Recently in Work Category

Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about how web designers work together. Most of these collaborations, in my experience, occur informally. A few people get together and start dividing up their work to move a project forward.

But where do I fit in? What skills do I bring to the table? What skills do I want my partners to have?

While Julie is off in the midwest visiting her family, I'm at home getting in some good coding time.

For the last month I've been building on my experience at the Rails Studio I attended in Portland to try to actually make something with this new technology. I'm finally hitting that point where all those hours of reading code and books about code and blogs about code and e-mails about code and IRC threads about code are actually paying off.

Last night I finally hit that point where I really got what I was doing. In proper Rails style, I spent a few hours really thinking about how the application should work. I drew some screens. I thought about how that would work and then drew some new and better screens. As I planned this out it began to dawn on me that not only could I draw this on paper but I actually knew how to make what I ended with.

So I got to coding. I wrote my database schema. I generated my scaffold. I wrote my views with a little quicky CSS to get me through. I looked it over in Firefox and for the first time every checked actual working code into my Subversion repository.

These days there are so many great inspirations out there. The design community is really on fire with development fever. For the last few years I've watched my ideas pop up from other people a few months after I think of something. This simple fact, that if you have a need someone else probably does to. Eventually somebody will make what you thought of. It won't be quite like what you would have made but what right do you have to complain? You just sat on a good idea instead of getting real and making it.

That's not going to be me anymore. I'm really pushing myself to get the skills I want to make my ideas happen and I have many of them. The first one is to start writing about my experience. I won't bore you here with the intricacies of how I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm creating a different, geekier blog for that purpose.

Never fear, this site will live up to it's name and continue to contain my almost daily observations in this hourly world. Mostly in the form of blog posts like this one about what's going on in my life and as an unending stream of links on the homepage and in the RSS feed.

I am an off-again on-again follower of the principles articulated by David Allen in his notorious book Getting Things Done. I read every post on 43Folders and Lifehacker in an attempt to glean a few more secrets about how I can best use my time for good instead of wasting my hours away with small distractions (like reading productivity blogs, but never mind that).

The hardest bit is finding a system you like. I've tried them all. For a while Star convinced me to use Entourage but it just didn't have the performance I'd come to expect from using Mail and iCal for a number of years. The Project concept in Entourage is handy and the rudimentary sharing between users is nifty in so far as it reminds you that it should be better and Microsoft doesn't know how to make software. What was their business again? Oh right, offering just enough versions of Windows that their customers can't understand what they're getting. But I digress.

Abandoning Entourage I turned back to iCal and Mail with the added bonus of the ever-popular Kinkless GTD. Inspired by David Allen's book, kGTD is a brilliant little tab indented file with powerful scripts that help you manage your tasks by project and by context. But that's not all. It syncs brilliantly with different (color coded, of course) calendars in iCal organizing my life into nice neat little bunches. The problem is that I end up with so many to-do items that it is more efficient to just know what I have to do today and be done with it. My file gets out of date, etc. etc.

So lately I've been tinkering with Google's new calendaring feature because of the added benefit of getting to share a calendar with Julie who is forced, horror of horrors, to use a Windows machine at work. Web based is the way to go and I've found the Google Calendar to be vastly more powerful than the next best thing, 30 Boxes. The big idea powering both of these systems is the all-knowing "one box." Instead of filling out a complicated form you simple type "Have lunch with Julie at noon tomorrow" and it parses the phrase for the necessary details. As you might imagines, this makes adding things to your calendar infinitely easier.

The mystery system that could solve everything is Joyent. They started out as a server appliance but now offer a hosted web-based version of their e-mail, calendaring, file management, contact management, and general collaboration tool suite. It's far far better than Microsoft Exchange in terms of interface, useful feature set, and price. The problem for me is that they don't offer a free, or even an inexpensive service like Basecamp, for example, does. This is because of the obvious fact that freeloaders like me would quickly balloon in number and come to represent around 98/% of their client base.

I've tinkered with Joyent briefly and it looks amazing. The interface is well designed and very responsive. Tagging allows you to easily connect people, events, files, and messages on the fly. In my opinion, if you work for a small team and are dissatisfied with your e-mail, calendaring, contact, and file management systems you should look at Joyent.

But I'm just a guy who wants to get himself organized. Basecamp and Backpack offer interesting promise and I've used and loved them both for specific functions in the past. They just don't feel like life managers to me. Maybe I should just shut up and get working but I know that I lose things and need a system for keeping track of them.

I'm still looking and if you have any pointers please pass them along.

Busy as a bzz bee. These last few weeks have been so busy. At work I have been dealing with annual budget requests, preparation for my presentation at the board of directors meeting, and then this past week and a half I worked with Adam to set the office up to use our new outsourced MS Exchange 2000 with BlackBerry Enterprise server solution. Fortunately, one can connect to Exchange 2000 via IMAP so we avoided alienating Outlook Express users.

The nicest thing about this little project was configuring the BlackBerrys. I have worked before with Exchange servers but this was my first time dealing with BlackBerrys. After researching all of the different options available I discovered that T-Mobile offers the best prices on both monthly unlimited data plans and on the devices themselves. The real perk comes in the devices themselves.

A brief history of T-Mobile: Deutsche Telekom grows weary of dominating the European market and yearns for the buckets of money to be made by unveiling a GSM network in the states. Instead of starting from scratch, they buy VoiceStream and absorb a decent size customer base in major urban markets. VoiceStream passes to the netherworld and T-Mobile is born.

As with any cross-border merger the different relationships of the two pre-existing companies must be reconciled and problems are inevitable. This returns me to my search for BlackBerry devices. Anyone who has seen these little things knows that they are, like old school Palms, black on green devices. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and Cingular all offer the same lineup of devices with slight difference. A BlackBerry is a little screen with a little keyboard that connects to an e-mail server over a cell phone network. Some are also phones and all require a good digital network. This is way cool for people who need an always on connection to an enterprise grade e-mail server. With BlackBerry Enterprise Server 3.6 users have access to the Global Address book and calendaring. For our solution this will allow Barry to view, edit, and confirm changes made to his calendar by his assistant with only a four minute delay. This is, simply put, way cool.

The problem with this system is that a black on green device is hard to read. When I switched from a Handspring Visor (now discontinued) to an iPaq Pocket PC a big advantage was that black text (actually very dark blue) on a white background is very easy to read. Surfing for BlackBerry devices online brought me to the T-Mobile web site where I discovered the BlackBerry 7230 for sale. This device is small, light, and color! Perfect.

Not so perfect it turned out. If you visit T-Mobile today you will notice that the Handhelds and PDAs page does not list the 7230. The BlackBerry website only acknowledges its existence in a June 2, 2003 Press Release stating that "RIM Introduces Color and Tri-Band Features to New BlackBerry Wireless Handhelds in Germany and Austria" to be rolled out in those countries by T-Mobile International. Somehow this device popped up on the T-Mobile USA web site the day I visited and then vanished forever.

A few hours on hold and arguing with Customer Service later I finally talked to a Corporate Accounts rep who acknowledged the existence of the 7230 and agreed to sell three of them to AU. Persistence pays off. Our legislative department and Barry now have the latest color tri-band GPRS BlackBerry available anywhere in the world. It was something of a headache to get them configured but once they work these devices are perfect.