Phil801 – Geek Blog

Serenity is almost to her second anniversary of having Leukemia.  The doctors are currently telling us that she'll be 'cured' and be able to go off treatment in July.  Being cured means that she has successfully gone through the treatment protocols and if she doesn't relapse for 5 years she'll be considered medically cured.  Relapse is the big scary monster, it's really bad.  She'll likely die as a result of either Leukemia, a second cancer or from the 'cure' – but hopefully not for a long time.  She should have died 2 years ago, we're extremely grateful for having the last 2 years and anything more we get is purely a gift!

In 2008 & 2009 I was working for a 3PL company called Lanelinks.  In November of last year the company succomed to the economy and went under.  We thought that we could make the company work so some of us continued working without pay for a couple months.  Eventually we gave in and I was 'unemployed'.  We had burned through a lot of our reserves but the big eye opener for me was realizing that I didn't have anything set up that would bring me residual income or provide a buffer.  I realized that I had spent my whole career helping companies set up their internet systems to make money but had failed to do so for myself.  I vowed to change that and make sure that I always had revenue coming in from the internet that I could step to anytime I needed to.  I spent the next two months analyzing several possibilities and building out a business plan that I believed would be successful, be interesting and be something I could step away from once it was established without it dying. 

For the following several months I worked on my plan with a couple partners, doing some contracting work along the way.  After working on things since November of last year, here are some of the things that we've accomplished.  We've established and built up a preparedness community (forum), established and refined a preparedness store, have several other stores in the works and nearly ready to launch and built the beginings of an online Survival Training Center.  There are still some other things that are included in the plan that we're working on.  The main point of all these sites is to build a turn-key system for providing preparedness/survival information, supplies and training via the internet in a way that hasn't been done before.  By the time we're done it will be pretty cool – and not require much work at all. 

Over the last couple years I've become really interested in physical security, primarily in lock picking and other work.  I've become enough of an expert at it that on a recent trip to New Jersey, we were hanging out with Deviant (from Toool/DefCon) and Dr. Tran – both recognized lock experts – and devised a way to pick handcuffs they had deemed un-pickable.  When they pulled them out I jumped at the challenge and went to work, it took me about 20 minutes to devise a method to successfully pick them, with paperclips.  Deviant posted this video about it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCy3kppR_rk[/youtube]

So I haven't written for almost a year. Before that, it was really sporadic. Before that I often wrote more than once a day. So what happened? That's what I've been wondering tonight. Here are a couple thoughts.

• My life and my objectives completely changed after Serenity was diagnosed with Leukemia.  Blogging anything that wasn't about her seemed a waste of time.
• My interest in being very public with my life and my thoughts waned.  A lot of the things that happened that year were too personal to talk about and they were the dominating factor in my life.
• Blogging itself got old.  I fail to see the point any longer in being the 'first one' to talk about a tech item.  Especially because there are a lot of shills out there that do just fine covering that. 
• My interests have really changed.  I still stay on top of tech news but it's not the dominating factor in my life anymore.  I've been looking for ways to change course with my career towards things I'm more interested in – tech combined with other things like security, survival and prepping.
• Most recently I've been more into talking about things on Facebook.  Micro-blogging became more interesting to me than writing big long articles. 
• This blog was always about building my "brand" as a bleeding edge tech guy.  My brand is diversifying a lot lately but this will still be about my "brand"
• Honestly, blogging became boring after several years. 

So here's what I'm thinking about doing.  I'm going to resurrect my blog and just write about the stuff I'm interested in, stuff I'm doing and stuff I'm thinking about.  A lot of times that will have to do with technology, a lot of times it won't.  Most of the posts will probably be short and simple.  Since this blog pushes to my twitter and facebook account I'll probably use it for micro-blogging to some extent.  Basically, my blog is going to be about me and what I'm doing, not so much about technology and tech news.  If you're still subscribing to me, cool – but you may not be as interested in my posts anymore. 

I may just get bored with it and not really post much. 

Seriously?  You still read my blog?  Shocking.  I’m just writing cause I want to vent.

This morning I went to Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast which is a breakfast meeting of a great group of techies.  I haven’t been in a while -I haven’t done much of anything public lately, except blogging on Utah Preppers, and I was pretty surprised by what went on.  This tweet from Phil Windley kind of summarizes it:

Big topics of discussion at #ctobreakfast: calendaring and syncing contacts.  Funny how these are still broken for most people.

Here’s the thing – they’re not broken for me, haven’t been for YEARS.  The only people they’re broken for are those with so much Microsoft hate that they refuse to use their software.  I’m blown away that so many of the techies at that meeting are having problems with this!  There is a very simple and elegant fix – it’s called Microsoft Exchange.  Here are the complaints from the meeting:

• My calendar doesn’t sync to my phone (in real time)
• My contacts don’t sync to my phone (from mail clients etc)
• My Email doesn’t sync to my phone (using gmail)
• When someone updates their contact info, I don’t receive it (and Plaxo tastes bad because of a mistake 3 years ago)
• gmail and google apps uptime isn’t that great

Seriously????  Really??  All these great techies and you’re all living like this?   I can’t believe that you haven’t heard of this hot new crazy named web 2.0 super awesome web service called Exchange!  Yeah, it’s actually been around for years – which is how long I’ve had all of the above issues resolved on my phone.

But it seems that the hot sexy thing is to use fragmented half-built “web services” that aren’t compatible with each other and don’t work but HEY!  THEY’RE FREE!   ….. Well, hope you’re enjoying what you pay for.

Oh yeah, then there’s the stupid iPhone – the over-hyped piece of garbage that can’t do half of what my NonIphone  can do.

Here’s what I do:

•  I use a Windows Mobile phone
• I use Outlook Mobile on my phone
• I use Plaxo with a LOT of my contacts
• I use a hosted Exchange Service for 10 bucks a month
• I use Outlook on my desktop and my laptop

What does this give me, all for 10 bucks a month?

Any time I add or change a contact on my phone, laptop, desktop or web outlook – the change automatically and instantly shows up on my phone, laptop, desktop and web outlook.  Any time I read an email on any of the previously mentioned devices – it automatically and instantly shows up on all the other devices as read.  Any time I schedule an appointment on ……. you get it?  It shows up.

Uptime has never been a problem for me actually – my email has NEVER gone down in the years that I’ve been using 4Smartphone.  It’s professionally managed and when everyone’s hollering about gmail being dead, I’m happily sending email.

Sharing calendars was brought up – everyone uses google calendars for that.  Yeah, me too.  But there’s also an Outlook sync that google provides so any changes that someone makes to my public google calendar …… automatically and almost instantly shows up on my phone, lap……

Tethering to your laptop for an internet connection was also brought up – you have to hack your stupid iPhone to get that to work – I use AT&T too iPhone people.  My phone natively tethers to my laptop – always has.  My phone has interactive gps with google maps too – I believe you finally sort of got that with the latest iPhone – hurry up and spend $400 bucks on the newest one!!!

By using Plaxo, many of my contacts are automatically updated in Outlook when they change their personal settings (like phone number) in Plaxo.   And guess where that goes?  To my phone of course.  So to recap that – if Johnny changes his phone number in Plaxo it automatically changes it in ALL my contact lists so next time I call Johnny I’m calling his new number without even realizing it.

So Phil, Sam, et al – syncing isn’t broke and waiting for a fix – it’s been available for a LONG time, it’s just not available to you because you hate Microsoft.  Hec, Outlook even works on a worthless Mac.

UPDATE:  My friend, Jesse Stay, has written a great tutorial in response to this post showing how to connect your iPhone with Exchange.  Check it out if you’re interested!

I’ve been blogging like crazy over on Utah Preppers and completely ignoring this one.  My passions and interests have shifted in the last year, quite a bit.  I’m not sure what’s coming down the road and I hope and pray that it’s not as bad as my imagination thinks it might be.  But, I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be pretty bad.  I’ve spent a lot of my life learning preparation and survival skills and the Utah Preppers blog gives me a way to share that knowledge with others – hopefully my blogging there will help others.

There are several things I want to update on.

The Juice Diet

My last couple posts were about me being on a juice diet – planned for 40 days.  When I started it I promised that if it compromised my health at all I would immediately stop it.  Well, five days into it I started passing blood – and stopped the diet.  After I stopped I didn’t have any more problems.  Something wonderful happened from it though!  I’ve been lactose intollerant for many years now, something in the juice diet changed that.  Since I spent 5 days only drinking pure juice I’ve been able to consume dairy products without ANY side effects!  I also felt pretty great and very energetic after the five days.  I plan to do a 5 day fast about once every couple months from now on.  It was a nice reboot.

Work

I recently took a full time position with a startup called LaneLinks.  We’re a backhaul management company for private fleets.  I’m the Director of Technology and while it’s been a tough adjustment to go back to a ‘real job’ it’s been very nice  to have a regular, reliable paycheck.  We’re building some very cool software that will change an industry that is stuck in the dark ages.

This Blog

I’m not sure where I want to go with this blog.  I’ve changed a lot in the last year.  Major trials tend to do that I hear.  I’m no longer interested in trying to stay on the bleeding edge of technology.  Web 2.0 has almost completely waned as an interest for me.  Some friends have said that they miss my tech posts and my views on emerging tech.  I don’t think I’ll be doing much of that anymore, maybe sometime down the road though, you never know.  I’ve tried to stay away from politics on this blog but lately politics have been really frustrating me and I’ll probably vent about them on here.  As I mentioned, preparedness is what has really flared up as a passion for me lately but I’ll keep most of that on a different blog.  Politics leads to preparedness and being a technologist means I’m looking at preparedness from that perspective a lot.  There are several technological things I’ve been working with in prepping and I’ll probably talk about that here.

People that know me know I’m an avid outdoorsman – that hasn’t changed a bit.  I’ve tried to keep my outdoor activities off this blog in the past but I’m thinking I may change that, although I may start using my personal blog for that (I haven’t blogged on that for years).  So, we’ll see where this goes.

Family

My family has been through a lot of trials in the last year.  I’m planning on writing a post about that soon.  My daughter Serenity, who has Leukemia, is doing fairly well right now.  She hasn’t had to be admitted to the hospital for several weeks so that is great!  Serenity was recently the recipient of the money raised at a charity tweetup at Sundance.  I’ll blog more on that later too but we’re very grateful for the communities continued concern and support for our daughter.

Other Activities

I plan to start doing a lot with The Serenity Foundation sometime in March (we are expecting to finish our software project at LaneLinks in Feb).  I plan on putting on more blood drives and doing several other things with the foundation.  Some people have asked me to put on more of my version of the Utah Geek Dinners – big with presenters, etc.  I may do some of that after March as well.  Some time ago I talked about doing a wellness bash for Serenity once she was stabilized a bit.  Her birthday is in May and spring will be here so I’m thinking of throwing her a community party sometime around then.

I’ve been thinking about putting on another conference.  This one would be Prepper and Technology based.  It will probably be in late summer or fall of 2009 if I decide to do it.  I think it would be a lot of fun.

I think that’s about it, that’s pretty much what’s going on in my life right now.  Thanks for still reading my blog after all this time.  Hopefully it’s still a little bit interesting.