Robert Sanzalone
Test
The NHK World TV app is good when I'm home but is GREAT when I'm here in Japan.
Finished my traditional Tokyo starchfest: all you can eat potatoes, pasta & pizza at Shakey's. 
My new read. Steve Jobs was amazing!
Lovely leaves at Horseshoe Bay.
LinkedIn App May Now Be Useful
One of the crappiest iPhone app contributions from a major player in the social media arena has always been LinkedIn. Their specialty has seemed to be heavy applications which either shut down prematurely or are a maze of button pushing leading everywhere except where you want to go.. Yesterday Apple released LinkedIn's latest version of app and to my surprise, it actually may be useful for something after all. Some of the features I particularly like include:
The one area dropped from the previous version which I actually DID like was the ability to download your contacts or individual contact to your iPhone address book. This certainly helped put pictures to many faces in my list. The new person doing this mobile app obviously didn't think it was so important. Hope LinkedIn doesn't send me messages defending their app like the developer of the last one did. "Contact me" he wrote. When I did, it was a monolog (NOT dialogue) of justifications. Let's hope these new team members actually LISTEN. So far it's a good (re)start. Sneaking back to Posterous FROM Google+
OK. We went out for a few weeks. You know. The novelty of new experiences. The anticipation of seeing things and doing things like never before. Yes. I know you told me it would be like all the others and I would be back. Well, you were right. Again for the time being, I've placed my domain robert.sanzalone.com back on Posterous. NO, NOT WORDPRESS, Posterous. I still find it is one of the least tinkering platforms I have played with. I'm not angry at Google+ and I certainly haven't given up on it. It has been one of the most welcome newcomers on the Social Media block for a very long time. I was just a bit over enthusiastic about what it could do. Be more engaging? Yes. Completely replace an actual blog? Well, there have been a few very important pieces missing which Google seems to be quite slow in getting around to. The most important of these has been tagging. Really. Think about it. If you wrote a really great post 7 months ago and somehow it just isn't really showing up in Google searches (naughty Google), then how are you suppose to find it OTHER THAN scrolling through all your posts for the past 7 months? Posts don't really have a subject line either so I don't really see how you can easily index your topics. There were a some posts from a few people in Google declaring these features were the next to arrive BUT... they weren't. Instead it seems the "shiny object" of video and Huddles became the priority and tagging is now low on the priority list. If things change with Google+ on these and other annoying issues (don't get me started on the clunkiness of the mobile app), there MAY be a chance I will give it another try. But don't worry about that Posterous. I love you MUCH more than Google+. For now. ;) Hope After Vancouver Mayhem Received as an email this morning after last night's stupidity in Vancouver. Well said.
Subject: Hope Walking from the Seabus to work, past burned out garbage cans, every window in the Bay broken, cops and glass repair men on every corner. I feel the bile rise in me and I feel rage at the stupidity that caused the destruction.And then I notice young men and women with garbage bags and rubber gloves picking up minute pieces of glass. White coated chefs from the culinary institute with huge trays of freshly baked cookies for the volunteers.At the corner of Granville and Robson a girl in a wheel chair with her dog sitting patiently beside her as she stoops down with a long armed stick and picks up garbage. I said "thank you" and she looked at me with surprise. "Isn't this what we should be doing?" her eyes seem to say.
And I feel that there is hope for us after all.
Calgary 2011 - Visiting Family Across The RockiesSweetie and I headed over to Calgary last weekend from Vancouver to visit an ailing relative. We were successful in our objective in catching up with family and it was a joy spending time with them. What was a little different about this trip was our means of transportation. Bus. Oy boy. Sixteen hours of pure Greyhound joy. My number one objective to pass the time along was to keep my iPhone's music going and to check in with Foursquare. This has always been a challenge even during shorter jaunts from Nagoya to Tokyo by bus over the past few years. I found this time the best way to achieve uninterrupted power to my iPhone was actually through the use of AA batteries. I bought a nifty little charger from XS Cargo before leaving which not only charges Ni-MH batteries from a USB source but also can act as a USB Host as well. Yup. I luv my gadgets. It took three sets of 4 AA batteries but I made it through 16 hours keeping the iPhone battery meter close to 100%. Nice. From a sightseeing, touristee perspective, the highlight would have to have been the Rocky Mountains on the way back. On the way there we pretty much only saw sleet and grey skies. On the way back the blue skies sparkled from the famous Rockies. I even noticed Canmore for the very first time - a pretty little village near Banff. Flickr set: 2011 - Calgary Moving Out - From WordPress to Posterous
It's been a long time in the coming but I finally decided to make a move from hosting Robert.Sanzalone.com (my primary website) from being hosted on WordPress to Posterous. I have to admit, the decision was not a quick one. I've watched Posterous for a number of years now since Steve Rubel announced it was the end all, be all product on the Internet. When I first played with it it didn't seem to have anything more than what I was already experiencing with other services existing at the time. It announced it had auto-posting to other services like Twitter and Facebook! Meh. I was using Ping.fm at the time and it did the same thing. It hosted your site for free! Ya, well so did WordPress.com, Blogger and dozens (if not hundreds) of other services. It was used by Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble and others evangelists I should be doing the same as. Yawn. Ya, whatever. No, what really hooked me over to Posterous was simplicity. WordPress has become a burden. Really. Why is it when I haven't blogged for a couple of months I come back and the interface is almost completely unmanageable? Certain plugins are out of date, are no longer offered or only work with a newer version of WordPress I haven't even updated to (and don't get me started on how much a hassle that is even with "auto-update"). Posterous just seems to sit there the same as it has for years with the simple ability to upload your blog post (like this one) composed as an e-mail from any e-mail account (mine being Gmail). Yup, pretty simple. Oh, and it certainly helps to have a few choices for themes. OK, WordPress blows any system out of the water when it comes to themes, but lucky enough I found one which suites me fine for the moment and gives just enough access to the guts behind it in case I would like to have some SEO/meta-tag goodness in there as well. Pointing my domain over seemed to work OK so no worries it will like something temporary I threw together and never play with. Keeping my fingers crossed I won't regret this decision and it will keep the blogging juices flowing. Time will tell.
|
|
