2WheelTech

2009-06-25T05:24:00.001-07:00

Brews and Bikes: The best bike-related summer beers Slide 1 : Bicycling Magazine.com (http://ping.fm/vLSEE)

2009-06-22T19:56:00.001-07:00

Dunkin’ Run Automates Your Coffee Breaks on the Web and iPhone (http://ping.fm/DlXKz)

This one put a smile on my face. How about you??

2009-04-30T11:41:00.001-07:00

via friendfeed.com

We all want you to be around for a while. Take this and be safe.

Posted via web from daveploch's posterous

If the THUNDER don't get you then the LIGHTNING will

2009-04-12T06:13:00.001-07:00

Riding in Florida can be a challenge at times.

Posted via email from daveploch's posterous

If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will

2009-04-12T05:51:00.001-07:00

via mail.google.com

Riding in Florida. It's a challenge.

Posted via web from daveploch's posterous

RealRyder ABF8

2009-04-10T05:16:00.001-07:00

via youtube.com

Now THIS looks cool. Tie it to a computer with feedback and this starts feeling like a real ride.

Posted via web from daveploch's posterous

New Rich Content Tool for Bloggers

2009-03-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

I ran across a new tool today that looks to be an exiting addition to any bloggers toolset. Apture is a way to easily and even in some cases automatically add semantic references to you blog. Scoble interviewed Tristan Harris the CEO and gave us a good demo of the tool.

The demo from Tristan shows us a ton of examples where there are rich links on content, people, places, video, you name it. Tristan talks about the typical user spending much more time on a blog page. The richness of the links keeps their interest. The fact that all the links are opened as windows without leaving the page makes this a real eye grabber. Some of the windows allow you to dig even deeper on some of the content.

Adding it to your blog is actually trivial. For the supported blogs you just add on script line and then the in line editor is available after blog creation. The extra content is actually an overlay to the site, not natively within the site.

I plan on using it a lot as I get back to the blogging.

Connectivity

2009-02-04T04:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it would be great to be able to connect to your home network while you are on the road. It isn't trivial if you want to do it in a secure way. There are DNS issues, authentication issues, firewall issues, etc.

I recently saw another tool GBRIDGE http://www.gbridge.com/ that appears to make some of this easier, even for the non-technical user. We'll see.

I will load this tonight and see if it works. Back in a couple days to report.

Jott and Reqall

2008-09-01T07:20:00.000-07:00

Jott recently came out of beta and have intiated their business model. They are have a payment model for extended messages and the "extra" capabilities. Short reminder messages to yourself (15 seconds) are still free. For me, the is the main usage but I was also using it to send messages to others on my list via phone. Now I'd have to pay.

Reqall on the other hand is still a free service. It is not as rich in capabilities but it does do all those things I am using. Reminders are simple to do and the transcription has been perfect. The system also sends a wave file of the audio.

Email, SMS and IM are the connections available for reminders. Nothing yet from any of the microblogging platforms such as Twitter or Jaiku. Personally I don't see a real need for those connections. I find the SMS and email alerts to be sufficient.

The iPhone apps for both services are great. They allow you to take audio notes while offline and then with the system connects, it will sync the info. Reqall also knows some key words such as "buy", "note", "remember" that will categorize those particulare items. It makes it very easy to create a shopping list for yourself OR for someone on your list. My wife can send me a shopping list prior to my leaving the office.

Jott Revisited

2008-08-23T08:10:00.000-07:00

I have written about Jott before.

This has been a great tool for me to drop myself a note while driving. I have also used it to send emails by talking to Jott and having it send that text to a distribution list. It's great.

Last week Jott has moved out of beta. They have also moved to a business model that charges for the services. Sure there is still a free version but all of the really good stuff for linking to other apps is a service you pay for.

Lately I haven't been using Jott as much as I did in the past. I recently got an iPhone and have been trying to use it for almost everything including Jott. The Jott app for iPhone is pretty cool. I still think this is a great app, but I really want to strive for being able to do all the work on the web with free services. Only if I can't live without it, will I pay. Haven't decided yet for Jott.

ouch

2008-07-28T14:15:00.001-07:00

Tungle and calendar coordination

2008-05-23T06:00:00.001-07:00

Setting up meetings with people within and outside your own organization has always been a pain. Trying to find a common time usually involves a flurry of emails moving around the group and eventually finding that there is NO date and time where EVERYBODY can attend. That takes time.

Personally I don't believe there is a great solution for this problem since it almost requires everyone to be on the same system, on line at the same time and ready to respond. Right, like that's going to happen often.

Recently I found and think this has potential. Jim Courtney's Skype Journal post gave a great explanation of the Outlook add-in product and its value. The great thing about this product is that it is agnostic to calendar systems though the organizer must currently be using Outlook.

The process is to share a set of open times, people select their preferences and finally once everyone enters their preferences, the "best" time is selected.

Try it, you'll like it.

Time, Task, Life Management Pt 2

2008-05-23T05:28:00.001-07:00

As it works out there are really only a couple ways of looking at this and I believe David Allen (Getting Things Done) has pretty well summed up what you need to do.

Collect
Process
Organize
Review
DO

I'll next look at some tools that can be used for doing all this stuff.

RememberTheMilk has a Getting Started site that gives a great overview of the features. I use this for maintaining a todo list for everything that is associated with my race registration business and personal activities. I use GMail as my personal email service. There is a great add-in for FireFox and GMail that adds RTM as a side window. This is an add-on from RTM and works well.

RTM has an INBOX to collect all your tasks. You can put items into the inbox using a number of methods. Entering a task into a form on the website is one way. The entry gives you options to enter due dates, repeating options, tags, location (more on this), url. It also shows you information on postponed, notes and sharing options.

One of the novel features is the geotagging of your tasks. Giving a task a location (even to tie it to a GoogleMap location) gives you yet another way to coordinate your work and plan your work.

Tagging of tasks allows you to tie a task to multiple projects or multiple categories. RTM gives you a way to build queries and set a query up as a tab within your RTM environment. Every time I see a new piece of software that is not currently allowing open beta, I enter a task to check on an invitation. I categorize the software into software and type. I set a task for two weeks out and check on my invite when that comes up if I don't ge the invite before that. I then set a task for testing the software and writing a blog entry. I have a query for software that shows all the open items I have out there. That query is a tab that I can open at any time to see what is open.

Any tab can be subscribed to as an RSS feed.

These tasks can be shared between people. Someone else can mail a task into your inbox and you can share a task with someone else who is a subscriber to RTM services. A team of workers could use these features very effectively.

Another very exciting set of options involve linking new services such as Twitter and Jott to RTM. I'll talk more about those services in another blog entry. Twitter is a microblogging platform. It allows you to send up to 140 characters to either everybody, to your known friends or direct to a private address. This last one is how you send a new item to RTM. Jott is very similar except that you do it with your phone by talking an entry. I use Jott extensively.

My next entry till be about Twitter and Jott and what they can do for you.

Unbuntu 8.04 LTS

2008-05-03T04:40:00.000-07:00

Last night I began the automatic process of upgrading my laptop from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon. It was FLAWLESS. No problems what so ever.

In the process I am now running FF 3 beta 5. Still a bunch of addons that don't work but nothing that is critical. I'll report more later.

Focus, focus, focus

2008-05-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I have lost a little focus. From this point on, this blog is going to be solely focused on technology and technology related issues. I'll keep all my personal ramblings over at my new personal blog site: http://daveploch.2wheeltech.com

That site will be simple and a place where I will wax eloquently on life, activities and stuff in general.

Dave

A fine dinner with great friends at American Bounty

2008-05-01T17:40:00.000-07:00

Dinner Thursday with our friends George and Maggie at American Bounty in Washington mo. It was great. Beef tenderloin with a basalmic reduction. Grilled salmon with a sweet rub. Apple cobbler for dessert. Sitting on the patio in sight of the river. Now this is living

Gateway to Innovation

2008-04-30T07:08:00.001-07:00

Dave Ploch - 2Wheeltech
Great conference today with many of the regions IT leadership in attendence. Reconnected to a number of people from my past,

Mark Showers / CIO Monsanto
Errol Sandler / Associate Dean, the Sever Institute of Continuing Studies @ Wash U
Bob Lozano / Chief Stratigist & Founder Appistry

The day was focused on showing the region to be a rich landscape for information technology. The Information Technology Coalition is looking to market the St Louis region as a rich area for IT professionals . With over 50,000 already in the area it becomes a significant part of the economic growth engine for the future.

Check out the conferenc website

Time, Task, Life Management Pt 1

2008-04-27T07:30:00.001-07:00

Time, Task, Life Management

My journey to get organized.

There are many, many ways to organize the project and tasks in your life. Every individual can find a different way to do this and find that one works better than another for THEM. I know that I have been through several tools to try to organize myself and keep my todo's and projects managed. A tool can only help organize, it won't get the things done. That is the most difficult part of the process for me.

My First Try, a paper based system

I realized a bunch of years (for the chronologically gifted, that is a meaningfull number ;-) that I was extremely disorganized. I had a ton of ideas, experiments, proof of concepts and real projects. I also had personal tasks to get done (renew car license, pickup milk, buy water softener salt, etc). I started using a paper system that was mainly a time management and secondarily an information management system. Each day had a page where you kept your daily notes on anything you needed to do or anything you did. Each evening you spent time copying information from the daily pages to contextual pages. These were contacts, projects, and other categories.

I believe the system was called the TMS (time management system). Clever name.

It took a lot of time to move entries. The note book was 0n 8 1/2 x 11 pages and too big. I used this for about a year before I abandoned it.

Did I mention that I believe I am ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). This adds to my issues around organization.

Second Try, Microsoft Outlook

Our corporation used Exchange and Outlook for email. This has a elementary task management tool within the client. It gives you a place to collect ALL the items that you need to do. They have a the ability to categorize entries. These categories can be for prioritization and context. Similar to tagging this gives you a way to gather all the pieces within a specific context.

Reminders, due dates and other meta-data can be associated with a task. This is all great and can give you a great place to get it all together.

What I found was the inability to work my corporate, personal and side business tasks together. Access was a problem as was the dilemma of using corporate resources for doing personal stuff. The system itself worked ok but I needed something that was going to be network based. Heck even then, the internet was becoming an important tool.

Next I'll talk about some of the new tools I've found and used.

XOBNI

2008-04-26T15:53:00.001-07:00

If you are user of MS Outlook, that's too bad. We have standardized on it within our corporation, as many, many others have done. Selling our souls to the devil incarnate in Redmond. Oh well.

Anyway, if you are a user of Outlook and you deal with a lot of emails and need to find emails, attachments, connections between people and organize around all those things then XOBNI (inbox backwards) is for you.

XOBNI lets you look at your email organized around people, not information. Use it to see a threaded version of your conversations. In that thread, you can also see who else participated.

Try it.

MySocial 24X7

2008-04-26T11:15:00.001-07:00

I had been using Twhirl and AlertThingy for doing all my Twitter and FriendFeed maintenance but found that it wasn't convenient for me and there wasn't a lot of extra value in running them on the desktop. I was able to get all of them running on both my Vista and Ubuntu boxes successfully. AIR is a good thing !!?!

Then I found the MySocial addin for Firefox. I ALWAYS have a browser up anyway. This addin let me have all of my FF stuff viewable.

It isn't perfect by any grade. It won't remember my FF key between browser starts. Each time I restart the browser I need to reenter the account and key. The "remember me" box is visible but not active. I can't check it.

It also doesn't automatically refresh on some timely schedule.

I am just now getting a grip on how best to utilize the feeds coming in through FriendFeed. Most of the key players who I use to keep up with technology are publishing via Twitter. The content is on their blogs. I could certainly subscribe via RSS to them but watching their twitter streaming is painless. Now with FF I also have a way to comment via the FF and start another channel of discussion.

Spring hath Sprung

2008-04-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

Dave Ploch - 2Wheeltech

Easter???

2008-03-23T13:35:00.001-07:00

Spring has sprung
Who whould have expected snowfall on Easter afternoon?

Trail

2008-03-22T09:49:00.001-07:00

This way to trail.

Down in Monterey

2008-03-12T18:24:00.003-07:00

Dave Ploch
2Wheeltech

We've decided to stay, forever

2008-03-12T18:24:00.001-07:00

Dave Ploch
2Wheeltech