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Oct 15

First thoughts on my Wave World adventure

Somewhat random notes from my first visit to Google Wave.

“A wave is a hosted conversation.” (from the Google Wave in Action video) Ah ha. That’s a good description. A wave is also boring when you’re all alone. Video says you can drag and drop from iPhoto but neglects to mention that you have to install Gears. Wonder if I can do that directly from Flickr.

Installing Gears.

With Gears installed, I can drag photos from desktop or from iPhoto. I was not able to drag an image from a web page however. Very nice and Waves gives a full-screen display when you click the thumbnail.

SHIFT-ENTER closes or opens “blips” which are the things waves are made of. Double-click a blip to reply/edit that blip.

You can edit someone else’s blip as they are editing it. There was some highlighting indicating the other editor at one point but it went away. There doesn’t seem a way to identify who typed what if you are in the same blip. Easy to get lost in a Wave if you are replying to previous blips or editing old ones. Is there a way to manage or sort? Ah ha. Playback mode goes through the wave in chronological order and indicates edits with yellow highlights.

I’m using Firefox 3.0x. Friend using Safari. Compatibility seems fine.When you mute a wave you can see it by choosing All from navigation pane. To “unmute,” select wave and click the inbox tab.

Finding waves with a particular contact: The search box for the inbox area is not useful unless you know the wave email address. It won’t give you a hit off the name (unless I’m missing the query term for it). So you would have to look for “pfhyper” for me and not “Peter”. You can search on “Peter” from the contact search and the pop-up will reveal recent waves. (Checking Wave help and they mention you can’t actually search on names yet.) The Google Wave overview video is telling me I can link waves and publish them to my blog. Do you have to use blogger for that? Ah, you need a gadget or robot or something. Wavety.com has a list of robots and gadgets.

I finally found the Tweety robot (made by the Wave team) and installed it. Tweety will display your Twitter stream in Wave and allows you to tweet from Wave. Or at least it will do that when they finish with it. Right now, it will grab your current twitter stream but then not continue updating and you can’t post to Twitter.

Check the Wave help forums if you are trying to get gadgets, robots, extensions to work. That’s where I found out that Tweety is broken for now. When they get it ready to go, it will be put in the Extension Gallery located in the “Welcome to Google Wave” wave.

For the record, this is how you install the Tweety robot. The instructions may be useful for other robots and gadgets.

Add tweety-wave@appspot.com to your contacts.
Start a new wave.
Drag the tweety contact to the contact area above above the new wave.

That’s all from my first Wave adventure. If you’re on Wave, you can connect to me at pfhyper@googlewave.com.

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Is Michael Pollan anti-agriculture? Agriculture critic's appearance angers university alumni (via @KTAndrea)

via latimes.com

Although “agriculture” often means big farm enterprises, it can also simply mean “the practice of cultivating the land or raising stock.” I don’t think Mr. Pollan objects to that. For him, it’s all in the means whereas for Big Ag, it’s often more about the ends especially getting the animals to market really fast and increasing profits.

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Support rural America! Call a sex chat line today! (AT&T, Google Voice, & Net Neutrality)

Google Voice blocks calls to certain rural areas because of outdated regulations that require the big phone companies to pay access charges to the rural companies when calls are completed in the rural company’s phone network. The original idea behind this regulation was to help in sustaining rural phone networks that may not have enough subscribers locally to pay for all their costs. AT&T, Verizon and the rest of the big telcos have no choice about paying these fees. At the moment, Google Voice does have that choice. AT&T is not happy about that and has raised a bogus charge of Google violating net neutrality.

It gets juicier. Some rural carriers figured out a lucrative business getting “popular” chat lines to use their local numbers. Each call that (mostly) men made to the (mostly) women at the chat service resulted in AT&T (Verizon, etc.) paying the access fees. This amounted to a lot of money. Enough money that the rural carrier chould just give the number to the chat service and in some cases kick back some of the wealth. In their defense, the rural carriers point to stimulating local economies, providing local jobs, and American entrepreneurial spirit. (I made up the part about “entrepreneurial spirit.” The local jobs would come from potential chat lines and tech help centers located in the rural area.)

Google’s Richard Whitt says it best at the Google Public Policy Blog: ”This issue has nothing to do with network neutrality or rural America. This is about outdated carrier compensation rules that are fundamentally broken and in need of repair by the FCC.”

Read Matthew Lasar’s article, Is AT&T targeting Google Voice to stop “traffic pumping”?, over at ars technica for the deets.

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Oct 13

Backyard Snow Photos

See the full gallery on posterous

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Backyard Snow Photos

Taken October 12. Way too early for this kind of snow.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Backing up is hard to do: A quick look at my OS X data backup plan

Backing up is hard to do. OS X Time Machine makes it lots easier if you have a dedicated drive connected up to your Mac. But my main machine is a MacBook and I don’t have a single workspace in the home where I can leave a hard drive ready to connect. I move around. Also not ready to spend the funds on any wireless backing up.

Second best (for me) is to turn Time Machine off and use on demand. I enable the TM status in my menu for this. Then connect the backup hard drive and choose “Back Up Now” from the menu. I try to do this every evening.

I just bought a 750GB Western Digital My Book drive from Amazon (+-$100). The My Book includes Firewier 400 ports along with USB 2.0 and I need the FW for compatibility with some older computers (an Apple Cube for one). Not crazy about the look and feel of the My Book and sometimes it won’t mount immediately which I think has to do with its sleep mode. But I think it will do for the immediate future.

Time Machine is wonderful and restorable if your drive goes bad. It also keeps around old versions of files until you fill up your backup space. For that reason I backup my 150GB drive to a 230GB drive. TM will delete the oldest backup when the drive is full. You can also have it warn you before it deletes.

TM backups aren’t bootable. If something goes wrong, you have to restore the backup. I want something bootable so if something goes wrong, I can reboot off the backup drive. SuperDuper ($27.95) accomplishes this and is very fast after the first full backup. It’s been upgraded for Snow Leopard. I keep my Super Duper backup on a partition of the 750GB drive. It will only “grow” as big as the internal.

I use to use Carbon Copy Cloner by Mike Bombich and free. I switched to Super Duper because CCC was very slow even when only backing up changed files. I just visited Mr. Bombich’s site and I’m curious if he’s enhanced performance in the latest version. The site itself is much slicker than before and the ad blurbs make CCC sound pretty slick. I think I’ll have to test it out.

There is an excellent user-generated Time Machine FAQ over at the Apple Discussion boards. For one thing, it explained clearly how to move my old Time Machine backup from one disk to another under Leopard (Snow Leopard lets you simply drag-and-drop.)

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Oct 7

Unsummit: Pete & Jeff Talk Net Neutrality & Censorship

Update

Here are some links about Net Neutrality that you might want to browse if you’re thinking of attending our session.The articles are reasonably short except for Chairman Genachowski’s speech.

WSJ: Neutering the ‘Net

WSJ: U.S. as Traffic Cop in Web Fight (a fairly balanced piece)

DSLReports: What Network Neutrality is REALLY About

FCC Chair Julius Genachowski’s speech.

Jeff Pesek and I are facilitating the Net Neutrality discussion at the Unsummit (@unsummit) at Minneapolis Central Library on Saturday, Oct. 10. We’re scheduled for 10:40 in the Pohlad Doty Room.

I’m working on the description of our session for posting to the Unsummit site. Here’s what I have so far.

Net Neutrality & Censorship

Net neutrality has become a big deal since FCC Chair Julius Genachowski spoke in favor of it last month. How would net neutrality hurt or help the Internets as we know them? Will it be the end of innovation and the free net markets? Will a non-neutral net allow AT&T to spoon feed us “approved” data and censor what they don’t like? Will a neutral net allow Google to dominate the world?

What the heck is “net neutrality” anyway?

Join us in a lively (and respectful) discussion on neutrality and whether it will help or hinder the Net.

Comments? Wonder if I can do the link to Genachowski’s speech.

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Update on Seward Co-op Annual Meeting

It was a tight election race for the Seward board of directors on Tuesday evening. Alas, I was short by some number of votes and won’t be at the table in the next year. Thanks to all who voted for me. There’s always next year.

Incumbents ruled with current board chair David Hoffman-Dachelet and Miriam Holsinger getting reelected. The third spot went to Seward employee Allison Meyer. (Allison served as the employee director this past year but ran at-large this year.) Greg Gustafson is the new employee director. Check the announcement here.

Some notes on the Co-op’s health…

We have grown from 4,700 members to 6,300 members since January and continue to grow at the rate of 100 members per month
We have 50% growth in sales since January with 34.8% of our sales from local food
We created 55 new jobs for a total of 175 employees

The food at the meeting was excellent as usual including wonderful dessert treats at the table and a personal chocolate bar from Equal Exchange Chocolates. Adam Wozniak’s band provided some great jazz music as we dined. (Find Adam on Facebook and MySpace.)

So become a member of the Co-op and you can join us for dinner next year (and vote for me!). It’s a one-time $75 payment.

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Oct 5

Unsummit: Pete & Jeff Talk Net Neutrality & Censorship

Jeff Pesek and I are facilitating the Net Neutrality discussion at the Unsummit (@unsummit) at Minneapolis Central Library on Saturday, Oct. 10. We’re scheduled for 10:40 in the Pohlad Room.

I’m working on the description of our session for posting to the Unsummit site. Here’s what I have so far.

Net Neutrality & Censorship

Net neutrality has become a big deal since FCC Chair Julius Genachowski spoke in favor of it last month. How would net neutrality hurt or help the Internets as we know them? Will it be the end of innovation and the free net markets? Will a non-neutral net allow AT&T to spoon feed us “approved” data and censor what they don’t like? Will a neutral net allow Google to dominate the world?

What the heck is “net neutrality” anyway?

Join us in a lively (and respectful) discussion on neutrality and whether it will help or hinder the Net.

Comments? Wonder if I can do the link to Genachowski’s speech.

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Oct 2

Join Mary and I at the Seward Co-op Annual Meeting for an awesome dinner (and consider voting for pfhyper!)

You do need to be a member. Cost is $75 and it lasts a lifetime. The dinner is truly awesome and costs $5 (with tix in advance, $15 day of the meeting). It will be held next Tuesday, October 6, from 6-8 p.m. at Augsburg College, 720 22nd Ave., Christensen Center Commons, 3rd Floor.

After you become a member, you get to vote in some new board directors. I’m a former board director and I’m running for a spot this year. Read my candidate statement below and please consider voting for me.

You can download a PDF with all the candidate statements at the Seward Co-op web site. You need to bring your ballots to the store by noon on October 6. (You can also vote at the meeting itself until 6:30 p.m.)

Peter’s Candidate Statement

Describe your experience with cooperatives. My wife and I have been members and employees of Seward Co-op, and we have lived in Seward Neighborhood for 30 years. I am a former editor and publisher of the co-op’s earlier newsletter, “Whole Wheat News.” I served on Seward Co-op’s board of directors in the ’90s and helped plan for the last new store on west Franklin Avenue. We have shopped almost exclusively at Seward for 30 years. We were also active in Seward Cooperative Daycare when we were raising our daughter.
Summarize your business experience. I have many years of business experience both in running my own successful computer consulting business (PF Hyper, based in Seward Neighborhood) and in sitting on the co-op’s board of directors during the last expansion to a new store. I have tracked budgets, allocated resources and planned major projects.
What do you believe are the primary challenges facing the co-op today, and how can you help Seward Co-op to meet those challenges? I believe the primary challenge facing the co-op and all small businesses today is a national—and global—economy in disarray. As the problems with mortgages and foreclosures play out over the next few years, the co-op must budget its resources carefully and watch for trends and falling profits. The board must stay vigilant as to how this is affecting our sales and the bottom line. I believe education is a key component in keeping our current members shopping at the co-op and in securing new members. The co-op currently does an excellent job with education and should continue this progress. We should look for ways to reach out beyond current membership and start conversations about sustainable agriculture, organics, and cooperative economics. We should also expand this discussion to the health care issue, as good nutrition is intrinsically linked to good health. The Internet is an excellent tool for education, and I have experience both with web develop- ment and social networking. Finally, we need to support the community we live in. Seward Co-op is already doing this well with the Seward Co-op Community Fund, the Eat Local initiative, and donations to the Groveland Food Shelf among other efforts. These efforts should be continued and expanded during this current economic downturn to even better meet our mission of sustaining a healthy community.
Why do you want to serve on Seward Co-op’s Board of Directors? Simply put, as a longtime Seward resident—including raising my daughter here and now shopping at the co-op with my three grandsons—I have a very personal interest in Seward Co-op continuing as a strong and viable busi- ness. I think I have skills and ideas that will help in this process.
How could the co-op better serve its members? The best way for the co-op to serve its members is to stay healthy and in- crease efficiencies to provide our food at competitive prices. A healthy and committed board will greatly aid in this effort. I would like to be a member of that board.

Thanks!

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