Master Dilettante

My favorite sushi in the world. Today\’s \”trust me\” omakase offerings: maguro & toro sashimi in ponzu, hamachi, shiro maguro with ponzu, warm crab hand roll, giant clam, uni, oysters, scallops, lobster hand roll, unagi. Very, very full right now.

Core 77 released its 3rd Annual Ultimate Gift Guide (77 Design Gifts Under $77) this week.  I can’t quite put my finger on why I love this stuff, but I do.  Perhaps it’s the gadget freak in me.

I’m tempted by the notion of assembling a silk-screening kit (make my own designer t-shirts instead of paying a fortune for Ed Hardy and a skull & crossbones design) and the Stanley thermos (I might want a hot water thermos to fill the mate gourd I picked up in Argentina).  And I already have the newly-released Kor One Personal Hydration Vessel and have been singing its praises around the office for the past several weeks.

This year, I’ve been experimenting with (loosely following) David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system.  With an Outlook plug-in and a BlackBerry application, I had the tools I needed, particularly at work.

But when I switched to the iPhone over the summer, I needed a new set of tools.  In my typical optimizer (read The Paradox of Choice) fashion, I went crazy with research trying to find the perfect application for my imagined needs.  None were perfect, but I settled on OmniFocus, which required a somewhat-tricky iMac-iPhone configuration to get the wireless sync to function.  OmniFocus had a great user interface, and it worked.  I paid the hefty $80 fee for the Mac application and the $20 fee for the iPhone application and the $99 MobileMe subscription fee that enabled sync — and I was mostly happy.  The only problem was:  I didn’t use it.  It lacked a PC or Web-based client, and it was too inconvenient to rely only on the small screen of my iPhone for my to-do list while at work.

So when Remember the Milk released its new iPhone application on the Apple Store (it already had a Web-based version optimized for the iPhone), I decided to reconsider.

Here are the features and functions I now realize I must have:

• GTD-system “projects” and “contexts” support
• Offline iPhone client (for airplanes and other places without Web access)
• Web-based application –> I realized I need a Web-based application more than a desktop client, because there are few circumstances in which I’d be using my PC at work or my Mac at home without Web access, and I could use my iPhone in those situations!
• Wireless syncing across devices and platforms
• iPhone-editable projects, contexts and text entries

Compare, contrast . . . Remember the Milk is the clear winner.  Lamenting my sunk cost in OmniFocus, I’ve ponied up the $25 for Remember the Milk Pro (which enables iPhone-Web sync) and switched, based on this absurd analysis (click to enlarge):

Yes, I’m a complete loon.

In sum:

• EasyTask Manager met most of my functional needs but was simply too hard to use, both the iPhone and the Web-based applications
• Evernote I consider more of a repository for storing information and isn’t suited for the GTD system and far too slow for an everyday to-do list
• Nozbe lacks an offline iPhone client - a deal-breaker for me
• OmniFocus is expensive and lacks a Web-based client
• Things looks great but didn’t have sync functionality when I last checked and has only a Mac client, no Web access

That left Remember the Milk, the award winning Web-based application now with an iPhone application, as the clear winner.  Most importantly, it works for me:  I’ve been using it daily.

While taking around 11 flights to, within and from Argentina last month, I had time to observe and ponder human behavior around air travel.  Based on my scientific observations, I’ve arrived at these 10 Commandments of air travel, which, coincidentally, might also reduce stress for travelers during this holiday season.

1. Thou shalt pass through airport security quietly and efficiently.  We all know the drill now.  Be prepared:  3-ounce fluids in a 1-quart plastic bag, shoes off, metal objects removed from person, laptop out of it’s bag, no excessive number of carry-on baggage, jacket off.  Move it, people!
2. Thou shalt not crowd one another or push and shove in line while waiting to board.  How many of you jockey for pre-boarding position in the relative roomy space of the gate area only to find yourself trapped in the suffocating confines of the gangway or the narrow aisles of the plane?  Worry not:  The plane won’t leave without you, so rushing to the front of the line doesn’t secure your transportation.  And if you’re worried about overhead storage space, you should have arrived at the airport earlier.
3. Similarly, thou shalt not crowd others when waiting in the gangway - you won’t get on the plane sooner and it doesn’t matter if you do.
4. Thou shalt not use the seat in front of you as a lever to assist you in getting up from yours.  There’s an alternative device to stand up that many Americans have underemployed chronically:  That device is called “your legs.”  No need to jarringly disturb the passenger in front of you every time you need to leave your seat.
5. Similarly, thou shalt not use seats as ladder rungs when moving about the airplane.  Again, use the legs, employ what’s called “balance,” and spare your fellow passengers the additional invasion of personal space that air travel all but guarantees.
6. Thou shalt not monopolize both armrests when seated in an aisle seat.  I’m just saying.  Consider this perhaps a minor sin.
7. Thou shalt not get hammered and/or be a loud talker — even if genetically predisposed like Jason H.
8. Thou shalt treat the flight crew with the utmost courtesy and respect.
9. Thou shalt not push and shove other passengers when waiting to disembark.  See commandments 1 & 2 above.
10. Thou shalt remember that we all have business to attend to and friends and family to visit.  We’re all on the same missions.  Yours is not more important than mine, and mine is no more important than yours.  Let’s all treat each other with the courtesy and respect we each deserve.

Gobble gobble!

Please feel free to comment on additional commandments or sins for comment inclusion.

I just upgraded this morning to the new iPhone 2.2 software.

For those following my iPhone trials and tribulations, you know that 2.1 broke my Microsoft Exchange integration of calendar and contacts — neither would sync with 2.1, and 2-3 trips to Genius Bars and multiple calls to Apple support didn’t help.  I still plan to describe the workaround I devised (Plaxo as the hub among applications with MobileMe for wireless sync) in a subsequent post.

Well, it seems to be fixed somehow.  The download and installation took about 30 minutes and was straightforward and without complications.  My iPhone and Exchange calendar and contacts are now synced again.  I would love to understand why, but I suppose I’ll be content that it’s working.  Obviously, for an enterprise application, it is inexcusable and completely unacceptable that it wasn’t working for the past several months.

I love the Argentine lifestyle:  long lunches, afternoon tea, late dinners, late nights, late starts in the mornings — then repeat.

I didn’t understand how that schedule worked with work until Argentine eBay-er MC explained that managers will arrive in the office at 9:30-10:00, that lunch is an extended affair and that the work days don’t end until past 7:00 p.m.

In vacation mode and without work to attend, for me this meant dining after 10pm, for hours, staying up past 4 a.m. and waking past noon every day in Buenos Aires.  Perfecto!

On Day 2, we did the map-guided tour of Recoleta Cemetary, last resting place of elite Argentine public figures such as Eva Peron (Evita).  Unlike most cemetaries in California, with graves in the ground, the entire cemetary in Recoleta is comprised of crypts with above-ground vestibules and below-ground chambers.  Coffins often are visible through glass or wood doors or metal bars.  Also unlike in the U.S., where sites are purchased in perpetuity, sites at Recoleta effectively are leased and payments must be maintained to keep them.  My understanding is that a waiting list exists to take over abandoned sites.  I suppose that means the last resting place is only for a nap!

I assume there must be some architectural conventions followed, but there’s still a mix of apparently more classic and some more modern styles. We saw Evita, including the epitaph that inspired the musical, and scores of government figures.

One morbidly fascinating sight we saw: A lot of feral cats are around the grounds; we saw one emerge from through the metal bars of a decrepit, overgrown crypt with a half-eaten pigeon in its mouth and continue the feast.

Somehow, the historical, public and tourist nature of the cemetary made touring it less morbid and somber than I imagine walking through another cemetary might be.

By the way, here’s what Lonely Planet writes of La Boca:

La Boca is not the kind of neighborhood for casual strolls — it can be downright rough in spots. Don’t stray from the riverside walk or the tourist sections of Caminito, Del Valle Iberlucea and Magallanes, especially alone or toting expensive cameras. There’s nothing you’d want to see outside these areas anyway.

Hm, so i guess inland on Defensa isolated on one side of a deserted street with a fancy SLR wasn’t so smart. My bad!

Buenos Aires is a beautiful, modern city, and travel buddy LTS and I serendipitously covered many of the major sights in my 3 days there. I particularly loved the architecture, mixing modern and older styles; the older world European feel; the civilized people; and, of course, the food — delicious — and inexpensive relative to American standards.

But the most story-worthy tale is about how I evaded robbery at gunpoint on my very first day in the country!

We had walked all the way from the Recoleta neighborhood to the San Telmo neighborhood, the latter lined with quaint shops and, on Sundays, a street fair for crafts and antiques.  The La Boca neighborhood wasn’t much further, so we kept walking, now in the late afternoon.

As we left San Telmo behind, the streets emptied of people and the apparent economic conditions seemed to decline. We saw a burnt, rusted car parked rotting on a street. But it was still broad daylight and we did see others here and there. Had I read my Lonely Planet guide more carefully, we might have heeded its warnings to avoid all but the major, most touristed streets of La Boca, regardless of time of day . . . .

This photograph could have cost me my life!

Instead, just a couple blocks from those safer areas and perhaps 50 yards from a full children’s playground, we’d paused to photograph two artfully painted building facades. My friend was across the street and later told me she saw a dark car pass her and make a u-turn towards me. I was standing a foot into the street taking photos and saw the car, with its dark tinted windows, approach uncomfortably closely, allowing little space between it and a high curb to my left. I saw at least 3 people, who appeared to be locals, in the car and remember being puzzled briefly that locals might be stopping to ask me a question.

Ah, but that’s not what they wanted. The car now immediately next to me and inching forward slowly, a dark-haired guy perhaps in his late 20s/early 30s in the back passenger seat brandished at me what appeared to be a silver, 9-millimeter pistol. Almost at the same time, either he or someone in the front passenger seat (and this is why eyewitness testimony can be so unreliable–I don’t know exactly what happened) grabbed my right wrist, which held my fairly new Canon Rebel EOS XSi SLR camera. I just reacted. I jerked my wrist and camera away and ran to the rear end of the car and beyond; I ran right by the passenger with the gun, behind the car and across the street. LTS just saw the car approach me, between the two of us, and then saw me sprinting from it.

Thankfully, the car didn’t turn back, continuing onward and away from us. And within 30 seconds we were at the children’s playground surrounded by others and a bit shaken.

Later, I told my friend that in the blink of the moment, my immediate impression had been that the man with the gun was a petty thief and didn’t intend to shoot me. Of course, I didn’t know that, and I would never risk my life for a camera. But I just didn’t freeze; I just reacted and ran and lived to tell the tale of flight over losing the fight, with just a minor abrasion to my wrist.

Having been maxed out on vacation accrual for months and not having taken a real vacation since 2004, I need/want some time off from work. It’s off to Argentina for some rest and recreation!

The plan is 2-2.5 weeks in country, with stops in Buenos Aires, El Calafate in Patagonia (for the Perito Moreno glacier and a trip across the Chilean border for some trekking in Torres del Paine), back to Buenos Aires (the hub for many domestic flights) and then a couple of days at Iguazu Falls before heading home via Los Angeles to see my niece.

Bon voyage!

This is Part II in a series describing my iPhone 3G issues and how I’ve addressed them.  Last, I described how to conserve the battery life, although the iPhone Firmware 2.1 upgrade was certainly the biggest factor.  Today, I describe how my Microsoft Exchange integration broke and describe my somewhat involved setup and sync needs.  This will set the stage for my exploration of solutions.

In brief:  I upgraded to iPhone Firmware 2.1, and my Microsoft Exchange integration broke.  I work at eBay, where we use Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and Web mail.  With my BlackBerry Pearl, everything just worked, without a thought.  With iPhone Firmware 2.0, 2.01 and 2.02, I was delighted that everything just worked too — a seamless transition from RIM, right?  Wrong!  With iPhone Firmware 2.1, email stopped arriving completely and all my contacts and calendar events were deleted from my iPhone and no longer syncing.

This was a disaster because of my setup.  I have a PC at work and a Mac at home, but I have (foolishly?) relied for the past 2 companies and 8 years entirely on my work Outlook to manage my calendar and contacts.  In other words, I have no other complete record of calendar events and contact information other than in Outlook.  With the Exchange integration broken, I now had an empty iPhone calendar and empty contacts.  Nothing, no ability even to call anyone without looking up their number in Outlook.  (No one memorizes numbers in this day and age, do they?)

Realizing this is a dangerous dependency, I recently had started to look to backup my data online.  First, I installed Yahoo! Autosync to sync Outlook with Yahoo! Address Book and Yahoo! Calendar.  This didn’t work very well.  I have close to 1000 contacts records in Outlook.  Inevitably, the number of contacts, in Yahoo! Address Book didn’t match the number in Outlook, Yahoo! Autosync failed to merge records for the same person, and, in many cases, critical information was missing.  Probably some sort of problem with field mapping.  Inelegant.

Second, I exported my Outlook contacts to a comma-delimited .csv file and then imported them into Gmail.  This had the same problem as Yahoo! Autosync — mismatched record counts, non-merged records and missing data.  I also tried Google Calendar sync to sync between Outlook and Gcal.  This worked fairly well but takes an inordinately long time to complete; I think the application starts afresh with every sync.

With broken Exchange integration and no clear solutions on Apple’s discussion boards, I now needed an alternative method to get calendar and contacts synced with my iPhone.

Here’s what I want:

• Ubiquitous access to email, contacts and calendar — from my work desktop, from my home desktop, from any Web terminal and from my mobile device . . . . For me, this means Outlook, Web mail, Gmail/Gcal, Yahoo mail/Address Book/Calendar, Mac Address Book/iCal and iPhone
• Uniform data — no duplication of entries, no omitted entries and consistent data across platforms
• Over-the-air sync — what good is a mobile device if I have to plug it in to get data on it?

Clearly, as much as Apple claims to be targeting enterprises with the iPhone, Apple isn’t ready.  They don’t even use Exchange at Apple is my understanding.  They don’t understand enterprise activation.  They don’t understand Enterprise-level support:  After several calls to Apple, their ultimate advice was:  We have no idea why Exchange broke, too bad, good luck.  Thankfully, email spontaneously restored after a couple of days, but I will no longer trust to the Exchange integration for my calendar and contacts, which remained broken last time I attempted to integrate.

Next post, the available options.