Disruptive Conversations

Light blogging ahead - Selling our home in Burlington, Vermont, and closing on a home in N.H.

Just a note to readers: I expect that for the next 3 to 4 weeks I won't be doing all that much blogging here due primarily to our impending move to Keene, NH, and the collision in timing of three different threads of my life:

1. We've now put up the signs and are officially selling our house here in Burlington, VT. Check out the website for more information, to see pictures, read the blog (yes, of course, it has one), etc. If you want to buy a house in Burlington, we'd love to hear from you. (And personally I'd enjoy it if the ultimate buyer found it through a blog. :-) We're going, at least initially, the For Sale By Owner route so naturally that will occupy some of our time (hopefully!).
   
   
2. We are closing on our house in Keene, NH, on May 15th, although we are not planning to actually move down there until mid-June.
   
   
3. A major new project landed on my plate at work that should be both fun and something in which I'll learn a lot... but it's going to be rather all-consuming and the deadline is also right around May 15th.

Add in some presentation deadlines, the ever-constant flow of email and generally the next few weeks look to be rather chaotic. I don't expect to be writing here or probably anywhere other than perhaps Voxeo's blogs (since writing there is part of my job). We'll see. I'm sure I'll still be twittering, because that's so easy to do.  Otherwise, I expect you'll see more here starting in mid-June. That's the theory, anyway!

Finally getting around to updating my home page..

After getting a second phone call of someone offering me a job because they had read on www.danyork.com that I was out of work and looking for a job, I finally got a chance to update the main page. In part the delay is a case of "the cobbler's own shoes". My web site has been online since 1996 and desperately needs to be updated on a technology end (you'll note that I don't have domain mapping set up, so danyork.com actually redirects into my lodestar2.com site). I just haven't made the time to do so. That was actually on my list of things to do if finding employment took a while, but then I landed rather quickly at Voxeo. So the main page of the site is updated - and comments or opinions about what I wrote on the page are welcome. Before I had a pseudo-resume... now I changed it to talk a bit more about who I am.

Technorati Tags: danyork, dan york

Blogging has been a bit light here recently... but that should be changing...

Longtime readers may have noticed that my pace of blogging has decreased of late. Don't worry.. I'm not fading out. I've just been sucked into the vortex of the WordPress MU implementation I'm doing for my new employer, Voxeo. The good news is that there is light at the end of the tunnel... and it's not an oncoming train! Seriously, the implementation has gone very well and soon I'll be able to provide some links to what I've been doing.

I'll also finally be able to get back to doing a bit more writing... my queue right now of posts to right is incredibly huge!

Light blogging ahead as I get ready for what's next...

Life takes very interesting turns. Yesterday afternoon I faxed off my acceptance of an offer from ... (Read the rest over on my Disruptive Telephony blog. :-)

Technorati Tags: danyork

What should I get for my next laptop? What's the best "social media laptop"? integrated webcam? Apple Macbook with Parallels? or Windows PC?

UPDATE - I gave in and bought a MacBook Pro (with 4 GB of RAM!).  More on that later...

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With my impending change in employment, I need to get a new laptop and, given that I'm thinking strongly of going the consulting route, I'm going to pick it up myself right now (versus waiting for an employer).  Obviously I want a laptop that works very well for participating in the world of social media.  An integrated webcam seems to be an absolute must.   People involved with video tell me that Apple Macbooks have the best quality video cameras and, being relatively agnostic toward operating systems, I'm open to Macbooks.  I'd love to get a laptop with a built-in camera that can rotate so that you can face it away from the user and toward the other people in a room, for instance.  But it seems that the current crop of laptops no longer have that - they all seem to have fixed cameras. 

Another "must-have" is the ability to work with a second monitor, but that's usually simple with a laptop.

So I've got a couple of questions for those of you working out there with blogs, podcasts, flickr, etc.:

• Do you have any specific thoughts on the best laptop for "social media" participation?
• Any recommendations about specific laptops with integrated cameras?  Know of any that aren't fixed?  (I've looked at the major vendors and they all seem to now be fixed.)
• Mac versus PC?  Mac users who still have to use Windows apps, have you been happy with Parallels? (Or vmWare Fusion?)

Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Thanks.

Technorati tags: laptops, apple, windows, parallels, vmware, social media

My employment status will be changing September 21... (and so I'll be available for employment)

The challenge of now having multiple weblogs... a friend pointed out that when I posted yesterday about my impending change of employment status over on my Disruptive Telephony blog, he missed it because that's one of my blogs he doesn't subscribe to.

So yes, it's true, the great time I've had at my current employer ends on September 21 after I finish a number of transition issues. I'll be in Los Angeles next week at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo doing one final speaking gig (and admittedly networking about what's next) and then I'll be up in Ottawa probably on the 18th and 19th... and then my time is done.

I'm obviously interested in opportunities that might be out there in the social media space... or other interesting areas of disruption.  (My other post talks a bit more about that.)  Please do drop a note if you know of such options.  Thanks!

Technorati tags: dan york

Returning to NOT using comment moderation...

I've decided to reverse my earlier decision and turn OFF comment moderation on this blog.  Today I suddenly realized that I shouldn't have been ignoring those TypePad emails and I in fact had 4 unpublished comments in the queue.  Oops.    Sorry about that, folks.  I am going to try returning to using CAPTCHAs... it's working fine on my other blogs so I'm not sure why it wasn't working here.  Anyway, comments are now NOT moderated - please do email me if you experience any problems leaving comments.  And yes, eventually I will get rid of the problem where the preview and CAPTCHA appear in a small middle column - I just need to find the time to move to the native 3-column layout of TypePad and then do my further customizations on top of that.... some day...

Light blogging ahead... offline until Monday, June 25th

Don't expect to see much from me here for the next bit.  In a few minutes I'm shutting down my systems and heading offline on vacation for the next week.  I'll be back online Monday, MayJune 25th, although I'll be travelling to a Mitel conference in Las Vegas for most of that week.

We're not planning to go anywhere extravagent... maybe some day trips around Vermont... some camping... work around the house... all in all just a pleasant way to spend some time before the heat of summer hits.

See you in a week!

Why did I wind up in Burlington, VT? Martyn Davies interviews me for his "Bending The Needle" podcasts

Ever wonder why I wound up in Burlington, VT, after living in Ottawa, Ontario, for most of 5 years?  Well, maybe you haven't... but that and other items about me are now available in an interview that Martyn Davies has posted as part of his new "Bending the Needle" podcast series.  When Martyn was over here and visited me back in the winter, he recorded this brief interview sitting in my home studio.  He just recorded it on his handy little Zoom H4 portable recorder which worked quite well.  He also took this picture to the right, which remains among my favorite as far as pictures of me go.

Martyn had told me that he was teaming up with Dean Elwood from VoIPuser.org to do a podcast series and this "Bending the Needle" seems to be their work.  The subtitle is "Interviews with the Leading Edge Personalities in the VoIP Space" and so it's an honor to be among the first interviewees he has up there.  I'll subscribe and will be interested to see their other interviews.

Technorati tags: dan york, martyn davies, podcasting, voip, voipsa

Subscribing to this blog via the browser RSS button now works... and an important TypePad/Feedburner lesson for me...

I have to thank Wayne Smallman for clueing me in to a minor little detail that I'd overlooked back in January when I had first launched this blog.  Wayne, who I have met through a public chat room about Twitter and Skype, IM'd me (on Skype) to let me know that he wasn't able to subscribe to the feed for this blog.

Given that this blog has been in action now for most of 6 months and I hadn't heard this issue at all, I was very surprised.  Feedburner stats do show a good number of subscribers to the RSS feed... but I'm guessing that they (some of you!) must have all grabbed the feed URL from the big orange RSS button or used the "Add to Google" or "Add to Bloglines", because the RSS icon in the browser address bar would definitely not work.

Here's the deal... back when I was looking to split out my writing into multiple blogs last fall, I had another name for this blog and had set up a similarly-named feed in Feedburner.  Wanting to ensure that people got to my Feedburner feed, I went into the TypePad settings and "connected" my TypePad blog to the appropriate Feedburner feed.  Everything was good.  I was getting ready to launch.

But before I launched, I found that "disruptiveconversations.com" was available and since it went nicely with my already existing "disruptivetelephony.com" domain, I decided to rename the blog.  In fact, I changed the underlying TypePad URL... changed all the template names, mapped the domain... and I created a new Feedburner feed with the new name.  All looked good and the various subscribe buttons you see on the right side all worked.    I launched the blog and you all have now been reading it for the past 6 months.

There turned out to be just one minor little detail:

I never went back and updated the TypePad <-> Feedburner connection!

Oops!  Yes, indeed, in the TypePad configuration screens this blog was very happily connected to the old feed at Feedburner.  The problem is - I deleted that feed quite some time ago!

The fix was quite simple: I simply disconnected this blog from the old Feedburner feed and then connected it back to the new Feedburner feed.  Done in just a couple of minutes and I verified that it all works.

I'm just a wee bit embarrassed that I never noticed it and obviously didn't test it.  I'm also a bit surprised that no one ever commented in all this time... are people not using that RSS icon in the browser address bar to subscribe to feeds?

So in any event, thanks to Wayne's query the button should now work fine!  If you tried subscribing in the past and it didn't work, please do try it out now.  And Wayne, if I ever do get over to the UK, I will have to look you up and buy you a drink! :-)

Technorati tags: RSS, feeds, feedburner, typepad

Switching back to moderating comments - anyone else having problems with TypePad requiring multiple CAPTCHAs and previews?

FYI, effective right now I'm turning OFF the CAPTCHA requirement for posting comments and very unfortunately switching back to requiring comment moderation.  I just tried posting a comment to one of my own posts and found that TypePad kept requiring me to re-enter a CAPTCHA - endlessly.  I did it about 8 times before I just said "enough is enough" and went into the TypePad control panel and switched back to moderation.  I first heard of this issue when a comment was left on an earlier post last week and I've commented successfully since then... but this was the first time I'd seen the issue myself.  I'll file a help request with TypePad to report the issue, but in the meantime thought I would raise the issue here.  (And now comments will get through, but of course won't be published until I approve them tomorrow.)

Technorati tags: typepad

Light blogging ahead for the remainder of the week...

It's a school vacation week here in my part of the USA and I'm planning to be offline for the remainder of the week.  Getting outside with my family... going on some day trips, doing some landscaping and otherwise enjoying the beautiful weather we are having right now.  I expect to be back posting here on Monday, April 30th.  See you then.

Light blogging this week during Cairo trip...

This week, March 19-23, I will be in Cairo, Egypt, to present at a regional conference for Mitel resellers. I expect that I will not be writing much here or on my other blogs during this week.  Of course, if I wind up being stuck in airports that also have WiFi access... or decide that 12-hour airplane flights might be a good place to write... I might wind up posting.  But my expectation is that you won't see much here until next week.  If I post anywhere, I may do what I've done in the past and post a bit of a travelogue to my personal blog and/or my Twitter account.

If any of you reading this happen to be in Cairo this week, do drop me an email as I'm always interested in meeting people in different parts of the world.

Back at you in a week...  I'm off to go sit in planes...

Suddenly having problems posting to TypePad with image uploading from Windows Live Writer...

I'm suddenly experiencing some problems uploading images from Windows Live Writer to TypePad, so I'm just doing a sanity test from a different computer to see if the problem is with a specific computer.  If you are actually reading this post, I'll know that the problem was with that other computer, and I'll probably be in the middle of doing the whole shutdown-and-restart routine...  aren't computers supposed to make our life more productive?

Yikes! My new blog format doesn't work with IE 6!

 A colleague called me this morning to tell me that he was only seeing half my text on this blog and that it was getting cut off by the right two columns.  I checked in both IE and Firefox on my own systems and, finding everything looking fine, asked if he had refreshed/reloaded.  He had, but the issue turned out to be... he's still using IE6!  And, sure enough, when I found that IE6 was still on another PC at home and opened this site myself... yes, indeed, it was all cut off (as seen in the picture on the right).  IE6 loads the main column in first, and so you see the text going all the way across the page.... but then the two right columns overlay on top!  Cutting off the text below for the length of the sidebar columns.  As you scroll down the page, the sidebars eventually stop and you can see the text.

So... it looks like something funky is going on with IE6 and all the TypePad CSS and templates that I'm using to make this site (and Disruptive Telephony) have the look they do.  Now, granted, Microsoft is more or less forcing folks to move to IE7, but there still may be many pockets (like companies with non-IE7-compatible web apps) where they still have IE6.  So for them... these sites of mine aren't working for those readers.

Well, I guess I'll just have to try to find some time to muck around with the TypePad Advanced Templates again...

Technorati tags: typepad, css, design, ie6

If you want to see what this blog is *supposed* to look like, use Firefox or Safari, not MSIE...

So if you are a user of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and want to see what this blog is really supposed to look like, try opening up the page in either Firefox or - on a Mac - Safari.  In both FF and Safari, it looks great.  The little tabs line up with the line underneath them... there is a dividing bar between the main column and the second column (the one with my picture in it)... and all around it just looks better.  I have now spent a serious chunk of time trying to get the CSS to work for IE and have to finally just say I can't...  it will have to wait for another day.

Of course, the content should look the same in either browser, and at least I've solved the issues so that IE is now displaying the columns correctly...  argh... all of this is rather annoying.

Testing with the new name

It looks like everything has worked for the move over to "Disruptive Conversations".  The one thing that appears NOT to have worked in the conversion is the FeedFlare.  Since I changed the feed name, the FeedFlare script changed... and now it does look like I have to edit the advanced templates to fix it.  So, I return to the coding...

Test post to check FeedFlare

Just testing to see why the FeedFlare is not appearing yet on posts.  FeedFlare seems to be working even the Advanced Templates, so it looks like I do NOT need to edit the individual template files, which is good to know.