I think that this all comes from 2 places which are my connection to my computer and my VOIP service from home that forwards an email to me with the message attached in .wav format. AWESOME!

I am also a heck of a lot more relaxed at home about this kind of stuff (my wife may disagree). A couple of more seconds to wait for x, y, z at home is not a big issue but at work I try to maximize my time. Often my voice mail comes from people other than my fellow IT collegues, sometimes my wife actually. It sucks to have to go and check that message just to hear “Call me”. Accck, send me a text on my phone or something :)

We have a VOIP system at work, when will all our voice mail be emailed to us? I suppose my real gripe here is that we have so many branches of technology and even though they are all more advanced and often more efficient in comparison to the past it is the fact that all of them still require our time separately is the problem.

Geek on!

I have been following Chris Pirillo for some time and when I referenced the “industry leader” above, I was referring to him. He recorded a video and pretty much hit the nail on the head.

What are your thoughts on the matter? There are tools that are much better designed to converse with than Twitter is.

Geek on!

Remember these? They definitely have a Canadian feel to them but you get the idea :)

Holy crap! I could go on forever. Post your links to your favorites below.

Geek on!

I am a logical person and I know that this is a simple procedure done thousands of times a day, but it isn’t done to our little guy everyday so it’s a bit stressful. It’s making me feel a little disconnected and I don’t mind it really. A little switch of priorities for a while doesn’t hurt. The little guy and I had a dad day on Sunday which was kinda nice. We even ended up at Opa’s house to start building mom’s Christmas present :)

Anyhow, geek on folks :)

The winner will receive a Google Wave invite and have their article posted at http://www.thesleepygeek.com.

Article submissions should be sent in to my email address at marcus@hamaker.net and before the end of Wednesday November 4th, 2009.

So take the weekend to think about something good! Make sure to include a link to your site/blog so that I can link to it.

Geek on!

Congratulations Jackie!

Your Google Wave invite has been submitted and is on its way. Keep in mind that there are delays with this. In Google’s words – “Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.”

I sent a very good friend an invite and it took him 4 days to get the email, so be patient!

Geek on!

PS – for those of you who didn’t catch it, Jackie is a high school teacher and will be sharing the platform with her students. Not bad for a lucky draw, I am excited that she is getting to use it to educate our future geeks!

Keep your eyes peeled. I still have some invites available and will be starting a new campaign shortly.

Move out Google Analytics, move in Woopra.

Woopra is another analytics service but they offer a slightly more detailed look at your stats. Live view is one of the most impressive things that I have seen for web stats and with a little work and tweaking I managed to up my page views by 1000% yesterday.

This service is not free across the board however. It is based on page views and if you are over 30,000 then you have to pay for the service. Most people are under that and that means that it’s a viable solution for the little guy. I truly believe that you can gather enough money from Adsence to pay for this if you have that many hits.

They also have a client program that you can download which is even better then their web interface. You can remain logged in which allows you to view your current status or any history when you like. AWESOME!

One thing that I have noticed that screwed me up a little was my time zone setting. By default it is set to UTC so if you are somewhere else you really want to change that. The problem I had was that it didn’t take affect when I set up my URL the first time. Then my reports reset at 7pm which was annoying, especially yesterday!

I still like to have my Google Analytics setup and the code remains in my html for now. Google is pretty much a standard when it comes to this information so I like it to be there. I am not sure if Woopra will be around forever so I like to have my information in more than one place. It’s almost like a backup copy of my stats, like they say “Data doesn’t exist until it exists in 2 places”.

Have fun with it, if you have 100 hits a day then it starts to get a little addictive ;)

Geek on!

I love it. Google has just released a new feature in the Docs app to allow you to export your documents to the most popular formats. This is really cool! If you are like me then you have some cases where Docs makes sense. Most of the time for me that means that I need to share a document with someone and collaborate on it. Bryan (http://www.geekerrific.com) whom I do Everyday Geek with and I use Docs all the time to work on podcast planning. We have lists of tasks that need to be completed as well as show setup lists. Amazing how easy it is to work on the document at the same time.

But there is always that chance that a document that was worked on in Google needs to be sent somewhere in a different format.

“Convert, Zip and Download” now joins dozens of other liberation features across our product offerings, ranging from Blogger’s full blog downloads to email export from Gmail using IMAP and POP3. The feature lets you bundle your Google Docs in a format of your choice (MS Office, Open Office, PDF, etc.) and download them as a zip file. No longer do you have to download each document individually, which can take a lot of time if you have hundreds of documents like I do! All you need to do is select the relevant Docs, click on “Export” from the “More Actions” menu and download them in one go. (Check out the Google Docs Blog for more details.)

I encourage you to take a look at this new feature. To know that you can export your written docs in Word format or your spreadsheets in Excel format is a real asset. I also love the fact that you can export as a PDF. If you don’t have a utility to make a PDF on your computer, then a quick and dirty way could be to import a doc into Google Docs and then export it to PDF.

Happy Googling everyone,

Geek on!

I will chose a winner from the list below. Thanks for reading!

Geek on!

EDIT (28-Oct-2009 – 8:30ET)
I am going to leave this open until 3:00pm ET today. Then the CHOICE! But don’t fret… if you don’t get chosen I will be coming up with another draw scenario to get another wave invite :)

Well when doing so today I noticed something new! Twitter is now blocking repeated tweets.

This can really only be a good thing. I am not saying I won’t miss the chance to give my posts another plug. I even went as far as to do a few auto posts about the more popular articles, but I turned it off. I was on the fence about how that would look from the other end and decided it was too SPAMIO!

So we have been saved from the double post… or have we?

I am not sure what the status is on the API. The API is what allows external applications or websites to link back to twitter and perform tasks in the system. So they have blocked the double post on the website, but what about those other apps?

Well I took my TweetDeck out for a spin to give it a try. Posts number 2 and 3 are nowhere to be found. I am not sure I really like the result, it didn’t return an error but it looks like the change is across the board.

Goo work Twitter! I think that this is for the better.

Geek on!