New to me, that is. I recently adopted an iPod Touch from a friend who had upgraded to a Pre and didn’t want the Touch anymore. It came with me on my recent trip to NYC and I had a chance to put it through its paces pretty thoroughly along the way.

I like it quite a bit — for games, web browsing, and of course music. Battery life is decent (a cross-country flight didn’t even drain half the charge) and the screen is lovely. But I am still glad that I didn’t get an iPhone. The iPod’s virtual keyboard does not even come close to being as good as a real keyboard and I’d go nuts trying to manage my email with it.

I do feel a bit silly carrying an iPod Touch as well as a Blackberry. I think it’s the size. I’ve had an iPod Nano for ages, so I shouldn’t feel different about the Touch, but it is bigger than a Nano and that seems to matter. Even so, it’s not a showstopping issue.

I really hate the lack of a decent web browser on the Blackberry but its superb email handling still makes it the winning smartphone for my needs. Unless an AT&T Palm Pre comes out and utterly blows me away, looks like I’ll be staying a two-gadget gal for the foreseeable future.

I’m not sure if I have gone over to the Dark Side or to the light, but as of last night I’m the owner of a Blackberry Curve 8310.

Setting the BlackBerry up is kind of a pain, especially since my old Cingular SIM card needed to be replaced by a new AT&T card. I had to call to activate the phone, then go through three different setup procedures to get my BIS account and associated email activated. It’s not a very user-friendly process and had me seriously wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

Once that was all done, though, things got easier. I love the over-the-air install, and already have three 3rd party applications running on my Curve: Twitterberry, the Gmail client, and a multi-IM client called WebMessenger. I still don’t really know how to use all the features of the Curve, but I’ll learn.

On a side note — switching SIM cards, while not a Blackberry-specific issue, brought to light exactly how unorganized and messy my personal address book management has become over the past few years. I run Thunderbird on my desktop and my laptop, and neither of those address books is complete or up-to-date, with some more key data living only on the SIM that I can no longer use.

No matter what I do for a PIM solution next, it’s going to involve a bunch of tedious manual data entry to bring all the bits and pieces of contact info I’ve accumulated together. I’ve got to figure out how to minimize that. I’ve even found myself wondering if this might be a good job for Plaxo (I’ve heard that they are not a grubby spamhaus anymore).

Thoughts?

So today I accidentally did something very stupid. I locked my keys inside my car. Luckily for me, I have AAA. I called them and inside of an hour, the nice service guy got my door opened in about 30 seconds.

This is the second time this year I’ve needed to call AAA and my experience last time was just as good. And for this, I pay about $50 a year. What a bargain!

OnStar costs three times as much. Why would I want to pay that much more when the service I get from AAA is so great already?

Well, I’m back from Vegas, thoroughly exhausted, but glad I went. I met some great folks I’d previously only “known” online, and some new people as well. I went to one great party and one really sucky one. I’ve already blogged the notes from some of the presentations I went to – I also went to others that were not as good, but decided not to blog those. And I finally got to experience Las Vegas.

I can’t say I learned anything completely new at BlogWorld Expo, but I did fill in a couple of knowledge gaps (thanks Avinash!) and also came away feeling much more confident about my knowledge base.

Blogging well is not rocket science, after all. You only need three things to blog: a willingness to commit the time to do it, basic writing skills, and something to say. Ideally, what you have to say is topical, focused, entertaining, insightful, and/or informative. And if you can combine all those with a flair for self-promotion, then you have a shot at running a successful, well-read blog.

(You might ask, if I know this, why isn’t my blog more successful? Easy. I lack focus.)

Although I think the show was generally a success, I think it suffered a little by trying to reach the biggest possible audience. With dedicated tracks for sports bloggers and political bloggers and military bloggers and “god bloggers” as well as a range of more general blogging topics, the show and the attendees were all over the place. If the goal was to pump attendance as much as possible in order to make the sponsors happy, then I can see why they’d choose that tactic, but if you’re going to do that, you need to build more into the conference program to help people connect with each other. Adding some “BOF” (birds of a feather) networking sessions, for example, would be a good start. Maybe a few “unconference” slots, or a demo pit for bloggers to show off their blogs. Heck, even an easy to find OPML file of attendees would help.

BlogWorld Expo’s show floor was a mixed bag. A few interesting startups – Cocomment in particular looks like something I should give a thorough test-drive (plus they had great swag) — but also a bunch of political / military booths, and a big pile of vendors who were all about either 1) adding content to your blog (widgets & feeds) and/or 2) monetizing your blog (mostly via ads). Since I was there with my “corporate” hat on, I wasn’t all that interested in either category.

One other thing that jumped out at me was how bad the marketing was at a significant percentage of booths. Now, trade show marketing isn’t easy. You have a limited amount of space and time in which to get your message across, in a space you don’t have a lot of control over, and generally without enough budget. Plus, odds are several of your competitors will also be there. Doing it well is a real challenge.

But still, this is not brain surgery here, and some companies really dropped the ball. For example, I saw several booths where the entire display had no clear statement what the product was. I suppose those companies though that if they used clever teasers they’d get more people talking to the booth staff, but I found it annoying. Another booth featured a poker table. Yeah, I get it, poker is a Vegas tie-in, very cute, but it seems to me the subtext you’re putting out is that doing business with your company is a gamble. Not the message I’d send.

And then there were the booths where a couple of different groups or companies were piled in together. It worked in the Military.com booth, where they loaned space to a couple of relevant non-profits, but when you’ve got companies that have no clear link to each other jammed into a booth with sloppy piles of completely unrelated brochures, you’re not fooling anybody. I am a big fan of the “if you’re going to do something, don’t half-ass it” school of thought. If you can’t afford a proper booth, find something you can do well within your marketing budget and do that instead.

(I didn’t intend to spend so much time writing about the show floor, actually, but there’s an outside chance I’ll be in a booth at Macworld, so I’ve spent some time recently thinking about the subject. I guess it’s rubbed off.)

This is getting very long, and I’m ready to call it a night. So I’ll wrap for now. I might add some more tomorrow, we’ll see.

…picked a new web host, that is.

In recent comments, I got asked how I decided which web host to switch to once I gave up on Powweb. Truth is, it was not easy, and I very nearly re-upped with Powweb again, on the theory “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” But over the last 4 years, Powweb has gone from being a great company to one that I barely tolerated. I couldn’t bring myself to give them the $$ for another year. So I switched.

Finding a new host was definitely not a one-time project. I collected information on and off over the course of many months, from a number of sources. Those include word-of-mouth reports from other web folks on 2 mailing lists (WWWAC and SF-WOW) and reports from friends (like Glen). That gave me some anecdotal evidence to start with. Another site that was helpful for giving feedback and potential hosting company names was the WebHosting Talk forums.

I tended to avoid the various websites that list or rate web hosts, since many of them gave the impression of being basically advertising vehicles for the hosting companies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but I wanted user feedback more than anything else. Basic web hosting is so much of a commodity these days that I was more concerned with customer satisfaction within the price point I’d chosen (under $100 a year) than the nitty-gritty of exactly how many MBs of disk space or how many e-mail accounts I’d get with my service. I also gave bonus points to companies that had an actual customer forum, not just a one-way support desk.

I looked at Dreamhost, Laughing Squid, Media Temple, Lunarpages, 1 and 1, iPowerWeb, and a few others before deciding that A2 looked good. I did some more digging into A2, looking for reports of dissatisfied customers, outages, etc. Nothing bad jumped out at me. So I filed the information away.

As I said, this happened over the course of several months. Periodically I’d re-check, to see if opinion about a company was trending one way or another (increased outages, reports of slowness / overselling, etc). A2 still looked good.

Eventually, my old contract was about to run out, and it was time to push the button, one way or the other. So I took a deep breath and signed up with A2. And here I am.

That’s a little longwinded, but it’s the story of how I chose a new web host. I hope it helps someone.

I was scanning Twitter when I should be working, and came across this via Scoble:

On the one hand, it’s funny. On the other hand, how is this going to help sell more Toyotas?

I don’t see MMO fans as a prime market for oversized pickup trucks…. although maybe they’ve got some research to prove me wrong.

I signed up for Twitter some three months ago. Unlike some of Twitter’s more rapturous fans (like Scoble), my feelings are more mixed. On the one hand, I “get” Twitter. I like the idea, I think there’s a lot of uses for the service, and I’m pretty happy with the feature set. I’ve found some people who are using Twitter in interesting ways, and two real-life friends also Twitter. When it’s good, Twitter can be a lot of fun.

On the other hand, using Twitter feels like shouting down a well most of the time. I can count on the fingers of one hand the people who’ve actually had any interaction with me on Twitter (including the friends). It’s hard to stay enthusiastic about something when you get so little feedback.

All in all, I’d give my first 90 days with Twitter a B. I’m not inclined to stop Twittering, but it’s in no danger of replacing my blog any time soon.

There’s an old truism that if you get good customer service, you tell two people, but if you have a bad experience, you’ll tell 10. So here’s my small attempt to balance the scales:

Hotwire, you guys rock. Not only do you help me book good, inexpensive rental cars, but when I needed to cancel our vacation last week, your Customer Service staff told me exactly what I needed to do to request a refund, and then they processed the refund quickly. And this despite Hotwire’s very firmly stated ‘no refund’ policies. (No, I did not purchase trip insurance.)

Things have been stressful enough around here; you helped lessen my stress. I’m deeply grateful, and you can bet I’ll be using Hotwire again in the future.

I promised Scott a Nintendo Wii for his birthday, but it took a little time to actually track one down and get it here (thank you, eBay!). And yes, I am probably a fool for overpaying on eBay rather than camping a line for one, but I’m too damn old to sit out in the cold all night for a game console.

So far, we’ve set the console up, gotten it connected to the Internet, downloaded all the updates, and created two Mii avatars. After dinner, we’ll crack open the games (it came with Wii Sports, plus we bought Zelda and the Marvel game) and see how we do with those.

Apparently you can add Wii-owning friends to your Address Book and then their avatars will wander across your screen along with your own. If you’ve got a Wii and want to friend up, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail and we can exchange numbers. I’d rather not post our console number in public.

I’m liking the centralized repository of bookmarks aspect of del.icio.us; I can bookmark something from school or work and not have to e-mail it to myself at home. That’s useful. I’ve also tried finding interesting stuff from other people’s tags, which has been reasonably useful.

I haven’t tried uploading my “master” bookmark list, because that would mean having to tag a few hundred links, and that’s a lot of work.

At any rate, if you want to take a look:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/networkbadge/rslux?name;icon"></script>

Apropos of my comments on the last photo I posted, I need to find a good graphics editing application. I already have at least three of them on my hard drive (not including whatever graphics apps came as part of Windows XP or MS Office): Photoshop 7, ImageReady and Picasa. And of those three, none quite meets my needs.

Photoshop, is, of course, the gold standard when it comes to graphics manipulation applications. It can be made to do just about anything, if you know how to do it (and can stand waiting for the program to load — it takes forever, and I have a pretty good system here). And really, that’s the problem. Even after a number of years, I have no clue how to use 80% of what Photoshop has to offer. There are a lot of books and classes out there for Photoshop, so it’s not like I can’t fill in the gap. And I may end up doing that if I can’t find a better alternative. But still, using Photoshop for my personal photo editing feels like I’m using a Formula 1 race car to go buy the groceries. It’s nice to have all that power, but I’d really prefer to have a daily driver for just puttering around town.

I also have Adobe’s ImageReady program. It’s more or less a junior version of Photoshop, with some of the high-powered editing taken out and some new features added to make resizing photos for the Web easier. And you’d think that would be exactly what I was looking for, given my complaints about Photoshop? Well, it is, but it’s not. I hate the selection of filters that come in ImageReady. Adobe left all the cutesy filters — like the ones that will make your image look like a charcoal drawing or a mosaic — and took out the few Photoshop filters I actually knew how to use and liked using. I can crop and resize photos with ease, but editing them is still a hassle.

Finally, I have Picasa. And I don’t like it either. It’s reasonably intuitive to use, and does about 90% of what I need it to as far as photo editing goes, but unfortunately it also doubes as a photo management system. I’ve been keeping photos on my hard drive for a long time. I have a system in place for organizing them, and I really do not need Picasa trying to impose its own methodology onto my system. Even more annoying is the fact that you have to go through a series of steps and export photos into a new folder if you want to actually view the changes you have made to your photos in any application other than Picasa. More than anything else, this is a dealbreaker. It’s a huge pain in the butt. If I open a photo for editing, I want to keep the edits! I don’t want to have to export the editied photo to a new directory to have an edited version of my original photo. Finally, since Google owns Picasa, the interface is geared towards Gmail and Blogger, with no interface at all for Flickr.

On the OSS side of the house, I tried The Gimp on my Mac at work. Meh. It’s powerful but the UI was kind of a pain.

There are probably hundreds of alternative applications out there. Scott has already suggested a couple for me to try, and try them I shall. But I’d like to hear from you, too. What’s your favorite photo editor? If it’s Photoshop, how did you learn to get the most out of it?

So, this spring, Powweb, the company I use for my webhosting was sold. This caused me some concern, because it was announced to customers that as a part of the deal, all the sites hosted on the old web servers would be migrated to some new servers. And oh yea, that would involve an OS switch from FreeBSD to Linux.

I have my preferences for OSes, but I’m hardly a zealot on the subject. FreeBSD and Linux are both perfectly acceptable platforms for web hosting, and I’m not going to get too upset about which one my hosting company uses. However, I also know that switching from one OS to another is bound to cause problems. Things are installed in different places, some modules may not be installed at all, paths change … in short, it tends to break stuff. I was concerned.

My site is not all that complex. I have a copy of Movable Type and a copy of Gallery up and running, and I have only one plug-in that touches my otherwise vanilla installation — MT-Blacklist. It’s a critical part of my website because it makes managing the trackback and comment spam that are the plague of a blogger really simple.

So of course, Powweb’s migration of my site from the old servers to the new ones managed to utterly break MT-Blacklist.

If you’re interested, here’s the error I get when I try to use MT-Blacklist now:

An error occurred: Out of memory during “large” request for 2147487744 bytes, total sbrk() is 5480448 bytes at ../../lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into ../../lib/auto/Storable/thaw.al) line 366, at /home/users/web/b1970/[username]/htdocs/lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 28

I have done some web-based scripting, but that was a long time ago, and only using Cold Fusion. I can customize the settings on someone else’s code, and if I really focused in hard I could probably make some very basic tweaks to an existing script, but troubleshooting something like this, especially on a server where I don’t know what’s installed on it nor what the paths are, is simply beyond me.

At any rate, I opened a ticket with Powweb Support about this problem, and waited. And waited. Every other day, I would send Support an e-mail asking what was up, and each time I was told, “Please be patient, someone is working on your problem.” So I waited. And manually deleted the pings and trackback spam that I kept on getting. After Day 6, I sent a slightly more annoyed e-mail to Support saying that 6 days to fix one script was more than enough, and that moving to a new company was starting to look like a good option. I got a slightly more effusive response, explaining that the issue was being “forwarded to our senior specialist”. I started looking at new web hosts, but decided to give Support a chance to do its thing.

Today though, I finally got the much awaited response from their senior specialist. And what was it? “We Googled your problem, and here’s a blogger in December 2004 who also had this problem. Try their fix and see if that helps.”

Some “Senior Specialist”.

Now, I am pissed off. I waited 8 days thinking I was going to get some expert help, and all I got was a Google search? I can do that myself. I was expecting that someone would look at the script, notice what it calls, and then compare it to what is on the new server to see whether the switch from BSD to Linux caused modules to move, be missing, or act differently. That’s the kind of thing that I as an end-user can’t do.

Yes I know, a real geek would self-host and avoid the problem entirely. I’d rather pay for shared hosting than self-host from the DSL line in my home. Our DSL provider is good, but we do have outages from time to time, and I want the bandwidth, monitoring, uptime & redundancy that you get from a professional host.

In some ways, I’m SOL, and it’s my own fault. MT-Blacklist has been integrated into MovableType since version 3.x, and I’m still using the plug-in version with MT 2.6x, so I can’t go to the author for support: the response will be, “Upgrade”. Which I have not wanted to do, because that would entail re-customizing all of the Movable Type templates in order to get the look and feel of my site back, and I didn’t see the point of doing that when everything was working quite nicely the way it was.

With the long weekend coming up, and us not having much in the way of plans, switching web hosts and/or upgrading my Movable Type installation might be a good project to take up. But then the issue becomes — will I just be trading one set of problems for another?

*mumble grumble grr*