Google Sync for Windows Mobile

Google can now sync your Windows Mobile calendar and contacts with your Google Calendar and Gmail contacts. They announced this a couple of weeks ago on their blog. Today, I finally got around to trying it. I have to say that it gives new life to my 2 year old Windows Mobile phone. I’ve been contemplating a move to the T-Mobile G1, but with this service, I can comfortably wait for the G2 or some other better-looking Android phone.

It did not take very long for my calendar to synchronize between my old smartphone and Google Calendar. Within minutes I was able to view all of my appointments on my phone. It took a little longer for all my contacts to synchronize, but it worked out. The only limitation that Google Sync has is that it only works for your calendar and contacts. If you want to sync your email, Windows Mobile allows for the use of IMAP. Google’s Sync is not the perfect and complete solution, but it’s good enough that I don’t have to pay for Exchange hosting. One little surprise that I really liked is that contacts that come from Gmail also synchronize the person’s avatar. Of course, this works best for those people who are on Gmail and update their own. Otherwise, you pretty much have to create your own.

Google Sync is also supposed to work with the iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia S60, and Sony Ericsson. Of course, I could only test on Windows Mobile.

There are other sync features for PC, Mac, and Linux on the Google Sync page.

Utterli Groups for Your Hometown

If you have not heard by now, Utterli has Groups. I’ve created the following:

http://www.utterli.com/…ssionTexas
http://www.utterli.com/…andeValley
http://www.utterli.com/…adreIsland
http://www.utterli.com/…asPolitics
http://www.utterli.com/SMCRGV

Let me explain why I made them and why an Utterli Group might be good for your home town.

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Are you drinking late?

How to get around the exhaustion and hangover.

Mobile post sent by shaine using Utterli.  Replies.  mp3

Going Old School

Do you ever get tired of the newfangled stuff and feel a need to go old school? On occasion, I get tired of how complicated modern conveniences make life. It seems that whatever convenience we have gets evened out by an inconvenience.

For example, your nearby convenience store is great for picking up a quick item like milk or a soda. I think we all know that we pay a great deal more for that convenience than if we had driven down to the grocery store.

PDAs and smartphones are another example. They lend themselves very well to keeping your calendar, contacts, and other important information at hand. The price you pay is that it’s not exactly fast or easy to enter or edit information on a tiny keyboard with your thumbs. Let’s just say that you won’t be typing 40 wpm.

The other day, Mrs. Mata bought a cool coffee pot. It was programmable, self-cleaning, could adjust the strength of the coffee, and some other feature I can’t recall. Well, this sophisticated piece of kitchen machinery required the use of a proprietary water filter. What will happen when the company decides to stop making that filter? The carafe broke while pouring water, so we returned it and got a stovetop percolator from the camping section.

I seem to be returning to the old stuff in other areas too. For example, I now keep notes on paper first. It is much easier to keep track of thoughts this way. When I’m done, then I’ll transfer to digital. It seems when I’m on the computer generating a first draft of anything, I spend too much time fussing with all the features.

Computers are another modern convenience that inconvenience. For a computer, you need electricity. You need to buy software to make your computer useful. With web software, you need to subscribe to Internet. If you’re on the Internets, you need a firewall. You should also get an anti-virus to be safe. You need to back up your files. You need to manage your backups. Even with all this overhead, computers make our lives better to some extent, I think.

If I were mechanically inclined, I’d probably rebuild the engine on my old Aerostar so that it would run without the electronic stuff. Sure, it makes the engine run smoother, but if it goes haywire, it costs an arm and a leg to fix.

In summary, modern conveniences often complicate our lives. It makes me want to do things the old way, just so I can relax. But, this is the modern age. You can only get so far before somebody wants to synchronize, collaborate, or social network with you. Like the lottery, you have to play to win.

Posted by Shaine Mata
Posted via email from Shaine’s posterous

Moving Day – New Apartment

Mrs. Mata and I have a new place as of yesterday. We started moving stuff in last night, enough for us to sleep. There was no heavy furniture involved. The kids were pretty excited and wanted to spend the night even if we slept on the floor. My wife and I aren’t as resilient as we once were, but we slept on the floor anyway.

Today, we have to get our storage emptied out and then our furniture moved. Grandma will watch the baby while we put the other two to work. Our day will eventually take us to the local U-Haul rental as it is drizzly today. In previous moves, a pickup was enough.
We stopped by Danny’s Mexican Restaurant, a local favorite here in Mission, Texas, for breakfast and most especially coffee. We did not think ahead and failed to bring a coffee maker.
So we think we have a plan worked out more or less. We have some leeway because the move is in town; and, this is not a big town. There is no packing and unpacking, just moving. Well, time to get to work.

Posted by Shaine Mata
Posted via email from Shaine’s posterous

Godaddy Drops the Ball

I’ve been hosting with Godaddy for a while, maybe over 2 years. They used to be pretty good about taking care of stuff. In fact, they used to call me on occasion to make sure everything is OK. Something must have happened because they are just not able to take care of things as quickly as they used to. My hosting account went down for 3 days and according to customer service, it wasn’t even touched by the escalation team. Oh, and when they escalated, “it could take 24 to 72 hours”. Definitely not cool.

As a result, I decided to move my blog to WordPress.com and accept the themes available. I’m setting up hosting for other domains too, which is not exactly easy as I still have to deal with aliased domains to Godaddy servers. They also control my domains. I’m still trying to work with them. I purchased another hosting with Godaddy to get around waiting for their tech monkies to take care of my problem, but that’s not working either. If the problem is not resolved by tonight, I’ll have no choice other than to host elsewhere. It sucks when I’m forced to move my account elsewhere because of an “internal” problem over at Godaddy. I’m not really angry about it; shit happens. Rather, I’m pressed for time; I can’t stand around waiting for Godaddy to recover their fumble.

I’ve been waiting for…

I’ve been waiting for godaddy.com to get my website started over again. I am switching over to a new server and the problem is that I took it down 2 days ago Sunday night and it’s still here almost 72 hours and the site had go down godaddy.com and a copy in 2 hours and on that point they can’t do much to enter seed. So here I am stuck with the main website-

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Everybody is Freaking Out About Google Latitude

You may have heard that Google released a utility called Latitude a few days ago. What Latitude does is use cell tower triangulation on phones without GPS, or at least tries to do it, to figure out more or less where you are. It then puts your face up on a map to show people where you are. On phones with GPS, this should be a bit more accurate. Currently, the accuracy of my position has been between 2 and 4 miles. My current phone has no GPS. In other words, it shows where I am not almost all the time.

Nobody wants to try it

It is funny that with over 1,000 twitter followers and I don’t know how many people read this blog, only four people have cared to share their location with me. It makes me wonder how successful the utility will be in the long run. I think, like social media, most people just “don’t get it”.

There are levels of trust

Here are a couple things to clarify about Latitude. First, you only share your position with people you choose; this means only people you trust will be able to see where you are on their Latitude phone app. You can trust them a little, so that they know in which town you are in; or you can trust them a lot, so they can know approximately in what neighborhood you are in. You can also choose to not share your location with specific people from time to time. Of course, you can also turn off the app completely. In other words, you control who knows your location at any time.

They’re watching you! No, they’re not.

The biggest concern I hear expressed is, “I don’t want Google knowing where I am.” I seem to recall the same argument about Gmail and contextual ads years ago when it was first launched, “I don’t want Google reading my emails.” Here we are many years later and millions of people have Gmail accounts, some even multiple accounts.

I think what happened was that people realized that nobody is reading your emails. A server out of many thousands at Google scans your email for context and matches the right ads to it. Nobody at Google has time to look at your email account riddled with forwards, bacn, spam, real messages, and email verifications. The manpower is not there; especially now with cutbacks The same is true with Latitude.

Raise your hands in the air, like Google just don’t care

Google doesn’t care where you are. The people you ought to be worried about knowing your location (see those black vans?) can already track your mobile phone without Latitude or GPS, and without your permission. Google, on the other hand, doesn’t benefit from knowing where you are; what do they care? The people who benefit are you, your friends who participate, and the coffee shop where you’ll meet up after seeing your friend nearby.

What is Google really doing?

Google’s aim is to create a platform that will open up social media in new ways. The fashion in social media these days is the Tweetup. You agree to meet with a friend or two at a predetermined location through Twitter. Other people then see your tweets and jump in. Latitude eliminates the pre-planning. Let’s say you see a friend in the neighborhood and start up a chat to maybe get together at the park or a cafe. Maybe you’re out of town and don’t know that a friend is also visiting the same town, instant meetup. Perhaps you saw a big news event on twitter and see that one of your friends is out near where it happened, you got yourself a first-hand witness (wait for news organizations to realize that one).

Latitude’s real value

The real value of Latitude has not sunk in. Latitude can help create social experiences that you might otherwise miss. There is only so much socializing you can do from your keyboard at home through social media; doing it in person adds a whole other dimension. You’re more likely to get together with people while you’re out and about. It’s like Second Life; except it’s real life (and you can’t fly or teleport).

Suffering From Project Overload

Lately, I have been a bit scatter-brained, which resulted in a one-night mass consumption of beer on Friday night. The main problem has been a bit of a project overload. There are several seemingly important things tugging at my attention from day to day, and it gets more and more difficult to figure out which takes precedence. If you find yourself in a similar situation, maybe you can do what I propose doing, a triage of sorts.

First, Make Money

First, I have a responsibility to earn a living. I am responsible for my family and myself. Tasks that relate to doing business will have to take precedence. Some of the fun things I enjoy doing will have to take a back seat.

Second, do one thing at a time

This may seem like, “Duh!”; but you should probably tackle one project at a time. I don’t have the capacity to quickly and continuously retool my brain from one task to the next all day. You may find a similar inability to focus on more than a couple projects in a day. I’m just going to have to designate my projects by day of the week. This will ensure that I have the right mindset and tools for that one project or two on that day.

Third, Get Smart

In order to improve my chances at landing better deals, it is in my best interest, now that I am a freelancer, to keep honing my skills. This means that I must set time aside to learning how to do new things and improve on those I already do well.

Fourth, lay off the computer

In today’s climate of downsizing, I find that I am more inclined to lay off my computer as well. Computers carry some productivity overhead that make it difficult to focus. I’ve been going back to good old paper and pen to write notes. A big chunk of my computing lately, is going towards my phone. Even so, I am reviving the art of the phone call. OK, so I won’t completely let go of the computer; let’s just say it will be welcome to stay on part-time.

Cut back on the social media

There are several folks out there that swear you can check your email once a day, or once per week, and you would not miss anything important. Thanks to Gmail’s spam filter, I don’t get much spam; however, I get tons of bacn. Informative, yes; useful, no. They’re right. I don’t get any meaningful email that must be addressed right now. Mostly, urgent matters result in phone calls. I’m willing to guess that if I check my Facebook and other apps just once a week, I’ll save lots of time. The same is true for other networks. Twitter, well, that’s going to require medical intervention; maybe there’s a patch for it.

UPDATE

I ran across this video from Chris Brogan soon after writing this post.

Link Your Highrise Contacts to Your Google Phone

T-Mobile G1

Originally uploaded by Dave of wikiHowl

You can now link your T-Mobile G1 with your Highrise account. I’ve heard the G1 called a “toy” by early adopters who simply wanted to play with it rather than actually use it for business. Well, thanks to a third-party app, it’s not just a toy.

The leader of business smartphones is obviously RIM with their line of Blackberry phones. Blackberry phones link back to the mail server at work and can even synchronize contacts with your desktop computer. Often those contacts will also link to your company’s CRM. The same holds for Windows Mobile based phones. For the Corporate Ninja, the Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone is the weapon of choice. For the Freelance Ninja without an Intranet, however, the G1’s link to Gmail doesn’t just end with synchronized contacts on your PC. You can now synchronize your G1 phone and your Highrise account too, which serves like an Intranet and CRM of sorts.

According to 37 Signals, you can now synchronize your Gmail contacts with your Highrise account through a third-party application called Soocial. This means that your Highrise CRM will always have the most recent contact information as input on your G1. This saves you the headache of double entry and having to merge duplicate contacts when somebody changes their email address on you. This will undoubtedly save you time and effort having to manually synchronize.

I’ve had the opportunity to use Soocial for the past couple of weeks. My Highrise and Gmail contacts were synchronized overnight, making it faster and more convenient to send off the quick email rather than have to switch screens to look up an email address.

There is more. With other smartphones, besides the iPhone, you cannot browse Highrise from the mobile browser. So, if you need to search for a note on a customer while you are on the go, neither the Blackberry nor Windows Mobile browsers can properly render Highrise. The G1 has no such problem. You can definitely browse your Highrise account and navigate it successfully on the G1 browser. For the freelancer who depends on being out of the office, this is a great benefit as you no longer need to open up the laptop to access your Highrise records. It means true freedom and time savings.

Freelancecamp San Antonio

Freelancecamp San Antonio 2009

This weekend I had the chance to travel to San Antonio with Sergio Chapa to the 2nd Freelancecamp in the nation, and first in Texas. As a recent freelancer, it was a great experience for learning what other freelancers are doing and for a little bit of moral support. When you make the choice to go it alone, you get that sinking feeling that maybe, you made a mistake. It was great to see that many others have made that mistake successfully for many years.

I appreciate the work that Luis Sandoval, Alysan Delaney Childs, Jennifer Navarrete, and Gylon Jackson put into organizing the event. After speaking with them I learned that more than half of the attendees had never been to an unconference, like a Barcamp. That is a great success. I can’t get over the energy that was present at the event. Great job, guys.

I got recruited into doing a couple of presentations, though the first was more of a group interactive presentation. The first presentation was titled, I’m a Freelancer… Now what? We shared experiences with taxes, health insurance, and dealing with the challenges of being a freelancer.

The second presentation was on Creating a New Market for Social Media. Sergio Chapa helped me out on that one. We learned that Corpus Christi has some of the same challenges we have in the Rio Grande Valley. Fortunately, it was recorded by Leslie Baldwin and is viewable below.