When people hear the name Steven Seagal, thoughts of cheesy, awful, and “straight to video movies” no doubt come to mind. While not every Seagal flick is bad, I admit that my mind too tends to focus on today’s Steven Seagal as opposed to the once popular action star from the 80’s and early 90’s. In fact, if you personally know me, I have no doubt told you my funny Steven Seagal/Taco Bell analogy.
I recently decided to return to my Aikido training after a near four year hiatus I took at the time my son was born. This has led to numerous conversations with friends and family who know very little, if anything about Aikido. The easiest way to explain this martial art used to be mentioning that it was the style Steven Seagal used in his movies. Unfortunately, saying that today almost guarantees receiving questionable looks and/or snide remarks.
And that’s very unfortunate indeed. You see, back before Steven Seagal starred in his own films, had an album, or his energy drink, his complete focus was on the practice and instruction of Aikido. Very few realize that Steven Seagal IS a master Aikido practioner. Thanks to sites like YouTube, previously unseen footage of Seagal, complete with a wild curly head of hair, practicing Aikido can now be viewed. His technique is hypnotic, extremely fast and very effective.
It was his proficiency in this art that grabbed Hollywood’s attention in the early 80’s and made him an action star. Thanks to movies like Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Out for Justice, Marked for Death, and Under Siege, Aikido was introduced to mainstream audiences. In my opinion, the adoption of Aikido by many westerners was largely based on the influence of Seagal’s early films. Or at least, that’s what perked my interest in the art.
Unfortunately, it appears that his movie career may have been his undoing. Today, the once prominent Aikido master is nothing more than a punch line for most. Very Sad.
Two months into my tenure with an iPhone, I find myself completely addicted to the device. Prior to the iPhone, I’d spent time with various other mobile handheld devices, mostly Windows based. Many of these device were cool in their own right, but just couldn’t provide the mobile experience I craved. And while I dislike Apple and it’s evil marketing and legal schemes, the iPhone is by far the only device I’ve owned that has provided me with a true Internet connected mobile experience. That being said, it’s not without its drawbacks. Aside from some of the most obvious: “Where the hell is copy and paste?” my biggest annoyance has been its calendar functionality.
You see, in an attempt to squeeze every last dollar from the consuming public, Apple has handicapped the iPhone so it cannot handle synchronization from multiple calendars. To make matters worse, Apple has chosen not to release the calendar APIs to third party developers, which destroys any hope of a third party solution to calendar synchronization.
Apple’s attempts to justify this is nothing more than eyewash as it’s plainly clear to see this is nothing more than a marketing initiative, not a technical problem. Apple’s MobileMe service promises to synchronize all your calendars for a $99 annual fee. In other words, out of box iPhone calendar synchronization is possible, but it will cost you $99 to activate. How the consuming public puts up with this type of behavior still gets me. No thanks, Apple. I’ll figure out a way to do this on my own.
My work calendar is natively synchronized to the iPhone via its exchange synchronization. But I also have a personal calendar I use at home that I’d like to merge with my iPhone calendar. Googling “iPhone multiple calendar synchronization “ returns a myriad of links regarding the problem, with very few solutions. The solutions I was able to find were rather hoaky or required syncing from a web service, such as Plaxo or Funambol. We’ll talk more about Funambol in a bit.
I realized fairly quickly that I needed to evaluate this problem from a different angle and then it hit me! Because the iPhone was already syncing with my work’s Exchange server, the simplest solution was to sync my work exchange calendar with my personal calendar. After a lot of reading and research I finally stumbled onto the underlying answer: SyncML. SyncML is a standard to sync PIM information between devices.
Here’s what you need to get it to work – or at least what I did:
• A home server with Internet access – I used my existing Gentoo Linux server.
• A groupware solution that supports SyncML – Since it had an existing package for my Linux distro, I chose eGroupware as my server solution. Funambol is another good option since they make their server software available to download for free.
• A client that supports SyncML – I used the free Funambol client plug-in for Outlook.
After installing the Funambol client to all my outlook clients (work, home computer, personal laptop) I configured them to sync to my Gentoo server on a regular schedule over an encrypted SSL channel. End result? No matter which computer I’m using, my Outlook calendars are synced… and as an added bonus, so is my iPhone.
I hate paper. It costs money to print, takes precious space to store, and is difficult to organize in an efficient manner.
Case in point, we have a small filing cabinet in our home office where we keep our “important” papers for each year, mostly consisting of billing and bank statements, receipts, and any other general documents we feel are important enought o keep around. At the end of each year, we empty out the cabinet into an office box and keep it around until tax time, after which we put it in storage for five years, “just in case”. At that point we take whichever is the oldest office box and dispose of it, which normally entails me sitting by the shredder for a couple of hours. As it’s a new year, I know my day of reckoning is upon me.
Over the past few years I’ve been thinking about methods for shrinking this volume of paper considerably or getting rid of it all together. As a result, I’ve decided to test a new method in parallel to our normal process. Essentially I’m imaging 2009 incoming documents to PDF forms prior to filing. To generate the PDF files, I’m using ScantoPDF from Softi Software, a nifty program that does just that. It isn’t free, but well worth the $25 price tag. Newer versions of Quicken also have a simliar capability with the added bonus of attaching images to register entries. Our images are saved to my computer in a group of file folders I created mimicking the folder names in the physical filing cabinet. The goal is to keep this data electronic for the five year retention period, at the end of which we could permanently delete expired data with a few keystrokes. The thought alone of not having to shred for hours was all the justification I needed. Not to mention the amount of space and money we’ll save.
As for losing information due to a hard drive crash, our backup process has been tested before and exceeded expectations. I’m confident it will be sufficient for the availability of our important documents.
We’ll see how it goes in 2009. If it’s successful, perhaps we’ll go full paperless next year.
Welcome to the new, and currently under construction, “My Waste of Bandwidth”. For the past couple of years, the bulk of my website development time has been spent on my social forum site: www.chewk.com and recently setting up our family website. The www.mywasteofbandwidth.com has been my longest held domain name and incidentally, the name of various incarnations of my personal homepage since 1996. I decided rather than leaving the domain to serve simply as a redirect to www.chewk.com, it would be best served if I made it my personal web page once again.
Expect posts mainly dealing with my various hobbies and interests with the humorous picture or video thrown in from time to time. In keeping with the subtitle of the page, don’t expect a post every day. While I’ll make an attempt to post periodically, let’s be realistic. No one gives a hoot about what I did today and what not. The goal is to post items that may be helpful to others with similar interests. I’ve learned a lot from the Internet. It’s time to give some knowledge back.
So pardon the dust around the site for the next couple of weeks. This is going to be slow to start, but hopefully we’ll build momentum and continue it for a long time to come.
When people hear the name Steven Seagal, thoughts of cheesy, awful, and “straight to video movies” no doubt come to mind. While not every Seagal flick is bad, I admit that my mind too tends to focus on today’s Steven Seagal as opposed to the once popular action star from the 80’s and early 90’s. In fact, if you personally know me, I have no doubt told you my funny Steven Seagal/Taco Bell analogy.
Two months into my tenure with an iPhone, I find myself completely addicted to the device. Prior to the iPhone, I’d spent time with various other mobile handheld devices, mostly Windows based. Many of these device were cool in their own right, but just couldn’t provide the mobile experience I craved. And while I dislike Apple and it’s evil marketing and legal schemes, the iPhone is by far the only device I’ve owned that has provided me with a true Internet connected mobile experience. That being said, it’s not without its drawbacks. Aside from some of the most obvious: “Where the hell is copy and paste?” my biggest annoyance has been its calendar functionality.
I hate paper. It costs money to print, takes precious space to store, and is difficult to organize in an efficient manner.
