that this apparent hip problem was growing more serious. After a brief history and physical exam the doctor concluded that I was suffering from Piriformis Syndrome, more commonly known as Wallet Sciatica. The bottom line (pun intended) is that while I have an ample amount of “padding” in certain places, one place I’m lacking it is on the backside. This means that sitting for prolonged periods makes it easy to pinched the sciatic nerve — the source of my great pain.

Thanks to my Grahl Duo-Back chair, I can comfortably sit at my think station for many hours at a time with no pain. But, when I’m at home, I don’t carry a wallet and a certainly don’t sit on one. Lately, however, I’ve been doing more travelling and sitting on my wallet. Therein lies (or, more accurately, sits) the problem. Sitting on my wallet in airplane seat for hours at a time was the cause of my Sciatica - Wallet Sciatica. My doctor advised me to use a thin wallet and to carry it in my front pocket. My super-cool David Allen NoteTaker Wallet is wonderfully thin when I keep my cash and business cards separately - which I did not do for the trip to Boston.

If you carry a fat wallet, think about thinning it out and carrying it in your front pocket or coat.

Tonight, I’m resting comfortably on pillows and taking anti-inflammatory meds to relieve the swelling around the pinched nerve. Hopefully, in a few weeks, I’ll be as good as before.

I found this site helpful in understanding the problem. (They apparently also sell a super thin wallet of their own.)

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

I am finding that there are plenty of things that I want to blog about that just don’t
fit into the theme of my current blog. This
is largely because I have just started a new role, in a new country with a slightly
different focus to what I was doing. So here I will be blogging about joys, trials
and tribulations of Messaging and Collaboration, Unified Messaging, and Communications.


This is an exciting time in this space as we are finally beginning to see products
that start to deliver on the convergence buzz word what has been floating around for
the last five years or so. In my new role much of my focus will be on Exchange 2007
including Unified Messaging, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Groove and Office
Communications Server so I would expect many posts around those products and integrating
them into environments.

Check out my new blog here.

There has been a bit of a post drought here on Blog::
Craig Pringle for the last two months and much of what I have posted has been
around the challenges I have faced relocating myself and my family from Wellington,
NZ to Sydney, Australia.

What I have not posted much info about is why I made the move and what I am doing
now.

The impetus behind the move was my job. In NZ I worked for Gen-i,
which is an IT company owned by Telecom
New Zealand as a Senior Technology Consultant specialising in Mobile Computing
and the infrastructure that enables mobile workers to function. I became aware of
a position in our Sydney office that was a bit of a step up and a slight change in
career direction. I applied, was interviewed. accepted and moved country in the space
of about 6 weeks.

My new role is Messaging & Collaboration Practice Lead for Gen-i
Australia. As a Practice Lead 50% of my role is still hands on consulting, which
is essential to stay on top of the technology. The other 50% is developing our capabilities
and our go to market strategy around Messaging & Collaboration technologies. This
includes MS products like Exchange, SharePoint, Office
Communications Server & Groove.
It also includes concepts such as Unified Communications, Collaboration and Mobility
- well as far as I’m concerned it does!  At any rate, try shutting me up about
mobility.

This is an exciting time for these technologies and IMO Gen-i - as an IT company owned
by a telco- is ideally placed to deliver on the promise of the convergence of voice
and messaging services.

This is a newly created position so I am starting from scratch and have no shortage
of things to do.

Whoops - I’m not getting any comment notifications! No wonder it has been so quiet!
Apologies to anyone who has commented and not had a response. I’ll look into it and
get it fixed toot sweet.

What does one do when they are in Orlando for a day before the big conference starts?
Hit the theme parks!

I decided to go to Disney’s Magic Kingdom for a bit of nostalgia, I went there as
a kid 20 something years ago. What a blast! There are plenty of things there that
I remember from my last visit and lots of new things, too. If they could somehow fix
the massive lines and long waits it would be a lot better.

One thing that has not changed - Space Mountain is still my favorite ride.  However,
since it is a bit hard to do a self portrait with a cell phone camera in the dark,
here I am on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

Some people never grow up, and it sure is fun being one of them!

I have little kids. I love video games. So, I read with interest a post over at Geekdad on the subject of how to decide which games are appropriate for your kids. My kids are still just 1 and 3, so video games haven’t really entered the scene yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

One approach, the Lego Rule:

Chris Anderson suggests an even more intriguing strategy: the “Lego Rule.”

The Lego Company, it seems, has a policy of not producing toys that replicate 20th century weapons. “You can have swords, and you can have laser guns in space, but no actual 20th century guns,” Anderson says. So his four children can play games like Halo, since it contains only futuristic, fantasy war, where you’re killing only green- or blue-blooded aliens. The same goes for Roman swordplay titles. “But it clearly walls off Grand Theft Auto.”

(I e-mailed Lego’s spokesman Michael McNally, and he confirmed the company’s Solomonic logic. Lego, he wrote, agrees that good-versus-evil combat “is at the root of children’s play scenarios, and we believe is an important part of a child’s exploration of the world.” But they don’t want it infecting the children’s perception of the real world around them, so the solution is to place it decisively in the realm of fantasy.)

I’m in San Francisco airport awaiting my fight to Orlando. The flight from Sydney
to SFO was a grueling 13 and a half hours. I’m sure I’ve gotten taller because there
seemedto be even less leg room than usual this time!

I’ve just had a surprisingly drinkable double espresso (for airport coffee) and I’ve
got time to check and cache my
feeds to read on the plane. On that note Nick
Bradbury - the brains behind FeedDemon -has released a screencast of
the new offline features in FeedDemon
2.5.

Keep an eye out for me @ TechEd, I’ll be the slightly tall guy with the LS800.

I see via Frank La Vigne that there is a new beta of Windows Live Writer available
for download.

From frank’s blog:

The new version includes a
ton of new features, including:

New Authoring Capabilities

• Inline spell checking
• Table editing
• Ability to add categories
• Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
• Support for excerpts and extended entries
• Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
• Paste Special

Integration and Compatibility

• SharePoint 2007 support
• New APIs enabling
  custom extensions by weblog providers
• Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
• Integration with Windows
  Live Gallery
• Support for Blogger Labels

Plus…

• New look and feel
• Available in 6 languages
• Improved accessibility and keyboard support
• Many other frequently requested enhancements!

You can download it for free at http://writer.live.com/

If they only included better inking support.

Here here Frank! I’ll download it and try it out when I am online again. I working
offline in the old beta somewhere between San Fran and Orlando.

There is a new version of FeedDemon available and it includes a greatly improved offline
reading experience. you can use a feature called ‘Pre-fetch’ to download your unread
feeds, including links and embedded images.

Finally! I’ve tried a lot of readers and FeedDemon remained my favourite, but it away
irked me that the images were not available when working offline. At last they are.
You can get FeedDemon here.

Fellow productivity blogger, Dwayne Melancon, wants to know if he can watch his legally purchased DVDs on his iPod.

Well, the fair use laws might permit him to repurpose his video, however, as Dwayne points out the DCMA gets in the way.

I covered this topic in a business law class I took a few years ago when I went paperless for 8 weeks, which meant that I had to scan my books. I posed a similar question: Is it legal to scan your books to read on a tablet PC? It was a busy thread with may comments and even more off-blog emails traded. Ultimately, and after much research, I concluded that the fair use laws would permit this for personal use and I presented my research to my class in a presentation called, Wallpaper, Toilet paper, or ePaper.

But my research only addressed fair use of paper/books, not media. What Dwayne needs is a different kind of presentation.

Fortunately, I have one.

The clever and creative folks at Stanford University, in collaboration with Professor Lawrence Lessig, have recruited help from a few Disney characters to explain why Dwight can’t legally record his DVDs to his iPod for personal viewing.

Watch the video.

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

• Jason Alba: Extra! Extra! Read All About It! - “If you are already employed, this may be the most important career tool you use to collect contact information and data on target companies - two of the most critical areas to track for career growth and future job searches.” I met Jason earlier this year on my epic trip to Utah. Over a Brazilian barbecue lunch he told me how he had come to start JibberJobber and how people were using it. JibberJobber is a long-term career management tool. Think of LinkedIn + Del.icio.us + an online version Windows Notepad, with added functionality for tracking the status of your pending applications, and you’ll be on the right track.
• Pamela Slim: Is Your Inner Tiger Choking on a Short Leash? - “Keeping an active tiger chained up inside you takes a lot of energy. It saps your life force to continually pretend to be motivated, to feign enthusiasm for your life or job, to grind through another day at the office when you can feel that it is strangling your spirit. Releasing it allows you to create a life that maximizes your creative energy and utilizes the best of your strengths.“
• O’Reilly Radar: Google Launches MyMaps - “Users are able to create their own maps and mark them public or private. The annotation tools that are provided are very simple and easy to use. Users are able to add lines, polygons and placemarks. They can edit those placemarks with HTML, images, and video.” - Via Steve.
• Dr. Dobbs: Second Life: A Programmer’s Perspective - “The primary attraction for software developers in using a platform like Second Life is the ability to create objects that have credible dynamism, even compared to AJAX and browser-based applications. Virtually every one of the objects you encounter in SL, from beach balls to shopping malls, has been created by a developer or team.“

GOP-issued laptops now a White House headache - pdf

When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.

The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes.

Now, that dual computer system is creating new embarrassment and legal headaches for the White House, the Republican Party and Rove’s once-vaunted White House operation.

Democrats say evidence suggests the RNC e-mail system was used for political and government policy matters in violation of federal record preservation and disclosure rules.

In addition, Democrats point to a handful of e-mails obtained through ongoing inquiries suggesting the system may have been used to conceal such activities as contacts with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was convicted on bribery charges and is now in prison for fraud.

Democratic congressional investigators are beginning to demand access to this RNC-White House communications system, which was used not only by Rove’s office but by several top officials elsewhere in the White House.

The coolest piece of technology on show at CeBIT Australia this year is an easy pick.

The EyeStep by EyeClick is a massive interactive
display projected onto the floor. Sensors mounted with the projector allow users to
interact with the display.

This can be used for eye-catching advertising or simple (but effective) games.

I watched these two little guys playing for about 20 minutes. It was great! They had
a blast!!

The EyeStep has been a commercial hit, too. Both the units brought to the show have
already been sold.

There is also a wall projected version called EyeTouch.

A MP3 player that looks like a banana. for all those people who don’t want an iPod
because everyone else has one… This is the MP3 player for you!

see it at CeBIT Australia or see if you can
find it on the website.

How do you keep a gaggle of bloggers fueled during CeBIT? 

Caffeine, water and jelly beans (blogger beans)…

So I’ve arrived at CeBIT Australia, congregated with the scruffy looking people outside
(the other bloggers) and entered the BloggerZone inside the exhibition hall. 
I must look a bit scruffy, too.  When I walked up someone quipped - you must
be a blogger!

The BloggerZone is an are inside CeBIT that has been set up so that invited bloggers
can come in and, well, blog.  All good.

Great to see CeBIT embracing the community and getting bloggers on board.

I’ll be heading along to CeBIT on Tuesday and
attending a special launch that Hugo Ortega is hosting as part of an initative called Blogger
Zone

I will be hosting an Official Breakfast to launch Blogger
Zone (a CeBIT initiative designed to get bloggers blogging, FROM the show.)

That’s not all Hugo is doing at CeBIT - he’s
right in amongst it.

Good effort Hugo!

It’s 6AM NZ time. I’m sitting in the lounge at Wellington airport. My flight to Sydney
boards in 20 Minutes and I’ll be house in Sydney later today.

So long Wellington! It has been great and to all my friends and family… Take me
and keep in touch.

More later…

I’ve been focused on key client and eProductivity projects for the past two weeks; I do plan to resurface next week. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with this thought on technology.

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.

Putt’s Law

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

You may still have a few Marshmallow Peeps lying around. What should you do with them? Wikipedia has some interesting ideas but why not advance the cause of scientific research?

Link: Peep Research

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

See I fortold that something would break.
The AARNET tunnel is now not authenticating, so I’ve decided to drop it and just stick with the HE tunnel. which is working swimmingly
Now on to my next project (which I havnt decided on yet, other than maybe integrating Google Ads into my wordpress

Debian Etch (4.0) was released on Monday, and I have to say I wasn’t at all prepared. I’ve got about 70 machines that will probably need to be upgraded to Etch at some point in the near future. I could leave some of them running sarge, but I’ll definitely have to upgrade most of these servers.

We use an apt-proxy internally, to improve apt performance. It works well, aside from a couple of bugs that cause it to lock up every now and then. While running some upgrades on out of the way servers today, I discovered that the version of apt in sarge really doesn’t play very nicely with an etch repository served by apt-proxy running on an etch server. It seems that Ubuntu is fine, and trying to update a sarge server via an apt-proxy running on an etch server is ok too.

Once the etch client has been upgraded, the etch apt-proxy works fine. So, looks like a key issue. The version of apt in sarge doesn’t have the archive security stuff in it, and has no way of checking whether the keys are intact - BUT, it still seems to care, and will timeout and eventually fail.

It turns out that installing a copy of apt from the sarge backports solves this. You’ll also need the gnupg package, but the one from sarge is OK

I’ve previously posted about alternate
uses for RSS such as driver update notifications and package tracking.

Now that I
am moving to Sydney I’ve found another use -house hunting.

I’ve found a real estate site called Domain that
lets you create a search specifying property type, price, number of bed rooms and
suburb and generate a feed from the result. Any new properties that match your criteria
show up in your RSS Reader of choice. Very cool.

The last few weeks have been crazy. A week in Seattle for the Global MVP Summit. I
passed through Wellington briefly then over the ditch to Melbourne and Sydney. I stopped
in the Gen-i offices in both cities, in addition to attending the Toshiba MobileXchange
conference.

On the back of those visits I have been offered a position in Gen-i’s Sydney office.
I’ve accepted and my family and I are moving to Australia in a few short weeks.

Crikey!

Needless to say I have rather a lot to get done in the next four weeks. Moving countries
and all… On the other hand I have tons of things I want to blog about, but I’ll
just have to do those as I can.

After two weeks away (well I had a 20 hour stop in Wellington last weekend) I am back
home again.  The last two weeks have been really hectic.  I have screeds
of feeds to catch up on and a whole pile of things to blog about that I have not gotten
to yet.

Two weeks ago, of course, I was in Seattle for the MVP Global Summit.  I then
flew back to Wellington.  I arrived home last Sunday and flew out again
the next morning.  This time I was bound for Australia and I spent Monday and
Tuesday in Melbourne and Wednesday through Friday in Sydney.

I packed my schedule in Australia and had some very long days.  I spent some
time in both the Melbourne and Sydney offices of Gen-i.  The other thing I did
while in Australia was attend Toshiba’s MobileXchange conference. 
Toshiba kindly gave me entry into the conference and paid for a couple of nights accommodation
so I could extend my trip and attend.  Unfortunately the whole conference was
wrapped up in an NDA agreement so I can’t even blog about some of the cool things
I saw there.  I had an excellent time working the floor of the Expo hall though
and had some great conversations.

I recently delivered a speech to the incoming students at The Center for Professional Studies (CPS) at The Master’s College in Santa Clarita, California.

This was an exciting opportunity for me to encourage the incoming students by sharing my experiences in the Organizational Management program and to offer some secrets for success in getting through the program.

While the speech is directed to students, and adult learners in specific, the principles I share could be applied to anyone in any situation.

This week, business cohort had a reunion and my colleagues encouraged me to share the speech, so here it is. I hope you enjoy it.

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

When I arrived at work today I was greeted with a welcome sight.  There was a
new device sitting on my desk.  No explaination.  No note.  Just a
toy in a plain white box.

When I opened the box I was reunited with an old friend.  The Padle.

The Padle - as it was sold in New Zealand by the now defunct (?) Lingo Computer Systems
is quite dated, but when it first came out it was a really cool device.

I’ll take some photos tomorrow, but suffice to say the Padle looks like a small slate
tablet - slightly smaller than a Motion Computing LS800 - with an 8″ screen. 
Very thin and light.  Instead of Windows XP Tablet Edition, however, it is running
CE.Net.  Basically it is a giant PDA.

As I said it is quite old - Circa 2001 I think - so as you can imagine the specs leave
a bit to be desired.  It has 64MB RAM - Shared between storage and programs. 
No Bluetooth, no WiFi.  It does have a PCMCIA card slot so you could potentially
add something in to gove you connectivity, but as it is running CE.Net drivers could
be an issue.  None the less I feel honour bound to find a use for it.  Right
now I am thinking either digital picture frame or uber remote for the media centre. 
Any other suggestions?