ask-mark.com

Last week I received an announcement from Google that they are going to include Reader, Blogger and Picasa in the application suite for Google Apps. These are three of the most-requested apps that were not included in the Google Apps for Your Domain suite, even for enterprise accounts. I’m a major Google Reader user, so you could imagine how excited I was by this news. I was even more giddy when I received the e-mail telling me that I could have ask-mark.com participate in the early testing program.

I quickly signed up and converted a few of the user accounts to test things out. The transition site said that no data would be lost, and that I would have the option of allowing users to migrate the information from their personal accounts to the Google Apps accounts. After I chose a few accounts to convert, I looked for the option to allow or disallow content migration. I couldn’t find it. I also looked for the option to add more of the apps, like Reader and Blogger, to the list of apps available to my users. I couldn’t find that, either. This was already not going well. My anguishing tale continues after the jump.

Update: There are four updates to my tale at the end of the post. Google is starting to redeem itself.

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It’s a phone. It (sort of) does what a phone should do. I like the weight of the phone – heavier than any phone I’ve had in the past seven years. It feels solid, unlike the lightweight plastic feel of a BlackBerry Pearl, or even a Motorola RAZR v3. The screen is bright and crisp. I’m not quite sure how much better the screen is than on my 2nd gen iPod touch, since I only have the glossy packaging film on the iPhone, whereas I have a matte protection film on the touch.

When I get home, I’m going to spend a bit of time syncing the phone with my computer, and installing all of those apps that I had previously found useless on the iPod touch. After the jump I’m including a short recap of my iPhone saga from the past couple of weeks. If you’ve followed it on Twitter or Facebook, you can probably just ignore it.
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After upgrading the blog to WP 2.9, I decided to do a little virtual housekeeping. For cleaning up post formatting (and some terrible writing), I am done with posts through May 2003. That leaves me with just under 8,990 posts to finish cleaning up.

I have also cleaned up my tags and categories a bit. I have rethought how I will use categories. At one point, I had completely dropped them (with the exception of the general category) in favor of using tags. I think I am not going back to having a few top-level categories, and then I will use tags to add some more info to the metadata for each post. In cleaning up the tags, I have ensured that any tags consisting of multiple words will include spaces between those words; I am no longer going to use camelCase.

For now, I’ve got to put the housekeeping aside because I was supposed to go shopping for presents while Chris was out of the house. With that, I am leaving for Target.

If you’ve got a WordPress blog, you should upgrade to 2.9. And if you’re like me, and you’ve had a blog running for a while, you may want to consider doing a little housekeeping.

Aside: I was sidetracked for about an hour after editing my early post on West Wing. I started reading about the line of succession.

So, I saw this linked from /., and the geek in me told me I must post it myself. Of course, I’ll give props to the original post on bIPlog. Revolution is not an AOL Keyword was posted by Eddan Katz way back on 20 March 2003, reinterpreting Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The following is a copy of the original post, including links (thank to Eddan for posting to the public domain using the Creative Commons PDD).
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Yeah, I guess I’m still being pretty damn lazy about posting. I’ve just been pretty swamped with stuff. OK, that’s another lie. Honestly, I’ve just been tired and haven’t gotten around to posting anything. Some recent news is that we’ve pretty much narrowed down our wedding photographer search to Grabari Studios and Edward Fox Photography.
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OK, so I understand blogging has been around for quite some time now. Hell, I’ve been reading Ars Technica, which is sort of a techie blog created by a few of Harvard‘s graduate students, for almost four years now. And .plan files on *nix systems did pretty much the same thing for years before that. I wonder why I didn’t think to use my blog to scribble notes down for work a few weeks ago when I started it.
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