Hans's posterous

16 May 2012

May 16th, 3:21pm 0 comments

How to link a non Gmail email address to your Gmail account

This could also be called "how to get notifications from Google Docs sent to your work (or other) address".

It's three easy steps.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

8 May 2012

May 8th, 6:35pm 0 comments

Return to Smartsheet

Been working with Smartsheet to get a couple projects under control and I am very impressed with it. Definitely recommend you check it out. Go back a couple posts for the full review.

Using the spreadsheet interface is brilliant. Almost no learning required.

Also the sharing capabilities are more thought out than most.

More soon!

7 Apr 2012

April 7th, 8:52am 0 comments

Amazon.com: Your loaned book will expire in 3 days

This seems like a pretty short-sighted view on Amazon's part--purely in place to force me to buy a book I couldn't finish in three weeks.

My wife bought this book (The Paleo Solution) a few months ago and read most of it. Then we started the diet based on her knowledge of it. Recently, I wanted to read it myself so I could fortify my knowledge in the area. So, I had her loan it to me. I'm not going to buy it twice, not when it is right here on the household "bookshelf" so to speak.

I knew I had only three weeks to get through it, but "life happens", ya know? (And this time it really happened with my wife in the hospital--she's ok, but I can tell you my priority is not rushing through this book right now when I'm being Mommy and Daddy to our four little kids.)

It would be much more ideal if I could work through this book one bit at a time when I have a moment (like just before I doze off at the end of the day). After all, that's how it works in the real world. My friends (and least of all family) don't say "here's the book I wan to loan you, but if you don't get it back to me in three weeks, I'm gonna break into your house and take it back!".

So this seems grossly out of sync with the way the world conducts itself. The lender should be able to control how long the book is loaned to someone. Just like life.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: digital-noreply@amazon.com <digital-noreply@amazon.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 9:40 PM
Subject: Amazon.com: Your loaned book will expire in 3 days
To:

Your loaned book will expire in 3 days

Hello Hans Eisenman,

We wanted to remind you that your loaned Kindle book will expire in 3 days.

You can purchase The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet and continue reading at your leisure.

For more information on Kindle lending, visit our Kindle Lending Help page.

22 Feb 2012

February 22nd, 8:41pm 0 comments

Smartsheet: A New Take On Spreadsheets

I was asked to do a quick analysis and summary of an online collaboration tool called Smartsheet. Thought I'd publish it to the blog in case anyone else is looking for a way to improve team efficiency and the flow of info within their organization. I don't know if we are going to use this where I am working right now, but it's an intriguing option in my opinion.

What is Smartsheet?

Basically it is a cloud-based app which combines the familiarity of spreadsheets with access to templates and additional features which would make spreadsheets more useful for a variety of purposes.

Purposes of sheets might include:

All the things we use spreadsheets for already
Project tracking
Marketing goals and tasks
Sales pipeline reports
more

So imagine a spreadsheet for any of the above purposes, but which also has value-add features built into the spreadsheet like:

Engage in a chat with other users about a particular row in the sheet. This is very powerful, IMHO. You can have asynchronous communication with other users assigned to the sheet at a row level -- in other words, an entire, recorded (written) conversation about that line item.
Associate files with a row. So you could attach, for example, a .docx with a specific row to provide more information about a task (or whatever is in that row).
See all user revisions in the sheet
Email specific rows to others
Reminders about approaching milestones
Gantt view of all tasks and their dependencies.
See the spreadsheet's contents in a calendar view (example).
Publish spreadsheet for outsiders to see
- Branding of spreadsheets
all key differentiators listed here

Of course, there is a more fundamental benefit to have it be a spreadsheet in the cloud in the first place: there would be no emailing back and forth of the various version of the document. All the users go to it. The doc stays in one place.

Pricing

Smartsheet offers the oft-seen "good, better, best" tiered pricing and is based on (among other more typical things like # of projects and users, etc.) on the number of "creators". If you would likely have more than 10 users creating sheets, you would need the Enterprise tier account, which is $150 per month (you could get two months free by prepaying the year).

A single user account is $15.95 per month.

Summary

Basing this kind of collaborative software on something as familiar as a spreadsheet is a unique approach that could give a collaborative tool a big boost in adoption in an organization. "Learnability" is already pretty high. Google Docs also does this, of course and there there are a few others that offer basic, cloud-based spreadsheet apps. However, they lack the templates and value-add features like row-level discussions and file association, just to name two.

If larger company would entertain the idea of spending the money for it after the trial (i.e. if the pricing is not a deal breaker in and of itseelf), it looks like it could be worth engaging in the 15-day trial and I would suggest piloting it on a specific cross-departmental project of some kind--in other words engage the maximum number of departments across the greatest distance. Then do a post-mortem and decide whether all involved found it to be productive.

8 Feb 2012

February 8th, 5:23pm 2 comments

Simplifying task management

This is going to be a short post because I just want to log a little epiphany related to managing tasks.

Basically it is this:

Tasks always require a certain degree of focus to be completed.

Not very romantic, I admit. But it came to me when I saw a coworker's task list and she had all sorts of color coding and other markups on the list, probably to help her differentiate priorities.

I've been there myself so recognized the m.o. immediately.

But I've since thrown all that out for the most part. The only thing I track about a task is:

The task (of course) in as finite a wording as I can (e.g. something like "stop being so thirsty" isn't really executable. "Drink a glass of water 3 times per day" is much more doable.). Wording it in measurable terms is sometimes another way to look at this.
Simple priority. This is either it's position on the list or I may mark a task as P1 or P2. But that's as far as I go with it.
Who owns it, if not me
IF it has to be done by a certain time, I mark it as such. This can get out of control sometimes so I try and reserve it for things things that really have a due date in the real world and not just in my head.

That's it. Anything more elaborate than that is a waste of time for me usually--it's time I could have spent focusing on the task.

In short, you can waste a lot of time meddling with tasks. In the end, you have to pick one of them and drive it to completion--then go to the next. Sounds overly simple, I know, but it's very easy to do other things (like prioritize, organize and pretend like we're multitasking and all that).

Focus is senior to all of it. "Dones"--task completions--require it.

So should we (mostly of ourselves).

3 Jan 2012

January 3rd, 7:37pm 1 comment

#ronpaul is my pick for pres @cnn

10 Jul 2011

July 10th, 3:12pm 0 comments

Checking in with Google vs. Facebook vs Foursquare

(download)

Hopefully this audio file from my phone can be played back by Posterous. But here are some quick thoughts about whether it is better to check in using Facebook or Google.

7 Jul 2011

July 7th, 4:50pm 4 comments

Google+ vs. Facebook

(download)

Without question Google+, Google's new social network, will be facing off with Facebook over the next several months if not years.

After using G+ for the last few days, I have a few observations about it and thought I'd take a moment to share them in a short podcast.

There is also a very well written piece on this which posted here (on Google+ no less) by another user. It's written a bit more from the viewpoint of someone with a technical background, but you should be able to glean some good points out of it even if you're not very techie yourself.

Why and How Google+'s Interface Is Kicking Ass

Either way, leave your comments below!

10 Jun 2011

June 10th, 7:51pm 0 comments

Google's Matt Cutts | How to Get Better Visibility on Google

via youtube.com

There's more to Search Engine Optimization of course, but this is good basic advice from a guy who would know and it's a great place to start.

24 May 2011

May 24th, 10:13pm 0 comments

World record 26 terabits per second data transmission achieved

With video content consuming ever more bandwidth, the need for faster data transmission rates has never been greater. Now a team of scientists at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are claiming a world record in data transmission with the successful encoding of data at a rate of 26 terabits per second on a single laser beam and transmitting it over a distance of 50 km (31 miles). The scientists claim this is the largest data volume ever transported on a laser beam and enables the transmission of 700 DVD's worth of content in just one second.

With no electronic processing methods available for a data rate of 26 terabits per second, the team developed a new opto-electric data decoding process. This process relies on purely optical calculations to break down the initial high data rate into smaller bit rates that can then be processed electrically. The record-breaking data encoding also employed the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme based on Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) mathematical routines that is commonly used in mobile communications networks including digital TV and audio broadcasts.

Because energy is required for the laser and a few process steps only, the team says the new method is not only extremely fast, but also very energy efficient.

"Our result shows that physical limits are not yet exceeded even at extremely high data rates," says Professor Jürg Leuthold, who led the KIT experiment. "A few years ago, data rates of 26 terabits per second were deemed utopian even for systems with many lasers and there would not have been any applications. With 26 terabits per second, it would have been possible to transmit up to 400 million telephone calls at the same time. Nobody needed this at that time. Today, the situation is different."

The latest breakthrough follows on from the previous high-speed data transmission record set by the KIT scientists in 2010, when they successfully exceeded the data rate of 10 terabits (or 10,000 billion bits) per second.

The KIT experiment involved companies and scientists from all over Europe, including members of the staff of Agilent and Micram Deutschland, Time-Bandwidth Switzerland, Finisar Israel, and the University of Southampton in Great Britain. The experiment is detailed in the journal Nature Photonics.

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via gizmag.com

Transmit 700 DVDs in one second. Wow!