Ed Batista

Swivel

Swivel is a content-sharing application for data and graphs.  It's sort of like YouTube meets Wikipedia for people who love spreadsheets.  As with YouTube, you can create a user account, upload your content (in Swivel's case, raw data or a spreadsheet file rather than a video), format and tag it, and set it free for others to view, comment upon, embed or otherwise use as they see fit.  As with Wikipedia, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder, so read the citations and take the figures with a grain of salt.

The most-viewed graph on Swivel today is Growth of Creative Commons Photos on Flickr, by Brian Mulloy, Swivel's CEO and co-founder:

There's tight integration with several Google apps, including the ability to make Swivel graphs from Google spreadsheets and a feed from Google Blogsearch showing people posting Swivel graphs, which just this minute led me to my friend Beth Kanter, who posted today on this very same topic, using the very same graph above.  Small world!

Tighter TypePad URLs

TypePad's post URLs are pretty user-friendly, but you can make them even better by adding one simple step to your posting routine.

The basic structure of a TypePad post URL is as follows:

"your domain"/yyyy/mm/"post name".html

TypePad automagically creates the post name from the first 15 characters of your post title.  (TP ignores dashes and other punctuation characters and inserts underscores for spaces.)

This is usually fine, but sometimes it results in some odd-looking URLs.  A common problem is the trailing underscore:

http://www.edbatista.com/2007/01/conflict_modes_.html

http://www.edbatista.com/2006/10/mcclelland_and_.html

Not a huge problem, but it's a little confusing, and it just looks odd.  The solution is to pick a user-friendly post name of 15 characters or less, and use that as the post title the first time you save the post.  After you've saved it once, you can retitle the post anything you want, but the initial title you used will be retained as the post name in the URL.

For example, I first saved this post with "TypePad URLs" as the title, and then retitled it "Tighter TypePad URLs."  And I first saved "Sage Cohen and Peter Drucker on Rapture and Excellence" as "Cohen Drucker."  The resulting URL:

http://www.edbatista.com/2007/03/cohen_drucker.html

Not a huge difference, but it's just a little more elegant and user-friendly.

A Little Housecleaning: Feedback Requested

Just in case you haven't noticed, I've been cleaning things up around here over the past few days.  (Note to Explorer users: I know the boxes in the left-hand sidebar are running wide--I'm trying to determine the cause of the problem.  Thanks for bearing with me...and have you ever considered using Firefox?  Um, just a thought.  Note to feed readers: Feel free to skip this post.)  Here's a quick orientation--and any feedback would be greatly appreciated:

• The "Stay in Touch" menu at the top of the left-hand sidebar includes links to subscribe to my feed, get updates by email, use my contact form, and my email and IM/Skype addresses.

• The "About Me" menu at the top of the right-hand sidebar includes links to my About page, as well as my Recent Transitions and Local Meeting Spots posts.  (I'll keep the latter two up for a while, but I'll probably update and/or replace them shortly.)  And on my About page, I've consolidated my reputation/profile links under the "For More Info..." menu, which currently includes LinkedIn, Opinity, Trufina and RapLeaf.  I'm uncertain as to how useful these services are--if you've found them helpful (or not), I'd love to know.

• I've moved the "Search This Site" links to the left-hand sidebar, at the top of the content navigation menus (Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories and Archives).  You can still choose between Google and Technorati, but I've added logos and simplified the interface.

• I cut out a few menus from the sidebars that didn't really seem useful--like my Del.icio.us tagroll, which you can still find as a link under the "Tools I Like" menu on the left.  And I'm about to do a major culling of the sites in my blogroll--they're all worthwhile reads, but I'm currently oversubscribed to technology sites and undersubscribed to management sites, and I need to adjust my feed reading to fit my current interests.

• I may not be done--I'm thinking about a new, less cryptic banner [Update: I've added a new banner and tweaked the color scheme] and a swanky top menu (if I have the guts to tackle it), and I'll definitely be adding a page on my professional services soon--but I'm reasonably happy with how things have turned out to date.  Thanks to TypePad for continuing to exceed expectations and to John Unger at TypePad Hacks for some great ideas.

Trumba on TypePad

UPDATE: Trumba has terminated their free and low-cost service aimed at consumers and small/medium businesses, and is now focusing exclusively on large customers with an event management service that's priced at $99 per month.  I've switched to Google--as I predicted in my original post below, resistance was futile--but I'm really not a fan.  If you know any any better alternatives, please contact me.

UPDATE 2: I'm really unhappy with Google Calendar's lack of display customization, so I've switched again to CalendarHub.  I tried 30 Boxes, and I liked a lot of their features, but the inability to display a list of upcoming events (as in my sidebar here) was a deal-breaker.  I also looked briefly at AirSet, but they have no options for publishing personal calendars at all.  CalendarHub isn't great--the interface for adding and editing events is clunky and slow--but it essentially does what Trumba did.  We'll see if they can hold out longer than Trumba did.

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I'm writing a lot more about personal and organizational development than technology these days, but I recently started using Trumba, an online calendar service, and so far I'm sufficiently impressed that it's worth a post.

Like millions of other people, I somewhat reluctantly use Outlook for my main personal productivity functions: email, contacts, task lists, and calendar.  I seriously considered switching twice in the past 18 months, but for a variety of reasons decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.  And then earlier this year David Allen's GTD and Outlook actually transformed Outlook into a much more useful tool for me.  (I don't use the GTD plug-in for Outlook, I just adopted the strategies outlined in Allen's 40-page guidebook.)

But having decided to stick with Outlook, I still needed an calendaring tool that would allow me to publish information about upcoming events on my schedule.  Optimally it would integrate with Outlook as well, but if I had to maintain it separately that was OK.  Note that I wasn't looking to replace my Outlook calendar--I just wanted an additional tool that would allow me to create and share a public version of my calendar.

I looked into Google's GCal and Backpack's calendar and a few other services, but nothing did exactly what I wanted, particularly when it came to publishing and sharing my schedule.  GCal's options have improved a lot over the past few months, but it's still not flexible enough for me.  (And although I'm a heavy Gmail user, I typically route all my email to Outlook and work with it locally, so currently there's not much value to me in centralizing my calendar and email on Google's servers.  At some point, resistance will be futile Google will make it worth my while, but not yet.)

And then I learned about Trumba through TypePad.  Bingo.  Here's what I like about it:

• Publishing Options:  Highly flexible and configurable.  Link to your calendar, display your calendar, display a calendar graphic, display a list of upcoming events, allow users to change the template, allow users to filter and search your calendar--you can even create a crawl.

• Sub-Calendars: Trumba makes it very easy to create "sub-calendars" that have a parent-child relationship to your main calendar.  You can mix and match events between the sub-calendars and your main calendar, and you can publish the sub-calendar separately, which is great if you have different audiences for your published calendars but you want to maintain them in a centralized location.

• TypePad Integration: Trumba is a TypePad widget partner, and you can create a list of your upcoming events, like the one in my right-hand sidebar, directly from Trumba's site.  I prefer to create a TypeList manually instead, because TypePad gives you more control over TypeLists than they do over widgets, but Trumba still makes it easy to get the code you need.  And functionality aside, the fact that Six Apart chose Trumba as their partner says good things about their business prospects.

• Outlook Integration: I haven't  sprung for Trumba's paid service yet ($10 a month, or $100 a year), but if I really become a heavy user, the biggest incentive to switch will be the ability to manage my Trumba calendar directly in Outlook.  (Presumably it's a two-way synch, but that's not clear.)  At the moment, the free service is fine for my needs, but I'll take a serious look at switching in a few months.
  

Pema Chodron on Patience and Letting Go

I just came across Pema Chödrön's March 2005 article, The Answer to Anger and Aggression is Patience.  As I've written before, I'm not a Buddhist, but I've learned a lot from Chödrön's writings and often look to her for guidance.

The following passage from the article made me think about the many things I hold onto past the point of usefulness--certain ways of doing things, beliefs about myself and others, even my perspective on the world--and how liberating it can be when I let go and open myself up to alternatives.  But Chödrön also provides a healthy reminder that it takes patient effort to explore and understand these things, and that sometimes it's best to focus on small ones before addressing big ones:

[W]henever there is pain of any kind--the pain of aggression, grieving, loss, irritation, resentment, jealousy, indigestion, physical pain--if you really look into that, you can find out for yourself that behind the pain there is always something we are attached to. There is always something we're holding on to...

...After a while it seems like almost every moment of your life you're there, at a point where you realize you actually have a choice. You have a choice whether to open or close, whether to hold on or let go, whether to harden or soften...

It requires enormous patience even to be curious enough to look, to investigate. And then when you realize you have a choice, and that there’s actually something there that you’re attached to, it requires great patience to keep going into it. Because you will want to go into denial, to shut down. You’re going to say to yourself, "I don't want to see this." You'll be afraid, because even if you're starting to get close to it, the thought of letting go is usually very frightening. You may feel that you're going to die, or that something is going to die. And you will be right. If you let go, something will die. But it's something that needs to die and you will benefit greatly from its death.

On the other hand, sometimes it's easy to let go. If you make this journey of looking to see if there's something you’re holding on to, often it's going to be just a little thing. Once when I was stuck with something huge, Trungpa Rinpoche gave me some advice. He said, "It's too big; you can't let go of it yet, so practice with the little ones. Just start noticing all the little ways you hold when it’s actually pretty easy and just get the hang of letting go."

That was extremely good advice. You don't have to do the big one, because usually you can't. It's too threatening. It may even be too harsh to let go right then and there, on the spot. But even with small things, you may—perhaps just intellectually—begin to see that letting go can bring a sense of enormous relief, relaxation and connection with the softness and tenderness of the genuine heart. True joy comes from that.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore and Chris Corrigan for providing the serendipitous path.

Pema Chodron on Patience

I'm not a Buddhist, but I've learned much from Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun who teaches at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery established in North America for Westerners.  Earlier today I turned to "Patience" in Comfortable with Uncertainty, a collection of Chödrön's short teachings compiled and edited by Emily Hillburn Sell.

I spent a good bit of time in traffic this weekend to deliver some important papers that needed to be signed to a swanky hotel south of San Francisco, planning to return to pick them up today.  Under different circumstances I would have used a courier service, but for a variety of reasons, that wasn't feasible.  The papers were received, signed by the recipient, left at the front desk for me, and promptly lost by the swank hotel.  (Sound of teeth grinding.)  It's not a disaster--I have copies--but I must begin the process all over again, and the delay will cause some difficulty.

Chödrön writes:

The power of the paramita [a quality leading to enlightenment] of patience is that it is the antidote to anger, a way to learn to love and care for whatever we meet on the path.  By patience, we do not mean enduring--grin and bear it.  In any situation, instead of reacting suddenly, we could chew it, smell it, look at it, and open ourselves to seeing what's there.  The opposite of patience is aggression--the desire to jump and move, to push against our lives, to try to fill up space.  The journey of patience involves relaxing, opening to what's happening, experiencing a sense of wonder...

As we train in the paramita of patience, we are first of all patient with ourselves.  We learn to relax with the restlessness of our energy--the energy of anger, boredom, and excitement.  Patience takes courage.  It is not an ideal state of calm.  In fact, when we practice patience, we will see our agitation far more clearly.

So I practiced patience.  I emailed my colleague: "I'm taking the Buddhist view--I had an amazing fish taco [on my long drive] and took this photo during a stop at Crystal Springs.  Papers get lost, life's too short, etc."

And lo and behold, the Minor Deity of Paperwork saw my patience and responded--the swanky hotel just called--"We found them!"  I'm happy--found paperwork is better than lost paperwork.  But the temporary loss gave me an opportunity to reflect on the blessings of the day, on the initial source of my impatience, on why I found myself in this situation in the first place, and I learned a hell of a lot more than I would have otherwise.

tags: pema chodron patience

Resuscitated Laptop: Lessons Learned

Today I feel like a very lucky guy--even though I just spent over a week without the use of my (previously) trusty ThinkPad T40, it's up and running again and better than ever with a brand, spanking new 100GB hard drive.  I was able to keep working on my wife's A31, for which I'm very grateful, but 1) that's one very heavy laptop, and 2) I'd forgotten how much Windows 2000 sucks.

But I learned quite a few important lessons over the past ten days, and I thought I'd set them down here in the hopes that I won't forget them and have to relearn them, no doubt painfully, at some point in the future.  So here goes:

• Hold On With Both Hands: My old ThinkPad T23 was heavy enough that I'd always have to use both hands to pick it up (and that's doubly true for the A31.)  In contrast, the T40 is light enough that it's pretty easy to pick up with one hand.  Unfortunately, it's just heavy enough that when it's open and lifted that way, the frame flexes a little bit, which can cause serious problems over time.  (The X-series are so small and light that they don't flex when lifted, and the newer T-series apparently have a much more rigid internal frame that prevents any flexion.)  This quite possibly caused (or at least exacerbated) the failure of my T40's system board.

• Always Call IBM First (Or, A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing): I initially thought the problem was related to my over-stuffed hard drive.  Performance had slowed to a crawl, and I actually got (and proceeded to ignore) several warnings about the lack of available disk space  (I said I'd get around to it, didn't I?)  The day before it finally failed, I'd ignored the most severe warning yet, so I assumed that the subsequent failure to boot was my well-deserved punishment.  I knew that upgrading to a larger drive wasn't going to be covered by my warranty, so I didn't bother to call IBM--I just found a local computer repair shop and asked them to take care of it.  Herrick and his colleagues at Ameritech cloned my drive and installed the new one, only to realize that the problem wasn't with the drive at all--it was with the system board.  The bad news: I'd wasted a lot of time by going to Ameritech.  The good news: A new system board was covered by my IBM warranty.  The lesson: Don't outsmart yourself--call IBM first.

• The On-Site Warranty Is NOT Optional: When I'd originally purchased the T40 through IBM's refurbished program, I debated whether spending a few extra hundred dollars for the on-site service warranty was really worth it.  In the end, I decided to do it, and it was clearly the right decision.  It took me a few phone calls to IBM to determine that yes, it was the system board, and no, none of their fixes solved the problem, and yes, they had the part but it would be a day before they could get it to the Bay Area--but once I jumped through those hoops, things couldn't have gone more smoothly.  I was surprised and pleased to find that the repairman who came to my house was the same guy who had replaced a faulty display in my T20 at work about four years ago!  He's a very cool guy--he arrived on an Aprilia, I think a Caponord--and we had a good discussion while he worked.  We both agreed that the on-site service warranty is a great investment because 1) you really can't rely on local shops--the guys at Ameritech were nice enough (although a little slow), but they didn't even put all the screws back in when re-assembling my T40, and 2) when it's fixed, you know it's fixed--no shipping it back to the depot because they didn't do it right the first time.

• Don't Always Believe the Manual (Or Support): Once the system board had been replaced, I still needed to upgrade my hard drive.  I bought a 100GB drive from Ameritech--the same one they'd initially cloned for me, but they'd already wiped it clean after determining that the problem was with the system board--and an EZ Gig Hard Drive Upgrade kit by Apricorn.  Following the directions apparently allowed me to clone my old drive onto the new one successfully, but the machine wouldn't boot.  I called Apricorn support, and they identified the problem, but their recommended solution sounded a little squirrelly.  So I tried using some common sense, and it worked out fine.  The bottom line: Don't boot and run the EZ Gig software directly from the CD, even though the manual advises you to do that for faster, uninterrupted cloning.  And specifically on T40s, don't disable the Pre-Desktop Area in BIOS Security, even though Apricorn will tell you that's what you have to do to clone a bootable disk.  Just run EZ Gig from within Windows--works like a charm.  More gory details are in a report I posted to the ThinkPad Open Forum.  Fascinating reading.

So now I have a very roomy, very fast and very quiet new hard drive in my comfortable, familiar T40, and I'm very happy, as they say.  And if I do say so myself, I was pretty damn Zen about the whole mess.  Things could have gotten very ugly, and I could have really freaked out about it, but, somehow, I didn't.  Perhaps I've accidentally acquired some wisdom along the way.  And to minimize the chance of future freak-outs, I'm taking one final lesson to heart:

tags: thinkpad ez+gig

Inbox Zero

The always-awesome Merlin Mann has been running a series on email productivity over the last few weeks called Inbox Zero.  I'm liberally excerpting the takeaways that seemed most relevant to me in order to refer back to them, but if you share my pain, read the whole series and draw your own conclusions.

(Gmail + SnapperMail) x Treo = Happiness

Gmail, SnapperMail and the Treo 600 are all perfectly fine things, but I'd never been able to get them to work in harmony until this morning.  Using SnapperMail to access your Gmail account on a Treo is much better than using Blazer (or, presumably, any other mobile browser on the Treo.)  The message editing and mailbox features in SnapperMail are just so much better than anything Gmail can offer via a mobile interface.  SnapperMail also makes it possible to review and compose messages offline if you're in a dead zone (I'm talking to you, Verizon!), which you obviously can't do if you're reliant on a browser.  Finally, SnapperMail can retrieve your Gmail messages and push them to your Treo whenever you want--Gmail via a browser is pull-only, of course.

Here are the Gmail configuration instructions from SnapperMail's list of ISPs and mail services:

1. These instructions require that you have the Premier or Enterprise edition of SnapperMail. GMail are rolling out their POP3 access in stages, so be aware that not all accounts will support this setup initially.
2. Log into your Gmail account, go into Settings, select the "Forwarding and Pop" link, and under POP3 Download, enable the type of POP3 access you want.
3. In your SnapperMail server account settings (Menu | Options | Edit Accounts | (choose account) | Server), enter the following:

   POP3 Server: pop.gmail.com
   Username: your full GMail email address
   Password: your GMail password

   SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com
   Username: your full GMail email address
   Password: your GMail password

   IMPORTANT: Tap the "More" button at the bottom of the screen.
   For POP3 Settings:
   - Set the "Use SSL" dropdown to "Always Secure (wrapped port)"
   - Use Port 995 (this port number should automatically be set when you select the SSL option listed on the line above)
   - Activate the "Always trust server" checkbox.
   - Leave the other checkboxes unchecked.

   For SMTP settings, you can use either "Set" of settings below. There is no mention to the word "Set" anywhere in the SnapperMail interface. These are merely two different ways that you can configure SnapperMail to send Email using GMail's server. Simply choose the set below that you want to use, but do not mix the settings together between both sets.

   SMTP SETTINGS "More..." Set #1:
   - Set the "Use SSL" dropdown to "Always Secure (STARTTLS)"
   - Use port 587 (you will have to manually set this port number)
   - Activate the "Always trust server" checkbox.
   - Leave the other checkboxes unchecked.

   SMTP SETTINGS "More..." Set #2:
   - Set the "Use SSL" dropdown to "Always Secure (wrapped port)"
   - Use port 465 (this port number should automatically be set when you select the SSL option listed on the line above)
   - Activate the "Always trust server" checkbox.
   - Leave the other checkboxes unchecked.

NOTE: Some people have reported that SnapperMail suddenly stops downloading messages from GMail, or it downloads erratically. This is usually a problem with GMail's POP3 server, not with SnapperMail. You should login to your GMail account using a web browser. Go to the Settings (or Options) page, shut off the POP3 option and accept the change. Then go back into the Settings page again, turn the POP3 option back on and accept the change. People have reported back to us that this usually works to get GMail's POP3 server working properly for them again.

Piece o' cake.  Thanks to the helpful TreoCentral discussion board.

tags: snappermail gmail

Converting HTML Rows to Excel Columns

This will not be my most scintillating post of the month...or even the day.  If you're not interested in transferring data from webpages to spreadsheets, just keep moving along, nothing to see here, folks.  But today I found an easy way to take rows of HTML data and convert it to columns in an Excel spreadsheet--I'd expected this to be a gruesomely time-consuming task, so I thought I'd document the process for future reference.