Joel Kehle's Blog

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

I For One Welcome Our Robot Overlords...

Or maybe not. This is either very cool or very creepy. What do you think?

Celebrating My One Subscriber

I'm having some fun tinkering with my blog.

I just moved it from wordpress to blogger. Wordpress was giving me some weird layout problems and debugging them didn't seem like fun. It's 2008. Blogs should just work. So far the transition has been easy. As part of the move I am trying out some new (to me) feedburner features. My favorite is the "FeedCount" Service that list my subscribers. Turns out I have one subscriber. I am not terribly surprised since I don't really blog. I just like to play with the medium so I know what the hell is going on with the technology of self expression.

It make me smile to know that I have one fan out there. So, I wanted to give a big shout out to my one subscriber for reading my blog:

Hi Mom!

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

My Failing Mac Experiment

Recently I migrated from a PC to a Mac. As part of the experiment, I wanted to use the client side apps written for the Mac (Address Books, iCal, Mail.) Today I just got rid of Mail. Not in favor of some other client program but in favor of Gmail. The primary problem was that I want to archive mail. As far as I can tell (and as far as I can google), there is no way to archive mail from Mail. I can read mail. I can delete mail. That's it. The ability for Mail to tell Gmail to archive a message is non-existent. If someone can tell me how to do this, please let me know.

I really would love to keep using Mail because I now have two problems.

Problem 1: I use Omnifocus to organize my tasks. This means that I need an easy way to copy mail from gmail to Omnifocus. It also means that when I get around to dealing with the mail, I probably need to pull up the original email in gmail. Both of these tasks are doable but Omnifocus has a tight integration with Mail. Going back and forth between gmail and Omnifocus is less efficient. This probably means I need another gtd that integrates with gmail but is not part of gmail. I don't think such a tool exist right now. :-(

Problem 2:Calendar invites that I get through gmail are not interpreted correctly in google calendar. This is very frustrating. I now have to manually enter in calendar invites until this get fixed by google.

If anyone on the Interweb has any suggestions to solve these problems, please let me know.

Thanks!

Update: Paul Paradise showed me the error of my ways (see comment thread). Mail.app is back for now.

Friday, February 29, 2008

Video Video Everywhere

Today I am guest-working at the downtown Los Angeles offices of The Groop. I wanted to spend an hour catching up on my "reading" and found that it was not possible. Much to my surprise, more than half of the articles I was supposed to "read" contained video.

Normally I would just plug in my headphones and consume the media in my rss inbox. However yesterday while sleep walking through LAX, I managed to step on my headphones. Not having headphones forced me to notice: A year ago this would not have been a problem. I year ago I was consuming text. Maybe I didn't even have an RSS reader. When did I start consuming so much video?

I am not complaining. I think video is a very useful medium for communicating information. I am just surprised that video has become such a substantial portion of my information mix.

Maybe I should post this on Seesmic. ;-)