cdcstudios.com | portfolio v7.1

The boys in a rare moment of semiquietness.

Well it’s been a strange few weeks since I last posted anything other than my weekly links (sorry about the lack of links last week (and this odd habit of alliteration as well)). Anyways, since I last wrote anything I’ve: gotten to spend more time with my family which is a great thing. Been laid off from my job as a network engineer (I’d name the company but they don’t need the search engine bump and I only advertise products I truly believe in. On top of that my father went back in to have a tumor removed (same spot as 5 years ago).

In the short term I’ve decided to return to my roots a bit and focus more on building my portfolio up a bit more and taking a few classes to bone up on my all around skillset as a network engineer and also as a web developer.

What’s coming up in my personal future:

• The soon to be unveiled new project
• The soon to be fully launched “Portland Dreams” site
• A resurgence in my participation in the Portland Tech Community (add my absence as another failing of my former employer. How can you possibly be a vibrant tech organization when 95% of the rest of the tech community has never heard of you?)
• More baby pictures than you can possibly shake a stick at. (why in the hell would you be shaking a stick at pictures of my babies? They’re awesome and cute. Plus the littlest one’s drool is a proven cure for dryness)
• Massive note taking and rehearsal to give a decent couple of panels at Wordcamp next month. This will be my return to the world of public speaking (for those unaware, it’s been about 12 years since I’ve done anything remotely resembling public speaking). If anyone wants to give me a pair of New Balance sneakers to go with my black turtleneck and jeans that’d be great :D

On the work related side (and as part of a return to my graphic/designer roots):

• The soon to relaunch site for the Percussion line I’m in.
• Wordcamp Portland limited theme
• Launching a photography site for a former coworker from the K. Falls newspaper
• Completion and launch of 3 plugins on the Wordpress.org site.

While not on either list I’ll also be endeavoring to write at least 2-3 posts a week from now on as well as increasing the number of Howto articles as well.

In the last bit of news I also recently switched to Disqus for my commenting needs. For those not in the know this means I have a few new features for my little spot on the web.

Features of the new Disqus Wordpress plugin:

• Comments are indexable by search engines (SEO-friendly)
• Export and import of comments
• Automatic synchronization between Disqus.com and your WordPress comments
• Uses the new Disqus API
• Moderate/administer your blog right from the WordPress admin

Very cool stuff and they even have integrated Seesmic support for video commenting which is just awesomely cool.

Well that’s it for now, I’ve got work to be done and eventually my In-law’s swimming pool to hop into. See you all on the flip side.

Lastly:

• RIP Bernie Mac & Isaac Hayes.
• Major congrats to the Phantom Regiment for winning their 2nd DCI title. This version of Spartacus was amazing and I enjoyed getting to see it twice this summer. Way to go! Hope you guys come west again next year!

Late Saturday night I decided it was high time to finally make a webclip icon for cdcstudios. It was a total piece of cake and shortly thereafter I made another one, this time for the folks over at Silicon Florist. For those not in the know, a webclip icon is the iPhone or iPod Touch desktop bookmark icon. They’re really easy to make and quite useful as displayed in the pic above.

With this plugin you can make a custom icon for your wordpress site or your wordpress multiuser site (yep this plugin will allow each individual WPMU blog to have full support for custom webclips). Head to the plugin page to get it or if you have any questions about it.

Many people know and love Outlook as the end all be all of email & calendaring. I’m not one of them. I split my time between Outlook at work (stupid exchange server) and Thunderbird and Mail.app at home. If you’re tired of Outlook then let’s switch (painlessly) to Thunderbird and allow me to tell you how to get started with this free (as in beer) alternative combination that kicks Outlook’s ass.

First off the main reasons to change:

• It’s FREE (again as in beer).
• No license, No need to take up 500+ MB of storage.
• Just like it’s older brother Firefox it has regular updates and patches to keep it stable and secure.
• Multiplatform. (I run it on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows)
• On top of that Thunderbird offers the ability for themes and addons to make your email and scheduling woes faded memories.

Ok let’s get started with Thunderbird by installing it:

Download Thunderbird & Lightning: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/]

Download the installer file from the page above, and double-click the file. Make sure you’ve closed all of the other apps you’re running (general advice but you can feel free to ignore it).

Read the agreement (or just choose accept and click next).

It should look similar to the above (unless you chose a different place to install to). Click next.

Click finish and you’re done installing (and you’re also starting Thunderbird for the first time).

Let’s configurate!

When you open Thunderbird for the first time, you need to create a new account, I will try to show you this step by step.

First click on “Create a new account”.

Select “Email account” and press next.

Fill in your name and email address, press next.

Now you are asked to fill in the incoming server, for me it’s “mail.gmail.com”, you may be asked for outgoing server aswell, usually this is the same server, press next.

You may have noticed I chose IMAP for server type. That’s a whole other post to figure out which is best for you. In a nutshell IMAP = syncs your mailbox so if you read email on a laptop and at work you only need to mark it read once and all other devices will reflect that.

Now you are asked to fill in your user name for your email provider, for example “jsmith”, press next.

Now you are asked what you would like to call this account, (I chose the email address for this example but you can choose anything you’d like), press next.

You will get a summary, check your information, and if everything is OK press finish.

Mark your email address and press “Get mail”.

You’ll be asked for the password to your email account, carefully type it in and check the box that says “save password” if you only want to have to enter it once. That way you won’t get asked again.

There you have it, you’re now using Thunderbird. Fun isn’t it?

Some of you more observant folks may have noticed that there is a calendar on the right side of Thunderbird screen above. That’s coming later this week in part two where I show you how to leverage the power of Thunderbird’s extensibility by installing Lightning and more.

If you’re like me and absolutely can’t live without your gmail account then read on to discover 5 simple scripted solutions to make gmail a faster more useful product. From adding icons in the inbox to power user macros this list will speed you up and make you more zen in your daily emailing tasks.

This list will require that you have Firefox & the Greasemonkey extension installed.

1. Do you get email with a lot of attachments? Ever wanted to see at a glance what those attachments are right from your inbox? All you need to do is install this little script http://userstyles.org/styles/5545 and suddenly you’ll have a clearly recognizable icon for each different attachment type.

2. Print from gmail often and don’t want to waste color ink (at $8,000 a gallon it can get pretty bad) This script will solve the problem by hiding the gmail logo: http://userstyles.org/styles/2909

3. Have a massive screen with a huge number of emails? With the row highlighting script you can see exactly which email is currently highlighted, all you need is this script: http://userstyles.org/styles/4725

4. Power user time: Macros. If you’re an email power user, mobile warrior or any other buzzwordy user you’ll eventually stop using the mouse for everything and want keyboard shortcuts to make your life easier, faster and just plain sexier (your mileage may vary on that last one, but one can hope yes?) with the Gmail Macros script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/14189

Case sensitive keys (overrides any gmail shortcuts using that key):

• ‘g’ –> ‘go to label’
• ‘l’ –> ‘apply label’
• ‘L’ –> ‘remove label’
• ‘N’ –> ‘create and apply label’
• ‘e’ –> ‘always archive’
• ‘E’ –> ‘Mark as read and archive’
• ‘f’ –> ‘focus: loads all inbox/unread/starred messages in the current label’
• ‘i’ –> ‘move selected messages to inbox’
• ‘T’ –> ‘Mark as read and move to trash’
• ‘t’ –> ‘trash’
• ‘r’ –> ‘Mark as read’
• ‘R’ –> ‘Mark as unread’
• ‘X’ –> ‘Select’
  • ‘+a’ –> all
  • ‘+n’ –> none
  • ‘+s’ –> starred
  • ‘+S’ –> unstarred
  • ‘+u’ –> unread
• ‘O’ –> ‘Open all conversations in the current thread
• ‘,’ –> ‘Mark as read, all unread’
• ‘U’ –> ‘Update current conversation’

5. Filtering assistant. If you’re anything like me you’re a big fan of organizing that massive amount of email automatically so you don’t have to wade through 500 messages every morning. While there’s always been a filtering assistant this little script moves it into the email itself and makes things a lot cleaner feeling. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7997

All in all 5 easy simple ways to make your gmail experience quite a bit faster, better and more productive. Feel free to post your gmail time savers and usage optimization tips below, I’m always on the lookout for new improved tools for my tasks.

For those of you not familiar with Gmail I can’t imagine a service without all of the following:

• Better spam filtering than any other service I’ve encountered
• True instant search (for those not in the know it’s almost exactly like Spotlight on OS X)
• Conversation based email (much easier to follow the thread of a conversation than emails in order of receipt.
• A truly clean fast interface for mail on the go. Mobile mail is a anything but a chore with gmail.
• Over 6gb of storage (and always growing, in fact when I got my account it was only 2.5gb)
• New features just launched include:
  • An optimized iPhone interface
  • Group chat via the integrated google chat app.
  • AOL Instant Messenger support right in the main gmail interface
• Plus dozens more features

Welcome to a tiny painful jaunt through the modern corporate credit rating easy system of NO! Hyperbole and general humor aside AT&T has some intelligent folks behind the scenes but with the exception of the sales people who aren’t management I haven’t dealt with them yet.

So 8 years ago I had service through AT&T, my contract was almost up and I was about to start a job working for Sprint. One of my last deeds as a “loyal” AT&T wireless customer was to refer my parents. At the time they were offering $50 per line for referral activations. This would have brought my account down to the point to pay off the remainder of my contract would have been under $50 nice right? Well too bad for me since AT&T never actually gave me the referral bonus. I was taught by my wise and cynical mother when it comes to corporations to NEVER throw money at a problem so I told AT&T until they fixed the issue I wasn’t paying them anymore or using the service either. Well the kind folks at AT&T customer service said no problem it would only take a few days to resolve the issue.

Let’s fast forward now to last July when I bought my iPhone. I was as excited and giddy as a young schoolgirl (pay attention and get the thoughts of those plaid skirts out of your head) as I plugged my iPhone into my Macbook Pro and awaited the iTunes activation. I entered in my SSN and omg! declined. What the hell I thought and called AT&T to find out why. Apparently I owed them over $400.00 for some reason. Wanting to learn more I got a copy of my credit report and discovered not one but two separate (yet identical) debts on my credit report. It seems that AT&T charged me a full $300.00 disconnection fee plus money owed with interest.

At this point I called AT&T back and asked them to look into it (I also notified the credit bureau of the double listing and they said it was verified that I owed both companies? (wth??)). Hilariously enough I was told that the records from that far back probably don’t exist so there is no way to honestly resolve the issue with full information.

Fast forward to this year when I tried to move from a gophone account with my iPhone (yeah I had to get a pay as you go plan which is really code for “gouge the people with bad credit plan which doesn’t actually improve their credit while being gouged” which is a mouthful and makes perfect sense as to why they shortened it), anyways I wanted to add Zoe (my wife) to my plan and make it a contracted family plan (which means her buying a phone and them earning more money off of us both on a contract since I bought my iPhone at an Apple store.

DECLINED! (or we could pay $400 per line deposit). The gentleman I spoke to at the AT&T store said no problem we can get the deposit waived. This sounded excellent. So thus began the dreaded 6 hours at the store. Everyone there was fairly helpful except the asst. manager on duty refused 2 hours worth of requests for a chair for the aforementioned wife (who is 7 months pregnant).

This same assistant manager also made a habit of frequently interrupting and even better ignoring politely worded questions. Amazingly (especially to the 5 or 6 customers who saw my treatment) I managed to keep a clear calm head until the bitter end when I did drop a harsh word the last time he interrupted me. I was trying to ask for his manager’s number as well as the district manager’s number to complain about him and he interrupted to tell me “he was done helping me”. I said continued interruption of a paying customer who wants to give the company more money is a really douchebag thing to do. At this point the elderly security guard told my wife and I to leave since we were hurting the feelings of the staff. At this point 2 of the staff members volunteered to go on record that my family was ill treated by the asst. manager.

Fast forward to me calling customer service the next day to make a complaint. The customer service rep took my complaint and said that behavior wasn’t tolerated and then offered to call another store saying “it’s an easy situation to override a deposit and give a waiver”. I said sure and he contacted the downtown Portland branch. The salesperson and he talked for about 5 minutes and then I was warm transferred to the salesperson and he got my email, mobile number and name and said he’d get back to me within 3 days. Excellent I thought finally some resolution.

3 days later I received an email from this salesperson letting me know that the PacNW operations dept said no. At the bottom of the email (which also contained the email to and from the operations center I noticed:

• My full legal name
• My mobile number
• My home address
• My internal customer id number
• MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

I immediately called the store and asked for a manager was told “none were on duty” and so called customer service who said that there was no way to take a complaint about email.

So I searched the consumerist.org website until I found the CEO’s office and called. The person who answered the phone put my call through to an executive care specialist who could barely speak english (no accent just not that coherent in his speech patterns) who told me “yes that’s against policy but there’s not anything we can do besides say we’re sorry”. Sorry? I’d like to buy a home soon and with the possibility that my SSN was sent in clear text and to who knows how many departments and I have no way of knowing who has my SSN now? For the record I gave the sales guy my email over the phone with no one ever verifying my identity. So apparently you can get SSN’s from AT&T by simply social engineering them now. Hooray for security.

To think this all started with my simpleminded idea that I’d be able to sign up to give more money to the corporation. It’s sad that AT&T is the only company in the US able to offer the iPhone. The worst part is I paid full price for the iPhone. Not subsidized by Apple or ATT like most other phones are. If AT&T had paid for part of the phone then I’d see it from their side but asking me to make a deposit almost equal to the cost of the phone is ludicrous.

I’m not a greedy person I just want to be able to talk to my wife regularly without having to pay a ton for the privilege. At this point however I do have some specific terms that AT&T can fulfill to keep me as a customer and to make right on a horrible run of bad customer service. I just want the plan I originally wanted, no contract, 6 months free (for the 48 hours plus invested that seems fair) and for risking my SSN an upgrade to a 16gb iPhone. All told it’s vastly less then the courts have awarded other people who’s SSNs have been released by corporations.