I keep a blog of other posts that I read through Google Reader, and I share the most interesting articles.  You can find the full blog here, or you can just look to the black widget in my right sidebar.  You will have to scroll down, it’s "below the fold" (an old newspaper publishing term…remember newspapers? LOL). The cool thing about the Google Reader Shared Items is that it has it’s own RSS feed (found here).

Anyway, in case you ever wonder what I read, you will find my favorite posts in that little box on the right.  Enjoy.

My good friend Karen sent me a link to an article today called "12-step program for email addicts".  What do you think she was trying to say?

It’s an interesting read, and I saw myself more than once in it.  Fortunately a lot of what I saw was the "recovery" side of things.  As I’ve detailed many times on this blog, I think email can become more of a tool against productivity, even while we think it is bringing us toward productivity.  The most interesting line from the article?

On average, workers who receive an e-mail take four minutes to read it and recover from the interruption before they can resume working productively, Egan said.

FiOS is finally available in my neighborhood!  Hurray!  I put in the work order last week for the switch from my Comcast commercial line to the Verizon FiOS line.  The result will be faster speeds (both up and down) at 25% of the cost.  Hmmmm…not a bad deal.

The only thing that has gone wrong with my master plan is the Comcast disconnected the service a day earlier than they were supposed to.  This morning I have no internet access to my servers at home!  Bummer.  It’s not even worth calling them for though, I can wait for a day for FiOS.  It will give me a chance to move all of my nameservers anyway.  The result of today is that I cannot receive mail to my domain mattsingley.com, nor will my blog resolve through www.mattsingley.com, but you can still reach it directlly at http://mattsingley.typepad.com.

I love progress!

This is a great video for those that are interested in social networking and how it relates to the web.  Are you curious what this whole "Web 2.0" thing means?  Grab a water and a bag of popcorn and enjoy the next five minutes…

I put up a short post last October detailing how I start my morning…with blogs and news feeds, not the traditional morning newspaper.  Although I only got a handful of comments on the post, a lot of people mentioned this one to me and thought I was crazy.  "The newspaper will NEVER go away" they said (or something close to that).

Well, maybe I’m not so crazy.  At least the publisher of the New York Times agrees with me.

So waddya think?  Is the newspaper soon to be produced only to line the gerbil cage?  Other than ink on your hands, what do you get from a newspaper that you cannot get electronically?

Windows Vista Desktop

So I’m playing with Vista Enterprise Edition on my laptop right now.  And by “playing” I mean seeing how it runs on our networks.  So far there are some problems with the way it interacts with Small Business Server (it won’t run the login/out scripts) but that’s not the end of the world.

Of course I had to manually map our network drives, again not a big deal, but when it has to be done for everybody by hand it will be a big deal.

Network printers are kind of a pain because none of them have Vista drivers installed.  So I downloaded the Vista x64 driver for the Dell 3010cn that is right outside of my office and just shoot straight to it now instead of going through a print server.  Also, I’m having some program compatibility issues, but only out of the poorly written programs like CDM+ Pro.  I had to run it in backwards compatibility because, well, it’s CDM.

BTW, I’m digging the Aero…scrolling through multiple windows, opaque settings…all of it is very visually appealling.  I also like the Gadgets sidebar.  There are plenty of Gadgets to download that are useful.  Yes, the screenshot above shows my dual monitors…sweetness!

I’m talking mostly aesthetics right now, but the security features are incredible.  More on the tech side of the Vista deployment later.  And no Kurt, you cannot have Vista yet.  We have to run it on our network (yes, I’m the guinea pig) for a while before it gets pushed out to the rest of the clients.

Google Analytics

According to Google Analytics I no longer exist.  Well, more accurately nobody else knows that I exist.  Want proof?  Look at this chart…instant death yesterday!

I got an email from Tony early this morning.  “Google Analytics seems to have gone dead for me.  Are you still getting activity?”  Nope, was my simple reply.  I noticed the flat line also, but figured it wasn’t anything outside of my own site.  It appears to be a big problem though. Tony is reporting this on his site too, he inspired me to put my “time of death” graph up.

The blogosphere is starting to take notice.  Check out Technorati and even Google’s own blog search!

Google!  Help us!  We rely on analytics, if nothing else than to make us wonder who in the heck all those little dots are in Europe that read our blogs.  Restore Analytics!

UPDATE:  Somebody with the screen name of “AnalyticsPro” wrote this on a Google groups thread (I’m presuming (s)he actually works for Google):

Hi all,
Thank you for your posts.  We appreciate the urgency of receiving
timely report data and are aware of the slight reporting delay.
Report data normally takes 24 hours to process, and can sometimes take
longer, so we appreciate your patience as we work on this.  We expect
updates to be resolved quickly.
We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
AnalyticsPro

UPDATE II:  TechCrunch puts together a pretty short and good summary of the events of the day for Google.  It appears that things are back up and running now.