Matt Singley | Social Media Optimization

Sitting in the coffee shop earlier, I noticed a few others in the shop listening to music like I was.  I was plugged directly into my laptop, but nobody else was doing that.  Of the 5 others I saw, 3 were using iPods.  Nice market share Apple! 

I don’t own an iPod.  I would be horribly surprised if I ever did.  Why?  Overpriced, under performing and limiting.  They do a fine job, but fine doesn’t cut it for me with electronics.  I’ve been keeping an eye on the portable music market, and I’ve got to say, iPod is exceptional in its market push, but less-than-mediocre with what it delivers.

Before anybody asks me via email or comments what I use, I’ll just offer it up, and it’s going to make you laugh.  When I go to the gym and work out, I carry a 256 MB Rio.  Yup, 256 megs. *gasp*  Why?  Two reasons: 1st, it’s so simple to sync mobile devices without much effort (especially w/ Windows Media v 11), and I change my portable play list often.  Frankly, I don’t have 4GB of music that I want to listen to at the gym.  My library is deep and wide (21+GB as of this writing), but a lot of that isn’t good music for the gym.  I need some beat, I need something to keep my blood pumping while I’ll exercising.  Second reason: I’m cheap.  When I take something to the gym, I cannot expect it never to get damaged/lost/stolen.  For that reason, a little $40 player suits me just fine.  If I lose it, it’s not the end of the world.  "But Matt, it doesn’t play video…".  Yeah.  I’m aware of that.  The 18 televisions at the gym do however.  Thanks for thinking of me though.

Seriously, I don’t think I’ll ever get an iPod.  If/when I feel that I need a high capacity player (BTW, I have a 1GB SD card that I can slide into my MP3 player anytime I want MORE), then I will stay away from Apple’s offerings.  What else is available?  Plenty!  Check out this site.  If you want some satirical marketing (viral marketing to boot), check out the iDon’t page.

So what about you?  What do you use to listen to your music?  Please, somebody say a record player and be telling the truth! ;)

Thanks to Jason for the post about Adobe finally offering non-profit pricing.  Since we’re bringing Creative Suite into the church on several computers, this got me pretty excited!  I contacted CDW right away to sign up for this program.  This is a good company that is usually on the ball.  Unfortunately the rep on the other end of the phone didn’t know what I was talking about. So he said he would look into it.  I came into work this morning, retrieved my email and had a note from CDW.  It said:

Although Adobe has put together a NP program CDW is currently not set up to sell from it.  Due to legal paperwork that is required before CDW becomes authorized to sell from this program, there is currently not an ETA for a CDW start up date.Sorry that I do not have a better answer for you.  However, until we are set up on this new program I will give you the best competitive pricing that I have available to me.  Talk to you soon!

Rats!  We need to purchase a couple of licenses for Adobe CS2 pronto!  So I’ll have to do a little more leg work to find out where to get it at non-profit pricing.  *shrugs*  If it will save us several hundred dollars, it is well worth the time.

UPDATE: CDW is now missing from the list of authorized resellers for the non-profit program from Adobe.  They were there last week!  LOL…now I have to go down this list and sign up with a new vendor.  We’re still going to go w/ CDW for all of our Microsoft needs though.  They’re a top notch reseller.  If you are a non-profit and aren’t taking advantage of this program, you are throwing your money away!  Call CDW today!

UPDATE #2 (June 6): John (I believe he is the department manager for Adobe w/ CDW) called me this morning and left a voicemail indicating that everything has in fact gone through the hoops at CDW in terms of their compliance with Adobe and the NP pricing.  He expects to be selling this coming Thursday or Friday.  I’ll create a detailed post when the information is available.

It’s been a brutal weekend at Sunset in terms of technology.  We hired our new IT Coordinator about a week and a half ago, and he got to jump in feet first today.

Much of our infrastructure is dated.  Really dated.  Most of it is good stuff (Cisco appliances), but it’s a little discouraging when you go to the Cisco website and the top of the product spec page says "This product has reached its end-of-life cycle.  It is no longer supported".  Bummer.

So we have had no internet for three days.  Why?  Well, we haven’t narrowed down the exact cause of the problem, but I can tell you briefly what the symptoms are.  First, our Cisco Catalyst 2600 has been compromised.  How would I define "compromise"?  How about the internal, private class IP address changing several times over the past 72 hours.  It started off as a 10.0.0.9, then went to 10.0.1.32, then 10.0.1.60.  Ummm…yeah.  It’s not supposed to do that.  We pulled it from the network immediately.  So it has either been compromised internally (a suspect a virus that allowed an outside source to take control of the machine), or from the outside, which is even more impressive, if indeed this is an impressive scenario.

Second, when we tried to jack straight into our Kentrox CSU/DSU we realized that we are pretty much up a creek.  You see, the older-than-dirt Kentrox that we have supports a very old cabling standard, and the ethernet port that it boasts is in fact worthless.  We thought that we would be tricky by sending the digital line from the Kentrox straight into our new Celestix appliance.  Silly us.  Since the Celestix (running Server 2003 Appliance Edition w/ ISA 2004) is actually new, it won’t interface with the archaic Kentrox.  So we’re kind of stuck.  Funny timing, we were planning on introducing the new hardware next week.  It looks as if we are going to be accelerating our time line.

Integra Telecom will be coming out tomorrow at 8am to bring us a new CSU/DSU, one that hopefully will be newer than 90′s technology.  Soon though we’ll have our Comcast commercial line in and we can forget about the overpriced and under performing T1…ah…I can hardly wait.

The only nice thing here is this: we work in a church!  People have been so kind and patient, even though we have no web access, no email…it’s not a good situation.  Yet the staff is patient.  Thank you!

I was looking at the insanity of my Outlook inbox, noticing that I had far to many emails sitting there, most had expired.  I started surfing and came across this site about email overload.

I read it, got inspired, and started just thrashing my inbox.  Delete, delete, delete.  I started the day with 1,700+ emails, as of this moment I am down to (drum roll please) 128.  Not bad.  I’m trying a new product called SpeedFiler. So far, not too impressed…but we’ll see how it goes over the trial period.

How’s your inbox doing?

I was doing a little blog surfing today, just bouncing around wherever the mood struck.  I landed on Kem Meyer’s page and started scrolling through the posts.

Kem puts down some excellent thoughts, so please read those.  However, something she linked to just hooked me, I’m been playing with it since.

Check out the Visual Thesaurus!  What a hoot!  And what a help!  They say that the Visual Thesaurus is a tool for people that learn visually.  Well, that’s me.  Most people that work with me know that a request via conversation will be forgotten by me in less time than it takes them to walk back down the hall to their office.  All requests have to come in via email.  So this little web thingy is squarely aimed at me.  Here’s a screen shot, check it out sometime!  I have to quit posting and go play with it some more.