Dopp Juice

Take a look at Lifehacker’s post today on the Top Ten Google Products You Forgot About. The Monster is alive and well. And here’s one I hadn’t heard about (which is blowing my mind particularly fiercely at this moment):

Googe Page Creator!

That’s right. Google created a full-featured WYSIWYG editor that allows you to build entire websites just by filling in the blanks. It’s free, the hosting is included (your URL is http://your_google_id.googlepages.com), and unlike most webpage builders, it appears to have some pretty decent quality and reliability behind it.

I have two (contradictory) gut-reaction responses:

• “WTF?!”
• “It’s about damned time!”

Check it out and tell me what you think.  I’m crossing my fingers, hoping this will solve the age-old “I have no money and I need a pretty website right now — what do I do?” quandry and make the world a better place.

You may have noticed that my last post was about having a full plate. You may have also noticed that my last post was nearly three weeks ago. These are not coincidental. They are quite related.

But while I have a few free moments on “Indigenous People’s Day” (or “Columbus Day,” if you live in a less rebelliously liberal part of the United States), I’d like to give a quick summary of my recent technodrama and its unexpected happy endings.

First, Gmail. I posted awhile ago about getting locked out of my gmail account. Fortunately, I received some very valuable feedback from a reader who has now become a very valuable friend to me (yay for broken tools creating new connections!) and was creatively persistent with Google. Forty-two days after the incident, I finally received an apology from them, along with instructions on how to now access to my account. My Gmail account is alive again! The irony is that I had forty days and forty nights to completely detach from it and pronounce it dead. It feels sort of like a zombie now. (A zombie that wants to eat my brains.)

Second, the Treo. Have I told you about the physical health of my beloved Palm-driven cell phone? Let me put it this way: every single person on my web development team has been threatening for more than six months now to steal it from me and destroy it so I will be forced to get a new one.

More specifically, the antennae is held on by a paperclip. That paperclip is held on by green electrical tape. The earpiece has broken off. The holder for the stylus is so loosened that I’ve now lost three of them and have given up on carrying one. The front face plate has separated from the back of the machine and is being held on by a single loose screw (and the paperclipped antennae, when it happens to be attached). The RAM is so overloaded that it takes 5-10 seconds to load the dialing screen when I’m ready to make a phone call.

BUT IT WORKS FINE! I DON’T SEE WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT!

The laughable part is that I’m paying for full insurance on the machine (which is all of $6 a month), and I could have claimed it for repairs or replacement a long time ago, given its condition… even without my coworkers first stealing it from me and throwing it into the bay.

The camel’s back broke yesterday, though, when I dropped the machine on the pavement and cracked the front face plate. Now it took four fingers clutching the machine from three different sides to hold its pieces together well enough to get a signal. It still worked — no, really, IT STILL WORKED! — but okay, yeah, it was probably time to take advantage of the insurance.

This morning, I did a final hot-sync with my computer to back up the data… which turned out to be quite an undertaking because the hot-sync port is mostly broken, too. The task required propping the machine halfway up on the edge of a notebook and weighting down the cradle port with a pair of heavy metal scissors, stepping back, and holding my breath for ten minutes, praying that the precarious sculpture wouldn’t move before the sync was complete. It took a few tries to get it right.

Then I walked into the Sprint Repair Center at 4th and Folsom, slapped my busted Treo down on the counter, and announced, “My Treo is exploding in on itself and eating its own brain. I have insurance. What are my options?” The man ran some diagnostics (which amounted to dismantling the tape and paper clip and watching it fall apart in his hands like some kind of gag gift), and returned with a concerned look on his face.

“We can’t repair this for you,” he said apologetically.

“Oh,” I said with disappointment. “But I have insurance…”

He interrupted me. “We’ll have to replace it for you.”

“I am TOTALLY OKAY with you replacing it for me,” I reassured him. “COMPLETELY FINE WITH IT. But, um, how long will it take? Do I need to go without a phone for a few days?”

He pulled out a new Treo and handed it to me. It was already connected to my phone number. “Here you go,” he said.

“That’s it? I don’t need to sign anything? Or pay a deductible?”

“Nope. That’s it. If you’d like, you can wait ten minutes and I’ll transfer your contacts.”

“No, that’s fine, I have it synced on my computer,” I said.

And I ran home gleefully, laughing and skipping in puddles and dreaming about all the beautiful ways this new phone will fall apart on me over the next year.

Ah, beginnings!

A few weeks ago, I found myself completely locked out of my Gmail account. My password just stopped working. This was not a matter of me misspelling my own password — two separate email programs that have my password stored in them (and that have been accessing my email just fine for years) agreed with me. I was really locked out. This meant one of two things:

• My account got hacked.
• Google screwed up.

I tried to recover it. The first step is to have Gmail send a link to your secondary email address. Unfortunately, my secondary email address is a three-years-dead hotmail account. No amount of negotiating with MSN could reconcile it.

They make you wait five days before you can move onto the second step, which is the security question. And my security question, apparently, is:

What is your primary frequent flyer number?

I tried all of my frequent flyer numbers. None worked. Upon further research, I’ve determined that I opened my Gmail account before I acquired my first frequent flyer number. Great. (As a sidenote, MSN also offered to let me answer a security question in the Hotmail Negotiations. It was, “Where was your mother born?” I don’t actually know where my mother was born.)

The third step, of course, is to email Google and beg for help. I tried one of my contacts “on the inside” and he directed me to the customer service address. He also didn’t offer much encouragement, reminding me that if Google can’t connect my identity with the account, they’re not going to let me back in. From the customer service address, I received an automated “We got your message!” email, with no follow-up response.

I cut my losses. It was really over — me and my Gmail. We were done. I emailed everyone who used that address, told them to use a different address from now on, and left daunting doom-ridden reminders that they should go check their email accounts NOW to make sure their secondary email addresses are functional and their security questions are current, lest they be suffer the horrors I am experiencing. I was just sayin’ is all.

A week later, I realized this is Google we’re talking about. They don’t just run my email, they run the world. In addition to losing my email login, I had also lost access to my Google Reader, Google Analytics, and Google Adsense/Adwords accounts — none of which I use too frequently, but all of which have important history logged in them. Great.

Technological detachment is a traumatic thing. I’ve been trying to take the Buddhist approach, embrace the impermanence of everything, accept that the lack of backup access is probably my fault, and get on with my life. But this voice in the back of my head occasionally keeps me awake at night, telling me that some very important email is sitting unanswered in my Gmail inbox, and that my unawareness of it is going to destroy a relationship, or kill a business deal, or ruin a small country, or cause a small puppy to die.

Today I made a new account. I don’t feel the urge to become Gmail-dependent again anytime soon, but I did miss my Google Reader, and couldn’t go another week without it. To set the system up clean from the start, I lumped all feeds into only two tags/folders: ALWAYS and SOMETIMES. This is a Gina Trapani trick that I learned at BlogHer07. Start with the ALWAYS folder every day, and make sure you see all of it. If you have more time, move to the SOMETIMES folder. If something in your ALWAYS folder starts to bore you, move it to SOMETIMES. And never, ever feel bad about hitting “Mark all as read.”

And that’s the story of my Googletrauma. It hurt, but maybe it was a good thing for me… to realize I don’t need my really organized, long-time inbox to survive in the real world. (::sniffles::) I mean, really, I haven’t died. And as far as I can tell, no small puppies have, either.

…But there is also an epilogue to this story.

I lost my Treo this weekend.

And I can’t. find. it. anywhere.

Jeesh.

This just made my day:

http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html

Impressively simple, yet disturbingly relevant.

How can I put this?

As I write this, I’m vacuuming. (Well, that’s not entirely true.)

As I write this, my home is being vacuumed, and I’m the only one home. (Well, that doesn’t feel so true, either.)

As a write this, an artificial intelligence robot is running amok in my living room, gobbling up everything in its sight. (Yes, that’s it.)

I bought an iRobot Roomba Scheduler (not an affiliate link) from Woot.com as a birthday present to myself. I set it up today and am equally impressed and entertained. It’s so cute, running around my floor going “gimme! gimme! gimme! gimme!” to all my dirt (no, it doesn’t actually have sound effects — I just feel so connected to my Roomba after the first twenty minutes that I believe we now speak the same language).

(It just found my kitchen — look at it go on the linoleum floor! How long has it been since I’ve swept over there?!)

Every creative genius has an Achilles’ heel. Housecleaning is mine. Still too stubborn to admit defeat and hire assistance for the task, I tend to just let the dirt just pile up. I can already tell that the Roomba and I are going to be great friends. This model comes with a scheduler, which means I can program it to clean every day (or less often, if I’m feeling lazy) while I’m at work. And since vacuums can’t clean under scattered laundry, this will force me to pick up more regularly, lest I anger my new AI roommate. Hey — double victory!

(Right now it’s navigating the underside of my futon, choking on electrical cords and freeing itself from the madness without crying for help.)

The other thing I’m proud of — I bought this puppy for $130 when it retails for $330. Have you heard about Woot.com yet? (If not, don’t feel bad — I just found out about it last week). It’s a geek-oriented shopping site that only sells one item per day. “One Day, One Deal” is their motto. The item is almost always super cheap and super cool. They’ve got an impressive business model:

A) Negotiate with companies for a low price on a really cool item that you can guarantee to sell a lot of in a really short period of time.

B) Build a community around a promise to provide the coolest, cheapest products on a daily basis through a really user-friendly and focused website.

C) Put non-obtrusive ads on the site.

If you’re a twitterer, you can find out about the latest buys on woot via tweets (wow, out of context, that sentence sounds really strange).

Expect a more critical review of the Roomba after I’ve played with it more. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a heckuva lot better than what I had going for me before.

Lifehacker has a great discussion today on Paper versus Electronic To-Do Lists — the pros and cons of each. Ultimately, they make a stronger argument for paper, and I can’t disagree. I still haven’t found the perfect set of solutions, though — my to-do system remains a personalized hybrid of several recommendations and fixes. The benefit is that it’s molded to fit me; the downside is that there are always holes, and it requires discipline to maintain. Here’s what’s working for me right now:

The Whiteboard (aka My Baby) – I have a massive 3′ x 4′ whiteboard on the wall in my home office (aka my living room). It is the central bucket for quick thoughts. Because it is limited in size and super-easy to use, it’s the most likely bucket in my life to get processed thoroughly. I want it clear for me to add to, so I’m always pushing its content forward to where it really belongs.

The Other Whiteboard - Next to My Baby, I have a second, smaller white board (1.5′ x 2′), which sits right above my desk. It’s too small for brainstorming, but it’s perfect for defined to-do lists. When I sit down at my computer to crank out tasks, the first thing I do is list them out on the board in the order I want to get them done. I also leave a margin on the right for adding other tasks as they come up while I’m working. (Note: if I’m not working at home, I replace this either with a piece of paper or a plain text file. They do the job, but they’re not as slick.)

The Treo (aka My PDA Phone) – I’ve found that I rarely look at my Treo when I’m working, so it’s not a good place for me to record work tasks. It is, however, a great place to keep shopping lists, since the machine is always with me when I’m out. I use the other to-do categories to record non-critical tasks that I can forget about for a few weeks if necessary — usually creative problem-solving ideas. If I really need to remember to do something and all I have on me is the Treo, I’ll either email the task to myself or attach an alarm to it. I also use the alarm system to remember non-work-related events.

The Date Book – I carry a thick Moleskin notebook calendar with me whenever I’m working. It has a separate page for each day, and I use it to keep track of the Big Picture. I log my goals, major tasks, and hours worked. The first thing I do on Monday morning is review what I did last week and make a master list of big things I want to accomplish this week. Then I break that list down and spread it out over the days. The first thing I do every morning is look at what’s queued up for the day and revise it to fit my latest plan. The last thing I do before I quit work each day is record what I actually did. I could do this in any notebook, really; the benefit of using a calendar is just that it’s archived for reviewing later. I prefer paper to electronic here because I can leave it open on my desk, and I can work on it while I’m on the train.

The Inbox – I use Thunderbird to manage most of my email (my big client-specific email accounts are kept separate in Entourage). I automatically filter the inbox down into four categories:

• Biz (email addresses I’ve identified to be primarily work-related)
• Groups (email address I’ve identified to be from a social networking site or a mailing list)
• Personal (anyone in my address book that doesn’t fall into one of the above groups)
• Misc (not in my address book, but not in my spam folder either)

There’s a minor breakdown in the system here: I’ve found that if I don’t respond to an email the second I read it, I may forget to respond at all. I’ve tried several different techniques for managing unanswered emails, and all of them have required more discipline than I’ve been able to maintain. So for now, I just add “respond to ___” to an external to-do list when I know it’s important, and that seems to work.

The Misc Lists – Everything I’ve talked about so far manages the big stuff. Sometimes, though, there’s little stuff — lists miles long of little things i need to remember to do at some point. These end up all over the place — on Post-Its (stuck on my desk), on pieces of paper (stuck on my wall or refridgerator), in Stikkit or Backpack (depending on my mood — I haven’t picked my favorite yet), or in notebooks (to be transferred later to other places). I’ve learned to be careful about where the urgent and important pieces get captured, and I’ve also learned to relax about the rest.

Not to scare you away from WordPress, but… I got 13 spam comments in the last 12 hours after my install (moderated and hidden for now, but still clogging up my inbox with notifications). Looks like it’s already time to check out anti-spam hacks. That was quick.

Meanwhile, I want to direct you to danah boyd’s analysis of Twitter, the source of those “web pings” at the top of my blog. A related topic? Yes. Twitter, to some, equals opt-in spam, and there’s some debate among tech geeks over whether it will survive the test of real social communities after the novelty has worn off.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Let me back up. Twitter is a new publishing platform that merges blogs with IMs with text messages. Basically, you can post as much you want (supposedly about “what you’re doing”), but each post has to be less than 160 characters. Why 160 characters? Because that’s the limit on most cell phones’ SMS text messages. So yes, you can do this from your phone. And you can receive your friends posts as text messages on your phone. And if you get a lot of friends who like to post a lot, that’s a lot of text messages.

Cell phone companies love Twitter. And speaking of which, I’m over my max of 500 this month thanktwitterverymuch, and need to increase my plan to unlimited text messages.

Twitter got a lot of action at SXSW. It was really an ideal machine for solifying quick hallway connections and keeping in touch about which panels/parties/dinner joints were worth the time it took to get to them. But now, away from SXSW, it has a different purpose. It’s more like listening in on acquaintances with myspace or livejournal, but with a louder megaphone.

danah pointed out some key gripes with Twitter, and I want to respond with my wishlist for feature changes:

• Multiple levels of filtering for outgoing tweets, a la livejournal (uses of this could include: topic of interest, geographic location, personal closeness).
• Multiple levels of filtering for incoming tweets.
• The ability to mark an outgoing tweet as important versus regular (with an exclamation point before the post, perhaps?), and the ability for tweet recipients to decide if they want those categories filtered differently.
• An alternative to Twitterific that allow for full 160 character display and respects the “leave” command.

So far, I like Twitter, and my appreciation for it actually has less to do with the network than with the medium. I’m using it to augment this blog with more frequent, current, and pithy thoughts. And it makes me pretty happy that I can do it from my cell phone.

“Fig 1. is a front elevational view of sunglasses showing my new design.”

– Shigeki Sueyoshi, 1981, Patent # D258662Guess what? Google has a Patent Search! It launched sometime last month, and is in beta. And like most trinket toys that Google leaves scattered around the web, I stumbled upon it by accident. Gotta love the “more” link above the regular Google search… To me, it seems to have more entertainment value than anything else. But I’m sure it’s a godsend to inventors. A quick news search brought up a few articles that criticized some errors in the system. I found one myself, actually. When clicking on the featured patent labeled “Zipper” (next to “Skateboard” and “Futuristic Toy Gun”), I was instead directed to the patent for the Expanding Internal Brake, created by Emil Zipper. But hey, it’s in beta.The point is, Google’s neat. And my love-hate relationship to them for dominating the world through the dissemination of useful technology continues.

Yeah, I know, we’re all email experts by now. But the thing is, we all do it differently because it’s still a fairly new communication medium. Here’s one team’s attempt at defining “the rules.” http://www.itsecurity.com/features/99-email-security-tips-112006/I think they do a particularly good job with the Etiquette section. Thou shalt not send emails when angry…

I have another fun toy for you. This one goes out to all the Creative Professionals out there — those who have something to offer as unique and marketable individuals. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s everyone. LinkedIn is an online community site for networking professionals. Be honest, now. You really don’t want to be searching for a job, client, or new business contact with your facebook or friendster accounts. This one is purely professional, focusing on your goals, accomplishments, and connections. As with any website marketed to professionals, not all of its features are free. But I’ll tell you what is free: creating a full profile, linking to people you know, writing endorsements (testimonials) for your contacts, and introducing your connections to each other. You can also search for new jobs, contacts, services, etc, and use your network to get you closer to those targets. If you’re “A” and you want to get to “C,” go talk to your buddy “B” and she’ll probably hook you up. And that’s enough free stuff for me to dub this site completely worthwhile for all of our efforts. Go sign up, and start by connecting with me (just search for “Sarah Dopp” and I’m there). Or tell me your email and I’ll connect you to my network with an invitation. All of a sudden, you’re network will include everyone I’ve already connected with (instant friends!). If there’s anyone in my network you’d like to have on your side, just tap me on the shoulder and ask for an introduction. If I’ve worked with you and you’d like me to write an endorsement, just give me a nudge and it’ll be up there. Or maybe I’ll notice how I can help you out, and take those steps on my own. Whatever you want to use the site for for, I think you should join the game. I can do so much more for you when we’re working in the same systems. And I think this one will be good.