Geek->Human Translation - Home

I'm Baaaaaaaaaack

2008-12-01T23:52:00Z

Today marks the beginning (again) of my time at Integrum. It's good to be back in the land of technology and geeks. I'll be updating more as we do more here, but as of today, I'm back and living the dream.

A Friend in Need - From Seth Godin

2008-11-05T14:33:00Z

Your customers and employees and investors will remember how you treated them when times were tough, when they needed a break, when a little support meant everything.
No one in particular will remember how you acted during the boom times.

Seth Godin
With the economic conditions, Seth as usual hits the nail on the head. If you are losing employees, right now, think about what you are doing to help them tread water during this. I’m not saying to pay them more or anything, but if you’re riding your team harder because its tough out there make sure you’ve got realistic expectations.

Google Tracks the Election

2008-11-04T23:29:00Z

coming back soon

2008-10-30T02:43:00Z

Growin' Up

2008-02-06T05:57:00Z

Until recently, say the last year or so, I avoided the news like the plague. Hated it. Wouldn’t do it. The most “news” like item I’d watch was Sportscenter.

Well that’s changed a bit, especially during the political sploogefest of the last month or so culminating with today’s Super Tuesday.

Maybe its being a parent, or just finally growing up a bit, but I realize that this stuff actually is kinda important to me now, and so I should probably pay attention. I never even voted in anything until 4 years ago in the presidential election (haven’t done it since – I would have today if I was allowed but I registered Independent so AZ won’t let me).

I would have voted today for Senator Obama. I find his ideas inspiring and his speeches fantastic. Is he perfect? Absolutely not. But he’s certainly better than what we have now in office and I think a fresh face without the years of Washington bitterness is what this country needs.

Yes We Can

In the past you’d never have seen me speak my political view so strongly (unless I was criticizing Bush), but I’m growing up some now, and maybe that means my voice counts too.

In order of preference: Obama, McCain, move to Canada (Ron Paul left out because there’s no real chance there).

Dirty Water

2007-10-29T05:15:00Z

2004 was for the generations who never saw the Red Sox win it all.

2007 is for us.

Go Red Sox. World Champions 2007

Share the Love

2007-10-16T16:58:00Z

I was just pointed to I Heart Zappos thanks to the joy of RSS and Seth Godin's Blog.

What a great story of customer service and humanity. Take away the fact that this is a company going well above and beyond, and realize that that took at least one person stopping what they were doing - thinking about human feelings - and doing the RIGHT THING regardless of what corporate policy or rules. If more people did this, more companies would do this, a story like this wouldn't be news. Unfortunately it is all too rare.

My goal for today - to find a way to make a client's day better regardless of the rules I have to work within.

The Man Comes Around

2007-07-12T23:21:00Z

So after my catastrophic hard drive failure this past weekend, I lost all my downloaded Itunes content. Rumor has it that they'll let you redownload your tunes in this instance with a stern warning to backup your files since its a one time only thing. I sent the email yesterday through their support site and as of 15 minutes ago got this response:

Dear Chris,
I'm sorry to hear the titles you purchased from the iTunes Store with account REDACTED were lost. I know how upsetting that can be and it will be my pleasure to assist you.
The iTunes Store wants to give you the opportunity to redownload (at no charge) all the titles you purchased on this account that are still available. Please note that you may download your purchases only once, so this is an exception. Follow these steps to redownload the available items:
1) Make sure you're using the latest version of iTunes. It can be downloaded free of charge from the iTunes website: http://www.itunes.com/download
2) From the Store menu at the top, choose Check for Purchases (if you're unable to upgrade and are using iTunes 6 or earlier, you'll find this option in the Advanced menu).
3) Enter your account name and password, then click Check. Your purchases should begin downloading. If you receive an error message while downloading, try again after turning off any firewall or web-accelerator software that you may have installed.
If you want to pause your downloads and resume later, click Downloads on the left side of iTunes, then click the Pause All button in the lower right corner. When you're ready to resume downloading, just choose "Check for Purchases" from the pull-down Store menu at the top, enter your account name and password, then click the Check button.
I examined your purchase history and found that the iTunes Store has modified or removed the following titles since you purchased them, so they could not be added back to your account: ...

A rare example of good customer service coming through! Apple++

HowTo: Multiple GMail Notifiers & Accounts on OS X

2007-06-01T17:00:00Z

This week at Integrum we switched over to a Google Apps For Domains interface for our mail service. Along with the super easy calendar sharing and GMail web interface, it gave me an opportunity to try a few cool tricks to make my GMail as close as possible to my Mail.app.

The first hurdle was creating a hierarchy of labels and filters to replace the folders and rules I had sorting my incoming mail. Using the Folders4Gmail script for Greasemonkey allows me to create a nest of folders under the following format:

create a label called Foo
create a label called Foo\Bar
Folders4Gmail will display Bar as a subfolder of Foo.
lather, rinse repeat (should be three separate steps but I'm saving space)

After setting my filters to put things in the right "folder" now, I went about installing two copies of GmailNotifier for Mac (one for my personal email and one for the work one). To do this, just install the first one as normal. Then copy the app over from the disk image to the applications folder under a different name (ie gmailnotifierWork). This works on the surface level, however once you restart your computer or the google notifier, you'll run into a problem where it signs you into the same account twice. Thanks to this post at MacOSXHints, you can see how to configure the package to use a separate preferences file; Thus now two independent Google Notifiers running side by side.

"But wait Conrey," you wail in desperation, "I have two identical envelopes on my desktop, I can't tell the difference between my two accounts!"

I'm no artist, so I enlisted our designer here at Integrum, Matt, to draw up a tiny Integrum Logo to replace the unread.png and nounread.png files within the app package mentioned in the macosxhints link above. Rather than editing the Info.plist file, go into the Resources folder and rename the unread.png and nounread.png files to something innocuous like unread.png1 and replace the file with your own creation. Voila, you now get a different icon to show off your cloned Google Notifier.

Dipping at the Improv with Seth Godin

2007-05-25T22:34:00Z

About half the Integrum team and I made an early morning pilgrimage to the Tempe Improv yesterday morning to hear Seth Godin speak about his new book The Dip. The elevator pitch version of the book is that success is found only by those who have the drive to know when to quit (dead ends) and when to power on through a "Dip" in their success.

While ostensibly about "Quitting" the book is really more about being the "Best in the World" (tm). Seth started off with a few stories, one of which is about how you can't go to the Louvre and not see the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa isn't the best painting, or by the best artist, but its the "Best in the World" because the market says so. The Mona Lisa is the painting Superstar.

With a few more examples ranging from Netflix (ie how the Post Office has Netflix only mailboxes... and how bad an idea it would be to try to compete there if you're only 4% better) to Enzo Ferrari, Seth moved quickly through the long tail and how to be the Best in YOUR World.

Not to rewrite his book, but the thing that stuck out for me about Seth's talk was the simple test he put out to the audience. He said "Everyone raise your hand as high as you can" which we all did, followed by "OK now raise it one inch higher". Unsurprisingly, the audience's raised hands all stretched a bit higher. So much for doing the best you can eh?

Being Average is Overrated, don't try to be everything to everyone, and stop looking for buyers for what you're selling, start selling what your buyers are buying. Those are the signs of surviving the Dip.

Overall, a great talk, although it was weird being in a comedy club at 8am. If anyone reading this wants a copy of the Dip, email me, and its yours.