Today I concluded that my Gmail experiment is working nicely. In addition, we figured out (thanks to Dave Michels) how to wire up feld.com to Google Apps without breaking all the other feld.com users that are being served of an Exchange server. So, breaking rule #1 of all migrations, Ross and I flipped the switch at the end of the day to have my mail end up in my Google Apps account (via feld.com) rather than my Gmail account (via brad.feld@gmail.com).
All of my mail flows nicely. You can send email to brad@feld.com and it shows up in the right place. That was good.
But, I hadn’t thought through all my other Google services that are tied to brad.feld@gmail.com. Contacts was “so-so” – Export/Import but it still feels a little messed up and I can’t figure out why. But Docs seems like a totally parallel universe, as does Profiles. And I’ve got a bunch of other services that I use (e.g. Bookmarks, YouTube) that I don’t really feel like having two accounts for.
I searched around for an easy way to “move my brad.feld@gmail.com account over to brad@feld.com in Google Apps.” There are some mediocre help suggestions about migrating individual services, but nothing that just solved it.
Am I missing something obvious, or is this a non-trivial thing to do.
Sometimes Colbert is priceless. Well – most of the time. This one had Amy and I laughing hard today. Enjoy your five minute break from monitoring your social media and email to see if something important is going on. Matt Galligan reminded me that this is oddly reminiscent of SocialThing’s TechStars Demo Day.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word – Control-Self-Delete | ||||
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I’m banging away on a bunch of new things these days. I’ve happily switched to a Mac, am halfway through my week of Gmail, and am contemplating what new thing to try next week.
I’ve always been a tech junky and love to play with new stuff. I’m quick to set up an account on a new web service and try it. It’s the best way for me to understand something – much better than an executive summary or a presentation.
I found that my switch to a Mac took two weeks to get really comfortable, but once I crossed the line I was all in. Gmail feels similar – after a few days of it I’m loving it but now running into a few issues (that I’m quickly resolving – such as the email send rate limiting thing that I mentioned last night.) I haven’t yet tried to move my calendar fully over, and I know that moving feld.com to Google Apps is going to be hairy because of all my family members using accounts on feld.com (currently an Exchange server) in a variety of different configs, but that’s part of the fun of this stuff. Well – maybe not.
While it’s obvious to say that “just trying something out” is much simpler than actually incorporating that new thing into your work flow, it occurred to me today that there isn’t enough focus on this on the part of most startups.
I’ve learned the incredible power of focusing on “daily active users” from my investment in Zynga. While I’ve been obsessed with DAU’s for a while now, I haven’t been paying enough attention to the specific DAU’s that come back day after day (rDAU’s – recurring DAUs). While I encourage everyone to measure the number of them, I haven’t been encouraging people to “measure what they actually do.” As I ponder my own behavior, I’m seeing a huge difference in my (a) fly by and try, (b) try and use periodically, and (c) become an rDAU behavior.
Note to everyone I work with – start measuring what your rDAUs actually do. It might surprise you.
My week-long experiment with Gmail continues with my first big bump happening last night at around 9pm. After sending a lot of emails (apparently 500) I received an error message “You have reached a limit for sending mail“. I tried again. This perplexed me. So I clicked on the link.
I read through it and couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong. I tweeted about it and immediately heard back that Gmail had throttled me for up to the next 24 hours because I’d been sending too many emails. I poked around a little to try to figure out if there was a way around this and finally concluded that the solution was to go to sleep and try again in the morning.
When I woke up, email was magically sending again. I guess I got turned back on in less than 24 hours. We’ll see what happens today.
Of course, one solution is to use SendGrid. I’ve just gone and signed up for an account in case I get rate limited again.
In the mean time, Gmail feels slow this morning. I’m getting used to my new friend, the yellow “Working” link at the top middle of the window.
In 2009, the word that finally got on my nerves was “space”, as in “our product is in the X space” or “the space we are going after is X.” It seems like the word “space” managed to find its way into every paragraph.
The annoying word of 2010 appears to be “platform”, as in “we are going to be a platform for X” or “our platform for X will solve the following problems.”
In my little corner of the world, the word “platform” is a lot more precious. There are very few platforms. You aren’t a platform until you have a zillion users (well, at least 100 million). Until then, feel free to call yourself a “junior platform” or an “aspiring platform.” Or, call yourself an “application”, which is what you most likely are.
I definitely make this mistake myself (e.g. “Company Y is a platform for X”) and I’ve been self-censoring lately and now saying “Company Y aspires to be a platform for X”).
Ok, I feel better now.
I had a new experience today. At 7am I had my first MRI at the Boulder Community Hospital. I was a little nervous, although I’m not entirely sure why. I was in and out in 45 minutes – it was fascinating.
I hurt my lower back about five months ago (actually, exactly on March 13th at about 1pm at my parents house in Dallas). I went for a two hour run and then took my dad to Fry’s for his birthday to buy him a new color printer. As I unloaded the printer from the car, I lifted correctly, but then twisted left and immediately knew I’d screwed myself. I rested a week and started running again in advance of a marathon in mid-April in St. Louis. I had a great three hour run in Charlotte the first week of April and thought I was ready to roll. Amy and I drove to Santa Fe the following weekend; when I got out of the car when we got back to Boulder I had enormous lower back pain. I got a massage the next day (big mistake) and when I woke up Tuesday morning in a hotel room in Seattle I couldn’t get up off the toilet, nor could I completely straighten up. Four weeks of rest and three months of intermittent running with regular recurrence of back pain in the same spot after a few days caused me to finally decide that I’m hurt and need to figure out what’s going on.
Boulder is fortunate that it has a great community hospital system. There are plenty of new facilities and the people are very nice. I checked in and got my paperwork. It was already completed via my doctor’s referral. The charge for the MRI was $3,696, my insurance plan allowed $1,078, and there was $0 co-pay or money owed by me. I was completely stunned by this – I expected to at least have to pay a $20 co-pay. The entire billing / checkin thing took about as long as it takes to checkin on FourSquare. I pondered where the difference between the $3,696 and the $1,078 was coming from, or whether it simply vanished into the ether.
I went to the Imaging Center with my Dark Side of the Moon CD, ready to chill out in a tube. I changed into hospital scrubs and was escorted to the MRI machine by a lovely nurse who talked me through everything. The machine I was in didn’t have a CD (it had an MP3 player) but my head was in a cradle that wouldn’t fit the earphones so I punted on the music. I got a little “panic thing” to squeeze if I freaked out and then went into the tube.
I basically had a noisy 20 minute shivasana. They did six scans, most between three and five minutes. The noise was loud, but rhythmic. I had earplugs so it was more like a weird electronica thing. I did my share of isolation tanks in college (I went through an isolation tank phase) – this was much shorter, much more comfortable, but much noisier. As is my practice with shivasana, I dozed off near the end.
They pulled me out, I walked down the hall, and picked up a CD with my scan on it. The software is pretty ancient, doesn’t run on my Mac, but worked fine on a PC. I have no idea what I’m looking at – well – other than my lower back and pelvis region with all the ensuing pieces – but it’s pretty amazing to look at and ponder.
It’s fun to be a human, even when you are hurt.
Now that my complete and total infatuation with my Mac has worn off and shifted into delight and love, I’m starting to explore the weaknesses of the Mac for not other reason than I’m trying to figure out where the real rough edges are.
So – if you are a Mac user, I’m very interested in the things you don’t like about the Mac, especially the things you hate. I offered up the Address Book as a burnt offering the other day. Anything else out there that blows?
I’ve been all Mac for the past six weeks and in general I’m loving everything about it. I am, however, starting to bump into a few things that are stinky.
The Mac Address Book is one of them. Mail and iCal are good, but Address Book just sucks. I’m constrained by an Exchange server on the back end which is nicely abstracted away across all my devices (multiple computers, iPad, iPhone). My actual contact database is just fine, it’s just that the Address Book app is incredible weak.
Is there a known alternative out there other than using an entirely different mail client such as Entourage, Thunderbird, or Zimbra? I just want a better Address Book – I don’t want to change Mail and Calendar.
No, Ross, you can’t have your $100 back.
On June 20th, I declared that I was going to try A Month of Mac. I took my Macbook Pro (an older model from about 18 months ago) up to Alaska, left my Lenovo x300 in Boulder, and went native Mac.
I’m typing this on my brand new spiffy MacBook Pro 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 with 8GB RAM, with a 500GB solid state hard drive. I can’t figure out why I’ve been so stubborn about really switching to the Mac. This is a beautiful computer.
The key to this switch was that the native mac apps (Mail, iCal, and Address Book) sync seamlessly with Exchange. So I don’t have to deal with the abortion that is Entourage but at the same time I don’t have to mess around with our email server and impact everyone else in our organization. That’s sweet. I had a feeling this would work this time since it works flawlessly on my iPhone and iPad, and it did. The only thing missing is Tasks, but I started using Evernote instead which actually worked even better than the Outlook Task manager.
So – no Parallels or Fusion – I don’t even have a Windows image on this machine at this point. I didn’t use Windows a single time in the last month and now that I’ve rewired my brain for Mac shortcut keys I think it’d be a pretty amusing thing to watch.
I’ve found peace and happiness with iWork as a replacement for Microsoft Office – it’s more than adequate for what I do. MarsEdit is a spectacular blog post editor, Chrome works happily on the Mac as does Skype and TweetDeck, and Adium replaced Digsby. Pogoplug works just like it did before – all my files are where I want them to be. Best of all, my iPhone actually does what it’s supposed to with iTunes.
Did I say that this is a beautiful piece of hardware? Sleep mode – check. Flawless super high resolution screen – check. Super fast everything – check. Find a piece of software you want to play around with – download and run.
The most remarkable thing was the transfer of all my data, applications, and settings from my old MacBook Pro to my new MacBook Pro. I connected them by Firewire. I restarted my old MacBook and held down the T key. After the transfer started, I went and had a meeting for a hour. I came back and my new Mac was set up exactly like my old Mac. Perfect.
Ross – you owe me $100.