Reflections along the way.

Category: Uncategorized (Page 7 of 22)

LG-9800 Address Book

I bought the LG V last spring because I wanted to merge my Palm contacts onto a non-PDA phone. While I adapted to the PDA phones when they first came out, they didn’t really fit my usage. I use a PDA and phone in different ways and sometimes I use them at the same time, so convergence didn’t work as well for me as I had expected.

I looked for phone that could sync up with the Palm, and Verizon assured me this was the one. Well, not so simple. In fact, there is no direct sync. I bought some merge kit, which never worked. So for the past six months I haven’t taken time to mess with this and just let it slide. Yesterday, I thought I might do a little searching on the web to see who else had this problem.

Turns out the merge kit was a waste of money. I downloaded bitpim and eventually made contact with my phone (after following the instructions of a few other folks). I exported my Palm contacts to a text file. Then I imported that into Excel and created a csv file. Bitpim can import a csv file. It is supposed to import vCard files, but I was unsuccessful exporting my Palm stuff and importing via vCards.

Bitpim does seem a crash a lot (maybe I had too many contacts), but eventually I got it working. As I imported, it took me to a intermediary screen and I had to rename the columns using its pull-down menu. Until I notice that I kept clicking through that screen and getting an error. Anyway, I finally got the contacts on my phone and I am happy.

Getting Your Boss's Attention

My wife sent me an interesting suggestion from Quint Studer about communicating with senior leaders. He suggests that when leader ask for updates, they are usually juggling multiple projects at once and are primarily interested in results and outcomes rather than process. If you overload them with process details at first, you may actually lost their attention before you deliver the key points. Here are three tips he gives,

  1. Open with results and outcomes. Make sure you can quantify what you achieved. Good effort is no excuse for lack of results.
  2. Be prepared to explain more. Once a listener has been provided the results, be ready to outline “the how” if asked. This helps the listener know the key steps for success. Great organizations always look for ways to replicate strong results in other departments or take them system wide.
  3. Show calculations if requested. For example, by lowering the left without being treated from 3% to 1%, 554 patients received care that otherwise would not. With an average collection of $276 (554 x $276 = $152,904) an additional revenue of $152, 904 is generated. (Be careful not to overstate results, however, as you risk your credibility.)

She probably sent this to me because I tend to be interested in “why” questions rather than “what” questions. So for example, when I first pushed social computing ideas at JTV, I approached it from why this trend is important and why people long for community while continuing to live in isolation. Needless to say, by the third or fourth sentence, my boss’s lost interest.

Adobe Flash 9 for MacBook Pro

Last week all my flash applications suddenly quit working. I tried several times to update flash, but with no success. I would download the player, click install, and upon completing installation it would send me back to a page requesting that I update. A mad circle. Felt like I was stuck in some twisted online merry go round. Unfortunately, I’ve been working on so many side projects (like antiquing a nativity set) that I didn’t have time to track down a solution.

Last night while I was sitting up in the middle of the night, I thought hey this would be a good chance to solve this. After a fe searches, I landed on Versiontracker with better troubleshooting advice than the Adobe troubleshooting section. If you have this problem with an Intel-based mac, here’s the advice I picked uu from Jim Kessler:

I’ve been working on a client’s machine where “you don’t have the Flash plug-in installed” appeared after installation and redirection to:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/index.html

Uninstalling and reinstalling had no effect. The solution? Repairing permissions with Disk Utlility. Then I ran the uninstaller (look on the Flash Player Support Center), and reran the installer, and everything worked.

BTW, check out versiontracker either way. It provides daily updates on software/freeware suff with comments (and troubleshooting tips).

MP3 Search Engine

Spent a little time this morning tracking some of the new Web 2.0 sites, and I put a few posts of the one that sound interesting to me. First, MP3 Realm, a music search engine. You can search audio files and lyrics, create playlists, download files, save searches and more. It could be interesting. While it’s a different princicple than Pandora, ultimately the playlist stirs me to comparison. I think it would be interesting to mash the search capabilities with the music  genome concept of Pandora.

Peace

Here’s a thoughtful quote by one of my new mentors: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. I discovered him about two years ago, and the life force that exudes from his speaking (and writing) overwhelms me.

 The world was created peace. But…the act of creating the world is a perpetual act. What we call the creation of the world is not an event of yesterday, but the event of all times, and goes on right under our noses. Every generation has the divine liberty of recreating the world.

Disciplining our Watchful Eye

During Advent, I am focusing on the idea of surprise. And this quote spoke to me about that in some way. Thought someone might enjoy:

“The need for discipline is the same need for watchfulness, for readiness, as in the parable. The ones who wait for the Lord must have oil in their lamps and the lamps must be trimmed. …[Monastic discipline] implies  cultivation of certain inner conditions of awareness, of openness, of readiness for the new and the unexpected.”
Thomas Merton

Bobi Jones

Here is a little poem from one of my favorite Welsh poets, Bobi Jones. Hopefully this will suffice in lieu of a good quote for the day. And I must also offer tribute to Joseph Clancy for the translation (as translation is an integral part of the poetic art).

The Middle Aged Poet

The child has dried up; his play and his sweat have died
His dance has shrivelled, besieged by bloated limbs,
And his leg’s sprightliness has grown bitter. I wonder whether
The muse can restore it in her swaddlings? Yes. Though finger
And thumb and ankle rot, praise will surely escape from their pit
By night, and make metre of the corruption: angels of mirth
Will still chat in the joints of the Poem. I bear within me
The innocents’ cheerful graveyard; an occasional night
Invites the remains of me to creep secretly out
To the early-patterned white leaves, and I dance a cradle’s questions
Through them, rhymes’ curiosity, till the dawn;
Then heavily, stooped, sad, in a magic procession,
Like lamentations that ventured out freely
For a time, they muster back to my silent daily ageing.

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