I am not a designer. In fact, I’m pretty bad with design. However, I can tell when something looks good. It is just my way of saying I appreciate good design, I just suck at it. Here is a great video showcasing how design (brands) work. This is great work done by Erica Gorochow
The Fundamental Elements of Design from Erica Gorochow on Vimeo.
I am a fan of using my iPad for note taking. I noticed today that Microsoft Onenote is now available for the iPad and iPhone.
Head on over to iTunes and download
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onenote/id478105721?mt=8
After trying out the application is works great. However, it does not sync with my work OneNote. It syncs with your skydrive. I am going to have to see if I can sync with my corporate onenote through skydrive.
Let me know what you think of this application.
I recently took a trip to Las Vegas for a conference. I took my ipad for both note taking and also to do work. It performed perfectly. I have to say that the majority of people at this conference had tablets and the clear winner in shear numbers was the iPad.
To prepare for the trip I loaded a few magazines, books, and movies on my iPad. To do this here are the top apps that I used:
1. Zinio – A e-magazine application (read my previous post on this) Great application to purchase magazines for the airplane trip.
2. VLC- Video Lan Client. I used this to watch a movie. Since I use windows media center at home. I just moved an .AVI to the VLC application and watched a movie while in the flight. (I would recommend better headphones or noise canceling)
3. Built in iBook reader : I read the last chapters of the recent james bond novel
(Close second is Kindle)
4. Business week : if you have a subscription
5. iSSH - Remote access to any of my servers while traveling
6. PPTP – Built in vpn. If you are traveling and not using a vpn be warned. You will have your packets watched or stolen. I suggest using a personal vpn if you don’t have access to one from work. Try wifi-vpn.com only $4 per week (or $9 a month)
7. Remote Desktop lite – Remote access to your desktop.
It is that time of the year. I love Christmas. I just realized at work that the the only pictures of the kids I have are getting pumpkins and a Christmas tree (multiple years). Yesterday we went and got the tree. It is always a fun event, and we have had snow each year we go. We have been going the same place for the last 6 years. (buy local 
In the spirit of things we have been listening to Christmas songs since ThanksGiving (my kids love them). But here are a few of my favorites:
These are songs that I’ve just enjoyed for a while.
1. Merry Christmas from the Family (REK) – Fun song
2. Merry Christmas from the family (MG) – just a fun twist
3. Dido (Christmas Day)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7heCppIC0_E&feature=related
4. Dave Matthews (Christmas Song) Live
5.
I’ve been cleaning up my work area. Not only my real desktop at work but also my computer desktop. To help keep a cleanly system I decided to try Fences.
http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/
Nice little gem of an application. Give it a try. It neatly organizes your icons or files on your desktop into specific areas.
I am a huge fan of the iPad, as you can see by my recent posts. I find myself reading more and more on my iPad and iPhone. One of the best things about the iPad is you can get magazine subscriptions using Zinio.
I can’t say enough good words about the software. I love to get a magazine quickly and before trips it can’t be beat. However, recently I noticed that if you purchase a magazine while on the iPad it is a bit more expensive. 
I am heading out for a trip and wanted to pick up a few items for reading. Note the price for the in app purchase of FourFourTwo ($5.99). But if you purchase through their web site it’s only $3.99. I did not realize the price difference. It is interesting that in application purchases are more expensive. I don’t mind for the convenience but I would rather know the difference between the two prices.
Every year I take the opportunity to do some winter cleaning on my computer systems. Clean up directories, remove unused applications, and backup. I typically choose Black Friday for this event because I can run out and get cheap storage (Hard Drives). Last year I purchased 2 portable drives and an internal drive.
This year, I did not want to go out early. So I spent the morning cleaning our computer systems and then headed out and purchased a few High Capacity SD cards. I got 8, 16 and 32 gig cards. Different manufacturers. The 16 I intend to use in our camera so it was the higher speed. The other 2 I plan on using for an “ON PC” backup.
I have many backup strategies for our home documents and photos, but I am adding a new one this year. I have done this in the past at work with my personal documents but not at home.
Since we are almost exclusively laptops at our house I setup jobs to backup the home directory documents to the SD cards. This does a sync that makes it easy to store on the SD card. The actual directory and photos are sync’d every night to our backup server, but this is just a quick fail-safe. I’m not sure how well it’s going to work, but the intent is to have a quick copy to pull back from of critical documents.
On my SD card I used truecrypt to create a volume and store information encrypted. Overall it is working OK. I will have to update this post as I progress.
After my bike breaking and having to fix the crank. I had a chance to test drive a few new rides at my local bike shop. (www.freewheelerbikeshop.com). I probably should not have done that. Now I am ready to make a change. I realize that the bikes I have are great (1995 schwinn and a 2010 Fuji Road bike) The Fuji I won’t ride to work anymore, and I have put lots of miles on the old schwinn while commuting.
While at the shop I took a look at a urban / commuter bike (raleigh Misceo) http://www.raleighusa.com/bikes/hybrid/misceo-12/ It is a mountain bike style road bike. 700 size tires that just glide like a road bike but a feel of a mountain bike. I was amazed a the ease of the ride. I can see that it won’t be long till I get a new bike. I just hate the idea of purchasing another bike while the trusty Schwinn is still alive.
Also, in the last few weeks I have been reading about commuting and the biking scene. I ran across this great little discussion on driving privileges
http://www.theurbancountry.com/2011/11/driver-privilege-checklist.html
How we take driving for granted, and have a society that counts driving and unsafe driving as the normal.
I have seen some great online resources recently for .net development training.
Pluralsight is a fantastic resource: Some are free : MVC controller
http://www.pluralsight-training.net/microsoft/players/PSODPlayer.aspx?author=scott-allen&name=mvc3-building-controllers&mode=live&clip=0&course=aspdotnet-mvc3-intro
For beginners this one is fantastic:
http://mottishaked.com/training/dot-net-tutorial
This past summer I got a new road bike. I chose a Fuji because of the price and the great ride. I test rode quite a few bikes and this one just felt right. After riding for a while and talking with many people I realized that there are not too many bike builders. It sounds like many bikes are manufactured in Asia and then assembled in the US.
Giant seems to be one of the largest manufactures that a lot of companies use. Fuji looks like it uses a manufacturer called Ideal.
Here is a great document that shows who manufacturers bikes for each vendor: http://www.bicycleretailer.com/downloads/US%20factory%20chart%2010-08LoRes.pdf
Another site with some background info http://wannabteam.co.za/?page_id=1422
I have recently been looking to replace my old Schwinn and purchase something new. Any suggestions?
Last week I finished riding home from work and noticed a bit of play in my pedal and crank. When I took a closer look the pedal was not straight in the crank. After a bit of work, I was able to get the pedal off to take a look. At a first glance it looked like the pedal was cross threaded. When I took it off lots of metal flakes came off the crank.
I did a quick search for a crank online and did not see much for my 16 year old bike. There was a few options for purchases but all were quite expensive. I borrowed a crank puller from a friend at work and headed to my local bike shop (www.freewheelerbikeshop.com/). The crew over there was able to find me a used crank, left arm. It was a cheap and easy fix.
After some discussion it sounds like the crank was over-tightened and over time caused it to strip out. When you commute frequently things tend to break. It may be time to get a new ride. Any suggestions.
Remote PC support has come a long way. It used to be a long phone call and people would explain what they were seeing. Then we added remote desktop sharing tools like VNC. Now many sites and applications have these features. I have discussed remote desktop sharing / support apps before - http://jimiz.net/blog/2008/07/open-source-applications/
Since then I have tried many versions. Go2MyPC, webex, livemeeting, dimdim, view, and many more. Recently on a family support call I decided to try two new ones. I have recently been using go2assist (from citrix) however I decided to let my subscription run out and go back to open source.
Two players in this space. join.me – a simple web site to allow you to share your screen. It was simple to use but not as intuitive as I would have liked.
I ended up using Microsoft’s SharedView. Since I already had a live /hotmail account and so did my family member who needed help the requirments to use this tool were already set.
They basically went to http://connect.microsoft.com/site94 downloaded the application and ran the 3 step install.
After it is installed you can run the app and get a tool bar on the top of your screen. Steps are simple. Login, start or joine a session. I was able to walk them through starting a session and quickly join them via email address in about 1 min. If you are starting the meeting you just click the start a new session and you are presented with a link to email or a password to share (SIMPLE)
Thank you Microsoft for this great tool. It is not as clean ad go2assist but very practical.
My wife sent me this link in an email today. http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/local/ottawa_county/vehicle-hits-bicycle-in-robinson-township It is tragic to see someone get hit on a bicycle. Since I have been riding into work I think about this often. I have had a few close calls, but I have not been hit. A co-worker was struck last year. He suffered a broken leg and a lot of bruises but thankfully he is ok.
I have determined I am a defensive biker. I ride on sidewalks to avoid cars, I cut corners and drop into the grass. It is not that I am afraid of riding in the lane. Not at all, I often take the lane and make myself known on a busy street turning left. However, it is just sad to really see how many people are doing other things than focusing on driving.
Every morning I see people as I’m biking driving their cars distracted. Some are texting, a few are talking on phones. The enjoyment of biking is you get to see a lot and take in a lot. This also means I can see how drivers are driving. I watched a lady talking on the phone, lighting a cigarette, while turning the radio station. How can she be looking out for me.
So be safe out their biking. I have flashing lights, headlights, and reflectors. Be prepared.
I’ve been involved in some mobile application development and have had the need to test a site and application with many mobile devices. During this process I have found two good iOS emulators.
http://www.electricplum.com/
and
http://code.google.com/p/ibbdemo2/
I just recently learned that the ibbdemo2 was replaced by the electric plum version above. I found these to be great emulators and tools to use while testing mobile optimized sites.
You can see that I pulled up my blog and it displays in the mobile version and not the full site.
Figure 1
I updated all devices at our house today. Ipads, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4s. Everyone now has ios 5 and all devices are backed up and have iCloud working. If you have not ever heard of all the “i” things can you imagine what I just said. Before the iPhone people did not even know what an app was… now we talk in clouds, sync, and siri.
If you are interested in cutting the cord and syncing with wifi here is a quick tutorial. We have many iOS devices in our house. I sync a few with my computer and a few with my wife’s. Our media server (windows media server) holds almost all the songs and videos. We just map a drive (that is a topic for another day). However the use of wifi sync is great. I have consolidated to the media server to be the itunes primary for a few devices. This allows for that machine to always run itunes (in the startup folder) and the devices to just connect to it via wireless.
Figure 2
To set this up you first have to enable wi-fi sync. Plug in your device and select the summary tab of your iOS device. Add a check box to the options area to “sync this iPad over Wi-Fi”. (figure 1)
Once you have done this the basics are complete. Your next step is to connect your iphone or iPad to a power outlet and watch it sync over wifi. You need the iOS devices to be on the same wifi network as the computer that has iTunes. NOTE: also the computer should have iTunes already running before the sync will happen.
I’m not sure of why the device needs to be plugged in, but that is needed. Here is the screen from your iOS device (figure 2)
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