Like many people I spend a fair bit of time everyday using twitter from multiple computers, I basically have 4 points 1) work PC 2) Home Mac 3) Mac laptop and 4) iPhone. As I’ve discussed in prior posts here and here, the biggest problem I have with twitter clients today is the inability to filter users into groups and have those same groups accessible from all my access points. As a general rule I do my best to read most all tweets from the people that I follow, as a result putting people into group makes this process more efficient. I have an email system that satisfied this but for other reasons (which I am in the process of writing a sort of postmortem on). When I heard the latest version of Tweetdeck provided syncing of groups and there members across all platforms in conjunction with the launch of their iPhone application I honestly thought tweetdeck would solve my issues. In nearly a week of testing I have found the latest version of tweetdeck, 0.26.2, to absolutely suck at syncing. And I think I will avoid tweetdeck until they fix these features as I have sunk hours into trying to get these issues resolved and the tweetdeck staff has been absolutely unresponsive on twitter, via email, via blog comment responses, or their feedback forum.

One of the best guests I’ve seen on Conan yet, William Shatner, was on the other night. Watch it below and pay special attention to Williams hand gestures. Just classic.

Thanks to The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien

I love Google Reader, its my primary source of news these day, in fact I’ve all but given up on reading blogs or sites that don’t provide RSS feeds. Anyway, i digress. Over time my reader has grown to over 270 feeds and haphazardly organized into 75 folders. Well as you might expect that many folders became quite unmanageable.

A few weeks ago I posted about looking for the optimal Twitter.com client for my needs. Ideally, looking for something that will allow me access across platforms and machines, enable me to never miss a tweet (unless i want to) and always know where I left off. My initial idea was an web service that would email each tweet in my timeline, replies, etc. Not being a programmer I found someone to actually build a single user proof of concept. The web app was completed a few weeks ago and I have been using that as my sole Twitter client since then. I would have posted earlier but my work schedule had me trekking around the country, which was actually a perfect time to be testing out such a system in addition to the holidays. Being disconnected for the long transcon flights and spending all day in meeting would preclude anyone from keeping up on Twitter, so it was a perfect period to be testing.

I am in need of a firefox add-in, some type of script, or something that will let me count the number of characters in a text field or in the body of a gmail message.  Please let me know if you have any thoughts on how i can accomplish this.

If you don’t know already I am a really big fan of Twitter, for many reasons I love twitter for keeping in touch with friends, discussing trading strategies, and finding new friends. It’s a great tool that has become a cornerstone of my communications and daily life. In fact I am likely on Twitter in someway more often than any other tool or service.

Right now I am in search of the *perfect* Twitter client.

Today I am heading across the continent for a getaway,
Nothin new about that (except for actually taking a vacation) but this is the first vacation, or long distance travel, that I’ve taken nearly entirly paperless.

Usually I’ve got books, tablets of paper, files, and other junk. But as I sit here on a flight writting this on my iPhone (wordpress app) looking at what I’m carrying I have virtually no paper except for a few business cards, boarding pass, and a passport.

This time in place of the bulky paper I’ve got my macbook air, iPhone, blackberry, and kindle. The best part, it all fits nicely in a very slim bag giving my shoulder a break for my camera bag with my cannon 50D, lenses, and a flip video.

I’m carrying less than I normally would and hopefully am able to be more productive. Only thing I’m going to miss… Always on 3G data. No way am I using iPhone data out of the country.

If you haven’t figured out yet Comcast’s Cable service sucks! I have had nothing but trouble with them since becoming a customer, I spend more time dealing with poor customer service than I do watching cable. Its absolutely ridiculous. My latest problem’s and the straw that broke the camels back, was more then a week ago when an installer came to provide new equipment and left me without my old working equipment and without working cable because he didn’t want to wait!Comcast’s proposed resolution, wait 5 days for another tech. Are you kidding me? you killed my service and I now have to wait 5 days for you to fix it!

This is a follow up on my prior post about switching to Verizon Fios from Comcast.  Yesterday, Monday, Verizon installed my new Fios service (TV and Internet). All I have to say is wow what a difference from Comcast! First of all the installer came during the installation window (as opposed to Comacst who never came on time), granted the window was 8am to 5pm. The service is absolutely incredible! Kicks my former Comcast service out of the water, i should have made this switch a long time ago.

A quick background, for the last 2.5 years I have been using a cheap Dell media center PC as my DVR system. It has worked great in the past and i really like the interface. However, this summer i bought a new 52″ HDTV and got HD service from Comcast. As one might expect the output from the Media Center PC to the new TV was very poor over s-video or VGA so upgraded the video card and now over HDMI the monitor looks crystal clear, as it should. That said the Comcast picture quality (SD) is pretty poor in my area(a lot of washed out channels). I’ve experienced this in all the buildings I’ve lived in the DC area for the last few years (so it wasn’t anything new). With OK SD input into my Media Center PC (yes, Microsoft also degrades the picture quality) the TV output even on HDMI was pretty poor on a big screen. Not the mention the age of the Media Center PC (its starting to go) and the fact I’ve been paying for HD service and use it infrequently (as it requires changing over to a different box) I decided to buy a TiVo HD.