michael’s thoughts

I haven’t really updated much here lately as I’ve been super busy.  I did end up taking a new position, and it’s in down town DC so getting used to my horrible commute is taking some time.  It’s an exciting job, however, and I’m hoping it will work out for the long run (it’s a contract to perm situation so we’ll see what happens).

I wrote before about using Salesforce.com to track job leads.  That worked…um..somewhat well.  I ended up with a lot of job leads in progress at once and it became somewhat of a difficult task to keep on top of updating the entires in Salesforce to log every call, meeting, email, etc.  This isn’t really a criticism of Salesforce, though, as it was too many job leads to have in play at once.  I got overwhelmed myself, was spending way too much time running from interview to phone screen to interview.  I should have done a better job of filtering what I wanted; the problem is that because my other job that I was planning to hop to fell through I was in “unexpectedly unemployed” mode which I don’t deal well with and end up chasing after lots of things at once to “get a job quick” and that’s not really very productive.

In this case it worked out alright, though, as I am happy in my new position.  Except I need to get used my 13+ hour days of work/commute.  Oh well.  I’ll live.

It’s not well advertised on their web site, but Salesforce.com offers a free Personal Edition of their salesforce automation software.  I signed up for an account a while back because I was curious what the package was like.  Salesforce.com gets a lot of ink in the trade press for their innovative software as a service hosted model for enterprise applications, but I’m not a sales person so I had never happened to have reason to use it myself.

I’ve had my account for a while, but I never really did anything with it.  See the part above about my not being in sales.  I don’t like signing up for test accounts and not actually testing anything, and I kept trying to think of something I could use the Salesforce account for.

It turns out, I have found an application for Salesforce in my life: job hunting.  I have recently become unemployed and have been on the job hunt.  My typical method is to save copies of all resumes emails I send out to a special folder, along with reply correspondence.  I make notes of the phone calls I have with recruiters and hiring managers on various slips of paper and backs of envelopes, which I then promptly misplace.

Salesforce is software to help sales professionals keep track of leads, document conversations, and drive sales productivity.  Well, I am selling myself in this case, so why wouldn’t it work for me?  So for the past few days I have been using my Salesforce.com personal edition account to keep track of all the various companies I’m in contact with.  It’s probably overkill for my purposes, but it’s a fun test of the software.

Overall I’m impressed.  I haven’t spent much time looking at their online help (which is excellent), but I’ve been able to get the system to do what I want it to do.  I’m sure I’m using only a small fraction of the features, but it’s already helping me keep track of who I’ve talked to on a given day, when I said I’d follow up, etc.

I plan to keep using it until I find a job, and if I come up with any other great revelations about how the software works toward this goal I’ll let you know.

Tags: Salesforce.com, Job Hunting, Recruiting 

I’ve been playing with Joost a bit over the past week, and I stand by my initial impressions. I like their technology, and the interface is not bad once you get used to it. The problem is they lack compelling content at the moment. It seems to me that Joost either needs to get more deals with television content providers, or else open up the platform for Internet video (Rocketboom, etc.).

I suggest they talk to Mark Cuban, as I think he still owns the Lifestyles of the Rich and famous catalog and since he can’t repurpose that for HDnet, since it was shot on video and can’t really be upconverted, it may make sense for him to syndicate it through Joost.

Tags: Joost, Mark Cuban

Wired has a piece covering some apparently prototype software that allows a single 2D image of a face to be extrapolated into an accurate 3D model. There’s a video showing the software in action and I highly suggest taking a look.

I agree with those who commented that this technology cries out for application in simple end-user tools. And no, I don’t consider something like 3D Studio Max or Maya “end-user tools”.

I’d love to use technology like this to more accurately model my avatar in Second Life, for example. And the world of MMORPGs has exploded in the past few years. Now Sony has announced their virtual world “Home” will be launching in the fall on PS3.

We need more 3D-Tools-for-Graphics-Dummies.

Tags: Graphics, Second Life, MMORPG

I’ve updated my home phone number on my Plaxo card to that of my new Grand Central number. So if you know me and are interested in trying out Grand Central from calling-party perspective, feel free.

If you know me and do not use Plaxo, this is my subtle way of suggesting you get with the program. I know way too many people and it’s a huge hassle for me to hunt them all down.

I was reading this post on the O’Reilly Radar site and learned of a relatively new startup Grand Central that is changing the rules of telephone numbers. Basically the idea is that you sign up with Grand Central and get a new unified telephone number. Then through their web site you “link” it to your existing phone numbers - cell phones, home, office, whatever. When people call your Grand Central number it will ring all the phones you’ve specified. You can also group various contacts to ring various numbers. It’s fairly flexible and pretty cool. This is not so different from some other offerings that have been around in the past - I think MCI has a package similar to this a few years ago.

But Grand Central offers a few key features that are definitely not available from standard phone companies. One extremely cool feature is the ability to switch phones in the middle of a call. You press the star key on your phone and Grand Central disconnects you (but not the person you’re talking to) and rings your phones again. This would be a killer feature for me, as my cell phone gets horrible reception at home and I’d love to be able to switch to my home VOIP line without having to hang up. I also carry a RAZR and a Blackberry and I don’t typically use the Blackberry for voice, as nobody has the number - but with Grand Central I can switch to the Blackberry if the RAZR’s battery is running low and it’s fairly seamless to the calling party.

Another very cool feature of Grand Central is the ability to screen your calls. When you pick up a Grand Central call it tells you who’s calling, or if they are unknown. You can then send the call to voice mail and even listen in while the person is leaving a message. At that point you are able to pick up the call - just as if it were being left on a physical home answering machine. Using this same technology you can also record phone calls and access them later via the web site. I’m sure podcasters everywhere will appreciate this feature.

The only downside I can see so far is that in their free beta, outbound calling is slightly kludgey. To make an outbound call you can return a call from voicemail, or you can make a call using the web interface. From what I can tell there is no way to initiate an arbitrary new call without using the web interface. This may not be a deal breaker if the web portal works with my Blackberry browser, but it’s something they’ll need to address before launching the paid service.

And of course there’s the concern that trusting an unproven startup with no business model or revenue with your “number for life” may be dicey. Nevertheless, they have some extremely cool technology and I am looking forward to playing with it further.

Tags: Grand Central, VOIP

It looks like I am about to be changing jobs again, and this reminded me that, yes, I am a Plaxo user. Plaxo is a company my friend Sean Parker helped start that is a distributed contact management system. Basically the way it works is that you register with Plaxo and your contacts do as well, and when you update your contact information it automatically propagates to everyone else’s address books.

Pretty handy stuff. If you’re not a user, I suggest you sign up!

Now…if only Grand Central supported Plaxo integration…one can dream…

Tags: Plaxo, Grand Central

I was reading this entry on Wired about Adobe launching the Apollo public beta (see Adobe Lab’s product page here, press release here) and I thought I’d check it out. Basically Apollo is a cross-platform runtime environment for application development. Superficially it’s a similar idea to Java, but instead of developing Apollo apps in a “traditional” computer language like Java you develop them with web technologies (HTML, Flash, etc.). But the distinction between Apollo apps and Flash apps is that Apollo is a standalone runtime environment (like a JRE) that allows you to package your creations as standalone applications that appear to run natively under the users’ operating system.

They currently have runtime environments to support Windows and OS X in the alpha, but I would imagine they will have to support Linux as well when the release is further along. It will be interesting to see what, if any, response SUN has to this. It seems to be a direct challenge to Java, and while I haven’t looked much at the SDK I would imagine Apollo is better suited to Rapid Application Development and prototyping than Java, as well as appealing to a broader and different market of developers and designers. On the other hand, Java is a more sophisticated language and runtime with a large mindshare and certainly Apollo doesn’t compete with Java in the server and servlet spaces. Still, it will be interesting to see what the Java community’s response will be, typically in the space of RAD tools.

There’s a good video on Apollo from the Demo conference - check it out.

Tags: Apollo, Adobe, Flash, Java

I have my DSL and main computer network setup in my basement, however I have a TiVo in my bedroom that I wanted networked. Additionally I like being able to login to work from my bedroom on my laptop when I get paged in the middle of the night, not having to get dressed and go down to the basement for a five minute fix. I have a wireless network setup, however the coverage in my house seems not to be too consistent. Because I rent, I didn’t want to go to the effort of running cat-6 networking cables to setup a “proper” home network.

Instead I decided to take a gamble and ordered the Netgear 85Mbps Wall-Plugged Ethernet Adapter Kit ( XE103G-100NAS ) from Amazon. I had read some customer reviews stating that the two adapters need to be on the same electrical circuit, which is not the case for me - but the product specs didn’t say that and I was hoping that since they are on the same electrical panel it would work. Sure enough, it was plug and play - a 2 minute installation.

I also ordered a D-Link DUB-E100 Hi-Speed USB 2.0 10/100 Adapter to get the TiVo hooked into the network. This device was listed on the tested and supported list of USB ethernet adapters on both TiVo’s and D-Link’s web site. Unfortunately the newer “Revision B” device that I received is actually not supported under TiVo and D-Link customer support confirmed that unless TiVo adds the driver for the newer revision into one of their software updates, it cannot be made to work. Of course I could hack into my TiVo and install the driver myself, but if I had that much interest in hacking my TiVo I’d be running MythTV. So instead I wrote off the D-Link adapter and picked up a Linksys USB100M EtherFast 10/100 Compact USB Network Adapter which is working just great.

Now that my TiVo is online, I have been playing around with Amazon Unbox but I’ll save that for a later update.

As a sort of Christmas gift for myself, I purchased a Olympus Stylus 1000 10MP Digital Camera with Digital Image Stabilized 3x Optical Zoom. I decided on this model after playing with one that a friend of mine received for Christmas. So far it has turned out to be a great toy. The image quality is very decent (hint: turn off the electronic image stabilizer for much better pictures), and the price is right. While the images won’t compare to 8 megapixel digital SLRs, they look great for a $280 10 megapixel pocket camera.

Once I find something interesting to take pictures of I will post some samples. I bought mine in a bundle with a 2 GB XD memory card, which I highly recommend. You can fit an insane number of pictures on there (about 400 at the highest quality, 800 at the second highest quality, and thousands at lower quality settings).

Tags: Camera, Digital Camera, Olympus