So, I plugged in my iPhone into the Mac in order to recharge the battery today, and was asked to upgrade to the new 4.0 OS (which I had previously Ok’d for download).

What the hell, I’ve got a few minutes before I have to run … And Apple’s been pretty good about seemless updates, right?

Wrong.

About 20 minutes later, I get the notification that the phone cannot be used because iTunes is out of date.

WTF?

And sure enough, the phone is dead as a doornail – it can make emergency calls, and that’s it.

At the very least, iTunes could have checked the required version BEFORE attempting to update the phone and killing the device. That’s basic update 1.0.1 … check to make sure the requirements have been met BEFORE you attempt an update.

The real problem here is that my confidence is shaken … if they (Apple engineers) can make that kind of simple mistake, what else has been overlooked?

I’m moving to a Droid Incredible as soon at comes in (it was orderd on Father’s day) … not because of Apple, but because of AT&T’s crappy service – but this hairowing experience has me just as glad to be on a phone that isn’t tied to (literally) iTunes.

So, between 2 kids softball games and Jacky’s party tonight, All while doing my own product launch, I have to somehow find time to upgrade iTunes and try a reinstall …

(I’m writing this post while iTunes is doing downloading)

Point: beware of this update, and upgrade your OS and iTunes, FIRST.

I’ve just finished the integration of Marketing Website Generator into iContact. You can read more bout it at the Intellispire blog.

I’ve been thinking about David Allen’s use of the word “project” for quite a while, and am becoming more and more unsatisfied with with it’s definition in my day to day work.

If you’re not familiar, here’s the official definition:
“Our definition of “project” is any outcome you’re committed to complete that requires more than one action step. That can encompass quite a range of things, from “Replace tires on the car” to “Reorganize marketing division.””

The problem, here is that in my lines of work, “project” already has a precise meaning:
A project in business and science is a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.

Now, if everyone I worked with agreed to change the definition of “project” to the GTD way, then everything would be fine.  The reality, though is that I have to work with most people who don’t “do” (or usually have even heard of GTD), thus making communication difficult – or at least, somewhat confusing at best.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need “something” to define a committed outcome, we do. I’m just using the word “task” for that outcome statement.

This seems to work.  I think have three major lists to work from:

- my projects. These are the things that involve other people, are managed by Microsoft Project or similiar, and use the accepted (varied) definitions.  When I talk to my staff about the “project for client X”, we all know exactly what we mean.

- then I have my tasks lists.  These are the committed outcomes, and usually – but not always, align to a higher level project. In many cases, a Project is Also a Task, but not all tasks are Projects.

- From there, I then have Actions .. the next action items to complete each task.

I’ve seen the Outlook GTD try to manage a similar issue … that of having “big projects” that require multipe “little projects” to complete managed by a “sub project” capability, which is sub-optimum in my view. By simply leaving the word “Project” as an externally defined entity, and managing at the runway level the Tasks and Actions.

The danger here … and one that I believe David may have been trying to avoid … is that systems other than GTD use the word “task” to mean something amorphous, and can itself be confusing when applied to GTD, and with GTD, the intent is to “break out of the mold” and not pigeoh-hole GTD with other time management systems.  The reality for me is that I spend far more time communicating with people about who “don’t do” GTD about projects than I do about sub-projects, tasks, or actions … so aligning the updated definition is much easier when it’s an “internal” shift than it is trying to explain my meaning to each new person I work with, or having to mentally translate between definitions.

So I work, day to day, from my actions list which are tagged to tasks, just as described.  Projects are reviewed at least weekly, usually as external commitments. And when talking with GTD’ers, I can mentally switch vocabulary and call my “tasks” projects, and we are all on the same page.

I’ve implemented this in pretty much every system that can implement tags.  My Contexts all start with an “@”, my Projects all start with an “+” sign, tasks with a “-” sign, and the actions are tagged to the task/project/context for which they relate. This works in Remember The Milk, GMail and Evernote, among others – as long as you keep your tagging relatively consistent,

Getting a list is as easy as clicking on a tag, my actions list is eveything not starting with a special character, and moving from one list to another

Another side effect of this technique is that an action can “appear” on multiple lists, just by adding the appropriate tag.

It seems to be possible to create a “mashup” application that will pull data from all of the above plus others, I’m still experimenting with that concept. I find that it’s easy to keep all the Actions in RTM, but reference needs links to GMail and Evernote … and sometimes Google Docs or Dropbox.  I’d also love to have a way to display appropriate task items from various PM tools such as RedMine.

Android is beginning to look like a promising platform for suh a mashup, while the iPhone’s lack of multi-tasking is seriously starting to cause frustration.

If you’re familiar with Tolkien’s Middle Earth, then you
know what a hobbit is.

They have a special place in my heart because as a child,
I was told I was too slow to be able to read.

But eventually I spent my reading time devouring The Hobbit
and The Lord of the Rings.

So, you could say, Hobbits helped teach me to read.
(along with my parents, thanks Mom & Dad)

Hobbits also have another strange custom I enjoy … when it’s
their birthday, they give gifts to all their friends.

And, guess what? Today’s may birthday!

So, for this weekend only, I’ve acquired a special report
that you can download as my birthday gift to you.

http://www.nicktemple.com/birthday/

No, I’m not really a hobbit, but I do love the creatures
and I think we can all learn a lot from their kindness
and love of life.

Have a great weekend.

Nick

P.S.: In case you are curious, I was able to build
out that complete site in a hair less than 3 hours -
from downloading the product to writing this email,
using the MWG.

About a year ago, I made a post talking about a Joomla plugin I created to connect Joomla! to Cloudfront.

You can read the full post here:
http://www.nicktemple.com/2008/206/cloudfront-plugin-for-joomla.html

After many requests, I decided to release the system under the GPL, and make it available to all for free.

The system needs some work: specifically in the areas of support for CSS files, features, and documentation.

You can download the code from subversion on Google Code. Support is provided only through the linked Google group however I may be available for implementation consulting on large projects – contact Intellispire if you are interested.

I have some open source software you can

download that helps you to build marketing
based websites.  Details momentarily.

We’ve just released the Software Installer for
Joomla!, 1.5.1 beta 1.

This fixes some problems with hosts that have
turned off the posix extensions, which we use
for determining whether or not files are
writeable during upgrade.

However, there may still be some issues on
some hosts.  Please download & test:

http://www.intellispire.com/web/component/option,com_kunena/Itemid,205/catid,31/func,view/id,26/

Please let us know if it works (or doesn’t) for you.

We’ll make it generally available once we’ve confirmed
the fix.

Also, you may have heard of Mike Filsames’ Butterfly
Marketing website building software is now
open source under the GNU/GPL license.

Exercising the rights under the GPL, we’ve re-built
the software as the Marketing Website Generator
software, just like Joomla! was orignally Mambo.

You can download a copy of MWG from our marketing
site:

http://marketingwebsitegenerator.com/

It isn’t as polished as Joomla!, and is used for a different
purpose. There are offers of support and extra extensions
along the way, which I encourage you to seriously consider.

Thanks,

Nick

For the last couple of years, I’ve been doing virtually all of my development on an Amazon EC2 server I’ve called “the forge”.

In order to make sure my backup system was 100%, I just “tested” having a catastrophic failure. I brought up a new instance, cloned the EBS volume (disk), and switched the elastic IP.

New server, identical to the first.

Total time? Less than 5 minutes, and absolutely zero detectable downtime (I’m sure there was a few seconds during the elastic IP switch).

Now, for the second time, I feel reluctant to “terminate” the instance of the server that has served so faithfully for nearly a year:

16:43:23 up 298 days, 18:36, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

And, again, I re-iterate – I’ve never had a hardware solution (shared or dedicated) from any hosting company that has been as reliable as the “virtual” servers from amazon – nor any that I could replicate and get back up so quickly in the event that there was a failure.

Good work Amazon!

This weekend I took some “guy time” with my son, Lee.

We went to Mammoth Cave, someplace I visited yearly in my youth.

While Lee and I had a great time, and there’s lots of little stories that will come out of this trip, the subject of this post is about finding my personal path … about silence.

During one part of the cave tour, the guide turns out the lights in the cave and everyone is silent.

And, during that five seconds, something happened.

I could see nothing, for the first time … in ever? (Even with your eyes closed, their is usually ambient enough light to see splotches through your eyelids.)

The silence itself was loud, people breathing, shuffling, hearts beating, and many sounds I could not immediately recognize … but it was still quieter than I can ever remember.

At the time, I remembered the experience, though it was cool, and thought little of it.

But that night, I had changed.

After getting home about 10:00pm with Lee, I sat in my Wife’s office and we discussed the day (and the tribulations of the last week, which had been seriously stressful).

We were talking about new opportunities, and up from … my center … just came a clarity of mind that is impossible to describe in words.

I knew I had been chasing a 20+ year old dream, that had not changed as I had changed.

And how that has effected my life in many ways, very few of them positive.

I realized my priorities in life had changed, but I had not recognized that change, so continue to act out of outdated paradigms.

In that five seconds of darkness and silence, I became more clear than I have been in a very long time.

What is next?

The insights received are still coming, and will continue to do so. The centeredness I feel now will ebb and flow, and I will begin to re-adjust my actions to my being.

It won’t be perfect.

And I will continue to look for that experience, to find the place, to re-center.

A question for you: where on earth can I go to meditate, to pray, to be alone, without light or sound?

Peace,

Nick

I have an old P4/3.4Ghz tower that has been (up until this point) running Fedora Core 8. One thing I have never been able to do is to get the Linksys wireless networking card running.

Since I need to rebuild it for the kids anyway (they are all hot on learning how to really work on the Internet), I thought I’d try Ubuntu as it was recommended by a friend.

The first problem I had was the install media … after burning and trying 3 different CD’s, each one had multiple errors when I tried to install.

What’s really weird is the erors came up in different places (same disk, different reboots).

This could be the media itself (Memorex), the burner or the reader … I don’t actually know.

What DID work, however, was buring the CD ISO to a DVD instead … first time worked wonderfully, and ubunty came up quickly and without a hitch.

Getting the wireless card running is still not happening, however. ndiswrapper says hardware is present, and modprobe says that ndiswrapper is installed, but still no wlan0 to fiddle with.

I’ve been futzing with hardware most of the evening (after we returned from Six Flags), and am putting it away for now. It may just require a reboot … but given that I’m running from CD (DVD) that’s not an option. I’ll need to find a way to do some sort of “soft reset” that doesn’t dump the ramdisk.

IF I can get this card working, then I’ll switch to Ubuntu permanently and let the kids have at it …

Anyone have any clues?

I’ve had a few requests that I port the Intellispire Auto-Responder products I’ve created for Joomla! over to WordPress. I’m still unsure though – will people using wordpress use plugins for auto-responders?

You can find a complete list of autoresponder products here.

Let me know what you think – should we port? Or spend the time adding more options (AutoResponse Plus, Constant Contact, MailChimp … any others?)