Category: Life and living

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Digital baggage

Verizon wireless has this really awful data policy, whereby I can only keep so many text messages on my phone – why, I just can’t imagine.  I have storage capabilities on my phone – but it doesn’t allow me to transfer the text messages to this storage.  Additionally, they retire voicemails after only so long – the only way to keep them is to wait for the messages to expire, at which point you can opt to save them for an additional 45 days.

This may beg the question why am I holding onto these messages?  Well there are a few reasons.  The most obvious is that I need to reference the message in the future – it’s a convenient way to carry around information – as I almost always have my cell phone with me.  But there are other, more sentimental reasons as well.  And Verizon should know this.  So why then can’t I opt to store this data off of their servers, on a data store that allows me to eventually transfer it onto my PC?

Without this capability, I’m eventually going to lose this data – either intentionally by deleting it myself (to make room for new text messages) or inadvertently (by not re-saving the voicemail messages).  And while this makes me angry –  because I’m driven to do it by a weakness in their systems – there’s a part of me that looks forward to clearing these things out.

As I’ve spent the last few days helping Meghan pack up and move out of her house, I’m amazed at the amount of stuff that she has, which makes me thing immediately of all of the stuff that I have.  And moving is the perfect time to clean house, and get rid of all of the excess baggage – and there’s something very cathartic about that process.  Perhaps the same is true of digital information.  As I look across my digital domain – at all of the stuff that I’ve accumulated.. perhaps it’s not bad for a little digital house cleaning from time to time..  I wonder if all of the digital stuff weighs one down as much as the physical stuff though?

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graduation

Yesterday was Meghan’s graduation from Vet school.

Meghan\'s graduation

Much of her family flew/drove in from all around the country which was really nice – her siblings and parents were there as well as a few Aunts and uncles and cousins. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t as cooperative as it was a pretty rainy afternoon.

The proceedings were well done – with the right mix of presenters and ceremony while still keeping the program moving.

Dr. Meghan is now insisting that her science degree (as opposed to her Bachelor of Arts) now finally surpasses my Bachelor of Science (always referred to in its abbreviate BS).  I see trouble for my future which may lead to further education for me..

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more data online

One of the goals that I set for myself during this little work hiatus was to get my personal data off of my desktop & scribbled notes. By ‘personal data’ I’m referring to all of that information that we all carry around in one fashion or another that gets us through the connected world – emails, contacts, finances, etc.,

I started with email a few years ago, and that’s worked out pretty well so far. I use Google Mail & Yahoo mail to manage my mail online. Yahoo accepts all of my potential spam while Google mail routes and services all of my personal mail which I generally have sent to knuetter.com.

The next step was to get my bookmarks off of my computers (work, home, etc.,) and I chose Del.icio.us for that service. I’m not completely satisfied with the service (I will probably try out Digg one of these days) but they provide a pretty straightforward service and a few nice tools like Firefox integration that make me happy enough.

Next was my calendar, which I used Google for as I wrote about in an earlier post.

Recently I decided to give Plaxo a try.  Over the years I’ve received a few requests to join and so when I was looking for a way to organize my contacts they were a natural choice.  Their system lets you plug in all of your various contact points (outlook, gmail, yahoo mail, apple address book, etc.,) and it will then gather all of the contacts and publish them out to all of these so that they’re all kept in sync.  Additionally, if any of your contacts are using the service, it will automatically update your contact lists when they change their information.  So far I’ve found it to be pretty useful and while a few features I would like are hidden behind the annual service charge, I’ve mostly been able to work around that though if I continue to find the service useful I’ll certainly consider upgrading.

One of the nice surprises about Plaxo is that it also syncs calendars and to-do lists so the Google Calendar syncing that I set up earlier may not be necessary.  One of the downsides to Plaxo is that they’re desperately trying to get into the social networking space, so I fear random sporadic updates ala facebook.  Hopefully they don’t go too far down this path.

Next up, I’ve got to figure out how to securely store passwords online and I’m still debating whether I want to aggregate all of my finances (ala Quicken) online or whether I’m OK with each of the individual banking websites that I use.  In each case I have to decide whether I’m confident enough in internet security to handle these items.

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Sunny San Francisco

This weekend was an awesome weekend in the city: The sun was out, the fog stayed away, and people were out enjoying the great weather.

Dolores Park

I still had some work to do getting things arranged for my upcoming trip but when I was finished I walked over to Dolores Park to enjoy a little sun myself. It was great to just lay out on the grass and watch the people – Dolores Park is such a diverse place. You get the gay crowd to one side, the Latino crowd to the other, the Mission Hipsters of course show up with their track bikes, and then there’s the sun worshipers who come from all around to get some color after the long winter.

After a while I was getting too a little too much sun (love that Northern European complexion) so I had to head back inside. But it was the first day where I really felt relaxed and enjoyed the possibilities of what lies ahead in the coming months.

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jimsauer.com

Continuing my trek through friends’ sites, I’ll again visit one of the older sites out there.

I met Jim through work at Intuit. He and I shared a similar work ethic and also both enjoyed getting to know rock climbing a little better. He and I, along with several other Intuit folks, would head up to the mountains on a pretty regular basis trying out different climbing routes and destinations. There were several trips to Yosemite, Fresno Dome and even a few great trips down to Joshua Tree

Jim had registered the JimSauer domain early in the days of the internet, and when I first met him the site was unmaintained and used primarily for the email address. Since then, Jim has spent a good amount of time overhauling the site into a bit of a blog type interface though he built the site and its publishing capabilities from scratch.

It remains his personal site, updated with select events from his day-to-day life including some photos and interesting anecdotes about what he’s been up to. This site probably won’t be of interest to too many, but I check in from time to time since he and I don’t manage to keep up with each other as much these days. I’d love to blame the fact that he’s moved to Tucson, but I know that’s not the case. Even prior to the move we weren’t spending as much time together. It’s a combination of no longer working together, me no longer climbing, and us living 40 miles away.

But that’s not completely it. I also feel that there’s a level of difficulty (that I feel anyway) of day-to-day living and trying to keep up with so many folks from over the years. I don’t know how unique I am in that regard or whether this is just a symptom of modern living – people living farther apart and creating larger and larger networks of people.

I think this at least partially explains the success of sites like FaceBook or LinkedIn. These sites would be unnecessary in a world in which people lived in the towns in which they grew up and worked in jobs that they maintain for 20 years.

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One more day

Tomorrow is my last day at StubHub.  It’s been just about 3 years since I started – and it’s going to be weird to move on, but the time is right.

The plan is to spend a week or so around San Francisco hanging out with the parents and friends and then head off.

The first stop is Michigan where I’ll go to Meghan’s graduation and hang out there doing any final packing and then it’s off to Africa.

I’ll write more later about some of the details about the Africa trip – there’s quite a few of them.  This will be the most organized and pre-planned trip I’ve ever taken.  For now, I’ll sit and reflect on the past few years of life at StubHub and what I’ve enjoyed and disliked and what I’ve learned from it all.

Tonight I’m going out for drinks with several co-workers and I suspect I’m in trouble as many of them are looking forward to a drink-fest and I’m expected to be in the center of it all.  We’ll see how tonight goes and more importantly, how tomorrow morning feels.