Dear Joyent
Dec 31, 12:54 PM by Eric Allen
Dear Joyent,
I really can’t believe how much you guys have lost your edge. It seems like just last year you were top dog in Rails hosting. Speaking of which, what happened to that awesome Rails hosting site you acquired? Whatever, I’m sure you’ve been working on more important stuff like….oh wait, what? I really want to believe you are busy on things that will improve the experience of your customers, but I haven’t seen anything in the last few years. Heck, I know somebody who just finished migrating from the old FreeBSD system last week! Didn’t that migration start over two years ago?
How can you possibly have let something like Engine Yard happen to you?? Here you are, top dog in Rails hosting, lots of great press, great server farm, good service, and these whipper snappers eat your lunch? Heck, what kind of edge have you got on Slicehost anymore? I know, I know, you’re doing a lot more than Rails…like, uh, hosting people’s Wordpress blogs? Come on, how card can that be? Your shiny Virtualmin is sluggish as all get out, and setting up mongrels still isn’t particularly easy.
I guess I should probably just shut up. I’m one of those pesky freeloaders who committed $500 up front to get in while things were getting going. Yeah, I had definitely planned on getting more features out of Joyent as time went on, but it’s been a few years and the $500 has probably paid itself off. I’m just a cost to you. But even if I’d gone and gotten a shiny Accelerator, I still wouldn’t be any better off. I’m writing not because I need the features (my next Rails app will probably end up on Engine Yard), I’m writing because I care about you guys. I loved having the personal touch in the forums back in the day, and I feel like Joyent has taken good care of me despite the lack of new things. I wish you the best of luck as a company, and I hope to be proven wrong!
Evernote
Dec 29, 08:09 PM by Eric Allen
I really can’t say enough good things about Evernote, the online note-taking application I ran into a few weeks ago. It’s not just online, it’s on my iPhone, my Mac, my other Mac, the PC I rarely use, and I can even send notes in via email! I’ve finally found a place I can keep all of my random thoughts and notes that organizes them well and is accessible from anywhere. Oh, and as a bonus I can record audio and photo notes, and it even searches for text inside the photos! I can take a snapshot of a whiteboard from my iPhone, and have it searchable within minutes. Evernote does everything I could ask for, and more.
Let’s start with basic text notes. When I have an idea, a thought about a project, or some notes I need to take about what I’m working on, I launch the Evernote application. Command+N gets me to a new note, I throw a title and a few tags in, and I’m immediately writing a note with rich text formatting and checklists! The tags are a huge plus for me: I can organize all of my notes and index them without even thinking about it. When I want to go back and review notes about a specific project, I just click on its tag and instantly I have a list of what I want to see. I can select multiple tags at once to narrow the field even tighter. If Evernote just handled text notes and synchronization with multiple computers, I would be sold.
Nothing’s cooler than having an iPhone app, right? Well, Evernote’s app delivers exceptionally well. I hadn’t bothered to purchase a voice recording application yet, and boy was that a good move! Now, when I’m on the go, I can whip out my iPhone and be recording a voice note straight into Evernote in seconds. I can add tags and textual notes to make the audio easier to find in the future, and I’m on my way. I can’t believe how awesome this feature is. But wait, there’s more! In addition to handling text nearly as well as the desktop version, and making audio recording a snap, Evernote for the iPhone lets you take pictures of things as notes and search them later! It did an impressive job on a few of my whiteboard snapshots, and my handwriting isn’t very good. Evernote for the iPhone on its own is worth a few bucks in the App Store, but even it is free!
Last but not least, the synchronization is perfect. No matter where I am, I have all of my notes at my fingertips, and the interface is optimized for the device I’m using. The Mac client is a beautiful piece of software, the iPhone app is well optimized, and the web version seems almost as good as the Mac! Now I never have to think about where my notes are—they’re with me wherever I go. Awesome.
Evernote is already an amazing product, and I think it’s clear that it will only get better. They just launched document synchronization, so you can keep your documents with you everywhere, too! I’m already very happy with this free product, and I will have no qualms about upgrading to their $5/month plan if and when I need it. Thank you Evernote for making my life easier!
An Information Diet: one month later
May 20, 06:28 PM by Eric Allen
It’s been over a month since I went on my information diet, and it is such a better lifestyle. I still read blogs, check email, and function normally, but I never read slashdot, digg, or reddit. As it turns out, this works quite well for reducing my inforporn to a reasonable minimum. Even four weeks later, I still find myself trying to check news sites once in a while, but thanks to AdBlock, the urge goes unfulfilled. I’m very productive at work (I’m back in CA for the summer), and I have a 3-day average for finishing tasks that I keep track of in Tracks. I’m even reading real books!
Paul Graham seems to have discovered a different solution to the same issue. Some other people have also found RescueTime to work well for keeping tabs on themselves.
Going on an Information Diet
Apr 16, 04:16 PM by Eric Allen
How often do you read the newspaper? Slashdot? Digg? Reddit? Blogs? Twitter? None of them?
Today’s information worker (or children thereof) is inundated with information. This problem has not gone unnoticed. For the last couple of years I’ve been borderline addicted to “infoporn,” and this week I decided to do something about it. I re-configured my web browser’s ad-blocking software to block any addresses at the infoporn sites I visit regularly. I thought I could just exercise self-control, but until this week I kept going back!
What a feeling! Without the constant instant-gratification of new information, my brain is hungry again—remember, it’s only been two days! Suddenly I’ve ended up more productive, as my information-starved brain quests for something to do. When I do consume information, it’s in the form of books (both fiction and non-fiction) and (gasp!) school. I actually want to read my textbooks because I’m not letting myself read things that aren’t worth the mind-clutter.
I will see how this develops over a few more weeks, but so far it’s an amazing success! Just say “no” to useless information, kids!
Twitter: how to avoid caring about people
Apr 4, 01:03 PM by Eric Allen
I’m struck by the attitude taken in an article I just read about how Twitter is changing lives. To be honest, I remain very skeptical. How can you really connect with people when all you’re doing is seeing their broadcasts and making your own? It takes the caring out of communicating, allowing people to ignore each other at will. In particular, the author says:
Because Twitter has allowed me to meet and converse with people all over the world, without much of a commitment. The tweets come in as a stream, and if I see something engaging, I answer it. If not, I don’t.
That scares me. So we all feel “interconnected,” but none of us are actually connected? What happened to sitting down with people and talking? While you were whiling the time away sitting in your room “feeling the interconnectedness,” did you ever consider calling a friend up and going for a hike or something?
Generation Me, we can be better than this.
CitizenTax: Epic Failure
Mar 4, 11:26 AM by Eric Allen
I really should have Done my homework before picking a free tax preparation service through the IRS’s Free File site. After my ordeal with CitizenTax (or CitizenTaxFree.com, the version I used from the same people), $75 to a tax preparer seemed like no big deal.
I should have run at the first sight of trouble: every now and then as I walked through the process their site would return an error page. A simple refresh fixed it, usually, but that is a little worrisome for a site that’s supposed to be processing my taxes. I went ahead anyway, and after submitting my taxes (I must admit, the site was pretty easy to use) logged out and went on to do other things.
I came back the next day to check on the status of my return, and lo and behold I can’t log in! I double-check, triple-check my username and password with no success. I then sought out their support page, and after 10 minutes of digging got myself registered (yes, yet another account) with their issue tracking system. I filed a ticket, and the following day I got a completely unhelpful reply saying to enter my username and password to log in. I carefully explained that I was unable to log in with said username and password. After a good deal more back-and-forth, I came to discover a fun feature of their password hashing algorithm: they don’t support symbols in passwords. I had naïvely used my secure password generator (1Password) to generate a good password, and it had put in symbols! CitizenTax informed me that my account was impossible to access, they couldn’t reset my password, and I should just sign up again and restart my return. But I had already filed it!! I just wanted to check the status to make sure the IRS had accepted it. After calling the IRS I discovered that I was supposed to receive an email confirmation from them, which I never got, saying the IRS had processed my return. The only way I know it went through is that they took the money out of my checking account four days later!
Just to add to the ordeal, CitizenTax doesn’t inform you about standard deductions, so I ended up paying $400 too much. This I discovered from the CPA (who will be filing my taxes next year) I got to clean up the mess CitizenTax left.
Good job, CitizenTax. Way to handle people’s tax records in a completely incompetent and unfriendly way. Next time I’ll be more careful!
