Several months ago I wrote about the best support experience I’ve ever had. One of my Samsung monitors was deteriorating. I called Samsung support, and within two days they had a new monitor waiting for me at the UPS store (I merely brought my faulty monitor in to be shipped back and took the new one home).

Well, those days are gone. Another of my monitors is now failing. I called support and was told that their policies have changed. I now have to ship my monitor back to them and wait up to two weeks for repair and return (they’ll replace only if it cannot be repaired). Which means I am without the monitor for two weeks. Which means I need to buy a new monitor. This time it will not be a Samsung. And that’s a shame. I love their products and have been buying them exclusively for years. Maybe this is normal policy for the industry, but their old policy had me publicly singing their praises, while the new policy has me publicly deriding them. Wonder how that will play out for them.

written by Christopher Murray

We’re huge fans of animation at my house. This short is remarkable for its detail and beautiful renderings, but is even more fantastic because it’s made by a guy who simply loves animation as a hobby, not by a huge house like Pixar. Its’ also very funny.

Click here to view the embedded video.

written by Christopher Murray

This is big news (if you’re a geek like me). “Dropbox is the easiest way to store, sync, and, share files online. There’s no complicated interface to learn. Dropbox works seamlessly with your operating system and automatically makes sure your files are up-to-date. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.”

It really is that simple. Dropbox places a folder on your desktop. Anytime you drag another folder or file into the Dropbox folder it is instantly synchronized and available to your other machines running Dropbox. In addition, you can also right-click on any file or folder and create a private URL to that resource. Sending that URL to someone gives them instant access to that resource. In addition, and by default, if a folder contains images, they are displayed in a very cool gallery format.

Signing up for an account gives you 2GB storage. If you recommend friends and they sign up, you get additional free storage. Larger storage options are available for a reasonable fee.

I now have Dropbox running on my workstation, my Windows laptop, my Mac laptop, and now my iPhone. Brilliant.

written by Christopher Murray

This is going to be of interest to only a very small, select crowd.

Here’s the deal. I do all of my design and development work on my local PC. Once I have finished a piece of work, I upload it to a staging server where it can be reviewed by the client. Once the client approves of the new work, it is uploaded to the live, production server.

The problem is my local machine, which runs WinXP and Apache, is painfully slow. Not because the machine itself is slow (it’s souped up with lots of speed, CPU, and Memory), but something else. When I load a page locally, it seems to take forever; the same page on either of the external servers loads within seconds. I should note also that this slowness appears primarily on Firefox.

I’d been Googling for this for a while until I came across this (http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2007/06/17/fixing-firefox-slowness-with-localhost-on-vista.aspx):

It turns out that the slowness is caused by an IPv6 issue with DNS and can easily be resolved by turning IPv6 support off in Firefox while doing localhost testing.  To make the change, type about:config in the address bar, locate the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting and double-click on it to set it to true.  This does the trick for the Firefox localhost issue on Vista and everything is running fast again.

Kudos to the guy who figured this out. My pages load beautifully now. I went the extra step and disabled IPv6 on the whole machine.

Oy, when I read this I realize how truly geeky I am.

written by Christopher Murray

+  + I am all about convergence. I love that my phone can act almost as a secondary computer. While I tend to write about all the nifty gadgets I find for it, it actually has become a huge part of running my business. But here again, I’m gonna write about the fun stuff.

I’ve been spending more time with Facebook lately, posting some inane things, but mostly writing about experiences from my work. And I’ve really enjoyed finding all the applications you can add to Facebook to make it more useful and more integrated with other services. This morning, I found an app that grabs all the photos (in their galleries, no less) from Picasa and displays them to a tab in my profile page. Because I use Photoshop Lightroom 2 to process my images and then directly export them to my Picasa web, I now am able to update Picasa while also updating FB with my photos.

But wait … now there’s more. It turns out this plugin I found doesn’t work so well, and also, only displays the photos and galleries in a tab in my profile, with no announcement on my wall that there are new pictures. And now I find something that is already built into FB that will accomplish this for me, without an additional application. Do this:

Go to your Profile page in FB
Click on the Settings button just below the What’s on your mind box
Here you’ll see a bunch of options for connecting to services like Picasa and Flickr
Just click on the service you want and enter the username used in that service
Done!

To further my aspirations for convergence of everything I hold dear, I even added my deli.cio.us bookmarks to my twitter feed so they also now will end up on my FB page. I am at one with the cyberverse.

written by Christopher Murray

I’ve recently noticed several posts mentioning mind mapping and other forms of defining process and capturing ideas. I can’t tell you how many tools I have used over the years for this purpose, Visio being my absolute least favorite. (I’ve also run the gambit of note-taking applications, from OneNote to EverNote, my current favorite.) But mind mapping is a simple and cool visual way to illustrate how a process or system might work. This little example below was quickly done on my iPhone using SimpleMind, which I then saved as an image, then imported into this post (using the WordPress iPhone edition). It’s a simplified example but it does show how easy it is to diagram the initial stages of thought for a project. I’m gonna kick this one around for a while, and see if there is a more complete version for the desktop.

There’s not much more to this application. You create related boxes and can move them about the screen. You can change the color scheme and either export it as an image or export it to the paid version ($6.99). For free, this is definitely worth trying out, especially if you’re like me and finding your phone a bigger part of running your business.

written by Christopher Murray