how-to

Hitting the Reset Button on my Address Book Contacts

This is by no means a brag – more of an embarrassing admission — that up until yesterday I was in the 9,000+ range of contacts in my address book.

It was years in the making, starting with Eudora (I still miss that app), then Outlook Express, Outlook, and then some Google/Plaxo/BlackBerry sync magic, Linkedin imports, iPhone contacts, etc — all resulting in a messy address book with lots of dupes, out of date contacts, and bloat. I would guess maybe 1/4 were actually accurate, if that.

Along the way I tried a bunch of “scrubbers” and ran Google’s find & delete — which only served to create more of a mess.

Then while watching a video stream of the Le Web conference (or maybe it was another conference) in the summer of 2011, I saw a presentation for Evercontact (fma Write.That.Name) which looked pretty interesting.

It worked by connected to your gmail/Google Apps email and based on the data in the signatures of inbound emails, would update your contacts in google contacts with the new info. So I switched to using Google’s contacts manager as the canonical source of all my contacts, and during the course of that last year+ it has updated hundreds of contacts and kept things up to date.

But what I starting noticing over time was that my iPhone apps that needed to use my address book were either super slow or crashing completely. Auto complete in the gmail app was painfully slow to the point of being a problem.

So yesterday I did a quick backup of all my contacts, and then went to delete everything !

What I found actually was that Google only allows you to delete 250 at a time. It does that pretty quickly, but if you want to delete more, you can actually use their old v1 interface which allows you to delete many more at once:

After erasing them all, I imported in only the ones that Write.that.Name had updated, and I’m now using their Flashback tool to scan prior emails for other contacts.

Next, I’m testing Rainmaker, which looks to complete other relevant contact info for your contacts based on your Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook.

I must say, it’s like a good spring cleaning, and obviously these days between Facebook, people’s blogs, Twitter, Linkedin, etc — it’s pretty easy to reach people even if they aren’t in your address book.

UPDATE: A couple of years in, and I’m super happy with Evercontact. I get these moments when a call comes in and my phone already recognizes them because Evercontact added it to my address book automatically. Magical!

Setting up my new MacBook Air in the age of the “cloud”

Everything today is in the Cloud – our photos, documents, sites, etc.

What I hadn’t realized was how much my own laptop’s initial setup was tied to the cloud.

I just got a new MacBook Air 13″ — which I must say is a big improvement over the 2010 model, and here were my steps to getting things setup:

  1. Install Dropbox (love LAN sync)
  2. Install 1password (which for me requires Dropbox)
  3. Install Evernote (via Apple App Store — runs locally, but cloud’ish)
  4. Install Skype (non-cloud)
  5. Install Adium (non-cloud)
  6. Install Spotify (all my music is in the cloud)
  7. Install mailplane (all my email is in the cloud / google apps)
  8. Download Chrome and watch in real-time as extensions appear (they sync) – pretty cool.
  9. Install sophos anti-virus (shows how popular Macs have become)
  10. Install office for mac (Downloaded trial version & put in my purchase code. I also use google docs a bunch, but for contracts Word is still the best w/ tracking)
  11. Turn off OS X auto correct !

So these 11 steps took all of about 25 minutes and then another hour or so for Dropbox to fully sync. And obviously nothing was installed from a DVD or USB.

I’m guessing that in 2 years when I setup the next new laptop, everything will either be in the cloud or get installed via an App store.

There are downsides in terms of control and what this means to some independent software publishers — but overall from a user experience, it’s pretty amazing to me how quickly things have shifted, and how just a few years ago you would spend a bunch of hours installing software, and do so largely from DVDs.

Poll: Extended Car Warranty – Worth it ?

I have a used car, and the manufacturers warranty is expiring shortly. Trying to figure out if it’s worth buying the extended warranty. Seems to come out around $1000 for each 15K miles for the top of line warranty which has a low deductible, no coverage limits, and is transferrable (good for resale).

With PCs/electronics/etc, I think the data shows that extended warranties are not usually worth it. But with cars, seems like I’m geting conflicting feedback, and the beta/risk is higher — fixing something can be $1000s.

Hence the need for a poll — what do you guys think ?

The Art of the Email Intro

Like many of you I get introduced to at least a couple of people per week via an email intro, and probably send out just as many if not more intros to various people.

A good intro goes a long way, and when people hook you up with the right contact at a company, it can save you a ton of time and open up some real opportunities.

Having said that, I’m always amused and sometimes a bit confused by the weird email intro or the odd email intro etiquette that goes on.

So I thought I’d blog a few dos and dont’s that I think are helpful to keep in mind:

Don’t use a real generic subject line like “intro”. Everyone is swamped with email, so it’s easy to just skip a generic email, especially when reading on a mobile device. Do use something like “Company X meet Company Y” or “Person X meet Person Y”. Makes it simple and easy to scan.

Don’t forward a really long and obtuse email thread inserting a new person in at the end with “do you know anyone ?”. That creates work for the person you are asking for help from, and is just messy. Usually reading the long forwarded threads also reveals a ton of stuff you probably should never have seen in the first place. Instead, craft a new clean email.

Don’t ask for an intro to someone but provide no context. If you are asking for an intro, at least provide some kind of hint as to why you want the intro, what’s the angle, and what the person being intro’d should expect. That way you can quickly write up an intro note without having to guess or be really vague.

Don’t keep the thread going on forever with me CC’d.. After I make an intro for someone, I don’t really need to be on the thread as you and the new person decide on a coffee shop and a date, and then change and reschedule it a few times 🙂 Fine to keep me on there for one back-and-forth so I know the email went through and isn’t stuck in a spam folder. After that, if it’s strategic in some way or an FYI, put me on BCC or just forward one of the notes.

The flip side, do make sure to acknowledge the intro. I have a couple of people who I’ve sent opportunities to, and each time they’ve failed to CC or BCC me – and I’m always following up to see if they got my email.

Anyone else have any tips ?

Sync Skype Chat History on Multiple Machines With Dropbox

Skype is awesome. We use it a ton here at Automattic, and it’s my main communication service for staying in touch with friends and family who are spread out all over the world. It’s also still the best text IM client out there. And now with the iPhone app, I can make int’l calls on mobile without thinking about it.

The one issue though I’ve had lately, is that I rely on Skype so much, that when I use a second machine I find myself looking through Skype chat history for a link or reference, only to realize that it’s stored locally on another machine.

In my quest to find an ideal backup solution, I’ve been testing Dropbox which allows you to sync files between multiple machines. So I took a crack at trying to get my Skype chat history to sync. A quick google search brought up this post which I followed:

Step 1) Quit the Skype application on all machines
Step 2) Move the "main" Skype chat history files to the Dropbox directory:
"mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/Skype ~/Dropbox/"
Step 3) Create a symlink from the original folder to the Dropbox folder:
"ln -s ~/Dropbox/Skype/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/Skype"
Step 4) On your secondary machines, remove the /Library/Application\ Support/Skype folder, and just insert the symlink:
"ln -s ~/Dropbox/Skype/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/Skype"

And it works ! One issue to be aware of: If you are logged-in and running Skype on multiple machines at once, you can get file conflicts and Dropbox will create secondary files – which kills the whole sync idea. So for this to work, you need to quit Skype before you plan on using it on another machine — which isn’t a bad idea anyway since leaving it open just means missed messages.

And lastly, I posted some of this to the Dropbox forum and one member there recommended a slightly different method where: “The original stays where it is. Without moving it, one creates a symlink. Its symlink goes into the Drobox folder.” I tried that method early on, and at least with Skype, the chat history kept getting written locally and never updating the Dropbox folder.

So for now this is working nicely for me. I do wonder if in the future Skype would ever offer up a secure way to store chat history with them. I also did see mention of a new service that tackles this issue for IM history in general called im-hisotry.com — looks interesting but haven’t tested so far as it’s Windows and Linux only.

For anyone thinking of trying the symlink method, as with anything like this, please backup your files before attempting this, as YMMV.