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The last few days I’ve been “commuting” from our place on Vashon Island into downtown Seattle.  Part of it was a trial to see how it was to commute, and part of it was for fun – if you call getting up at 6AM fun.

Monday I took the passenger ferry, which I’ve done hundreds of times, and it was no different than normal.  Of course, I’m doing this during a week when traffic is light due to the holidays, but that’s OK for me.  It was nice seeing the sunrise, and the drive was nice on the Vashon side.  The Seattle side was less fun, but still not horrible.  On the return trip, I had to wait a while to catch a ferry, but nothing hugely long.

Tuesday and Wednesday I took the King County Water Taxi from Vashon directly to downtown, and then walked 45 minutes down the waterfront to work.  Both times were excellent – the ferry trip was super fast (~20 minutes) and smooth, the crew very efficient and polite.  There were a few problems with the new ORCA cards, but that’s expected with something new.

The walk from Coleman dock to work was nice – the first day it was freezing cold and I didn’t dress right, so I was a bit unhappy there, but the walk itself was nice.  The sun was rising during the walk, ferries and ships were moving around, and of course a few trains went by just to keep me awake.

I think if you have to commute, this sort of commute is pretty nice – a bit of exercise to start and end the day, and efficient mass transit in the middle.  Of course, I am not doing this during a normal day (holidays and all) so I am sure it would be less fun if the boat was full/late/canceled.  Nevertheless, commuting just as long in a car offers up the same style of interruptions and inconveniences with traffic problems and sports games

I think it would be great to be able to ride my bike from the place on Vashon to the ferry terminal, and subsequently into work, but in talking with several others that commute regularly on the Water Taxi, those bike rack slots on the boat are hard to come by – maybe just cycling one end would be OK, and walking the other (Seattle side for walking!).  Of course, that would mean actually getting back into shape since the ride from the house on Vashon to the ferry terminal is super long (11 miles), and has a huge amount of hills.

It’s good to know that commuting isn’t that bad, though…

steve Uncategorized

I moved yesterday to a new, larger apartment, and I used an actual moving company this time around.  All of my moves before had been done by me, and friends helping.  It always seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and the stack of boxes and furniture really didn’t look that big anyhow.  But it always ended badly – something being broken, taking way longer than the day you had the truck rented, and every time being sore and completely worn out.

This time around I asked at work for folks recommendations, and ended up settling on Gentle Giant Moving Company.  They are based out of Boston, but have a local office here in Seattle.  Every aspect of the move was handled exactly as I would have wanted it – very quick, concise communication via email and phone for the estimate, 100% courteous and professional folks on the moving day, and everything was packed and moved perfectly.  I was especially surprised at how helpful the guys were that moved things, and how fast they were.  Done in 4 hours!

I would highly recommend them for anyone in the Seattle area wanting to move.  I found many, many scary companies out there that quoted me various open-ended amounts of time, and tried to push me to buy their own packing supplies (which I didn’t need) and other things.

Still getting used to the new place – still lots of boxes to unpack and things to re-find again.

steve Uncategorized gentle giant, moving

I’ve been thinking off and on for a while about moving from my current 1 bedroom, 900sf apartment into something a little more unique, and a little larger.  Friday, a new rental came up on an RSS feed I have for SeattleRentals.com – a house boat on Lake Union in the Eastlake neighborhood.  In fact, there are at least three for rent in the same general area.

I love the water – sailing on it, being near it.  I own a place with two other friends out on Vashon Island right on the sound, and I love getting out in my sailboat as often as possible.  I think it would be amazing to live on the water.  I’ve considered living on my sailboat, but that requires a significant lifestyle change, plus it’s hard to find liveaboard slips around the area.

So the big question is – what should I be thinking about in living on a houseboat?  I’ve read a bunch of stuff about the communities and fun things, but I want to know what to watch out for.  The things that aren’t so fun or nice or interesting.

My biggest concern is the neighborhood location – I’m used to living on Queen Anne, which is literally 5 minutes from work, all on pretty un-busy city streets.  And it’s only a couple of blocks away from restaurants and grocery stores.  The Eastlake area isn’t as close to those things.  And it’s pretty difficult traffic to get from Eastlake over to work, or to my friends house that I spend lots of time at.

If you have thoughts, let me know… still thinking about the options…

steve Uncategorized house boat, houseboat

I’ve had the G1 for a while now, and have found a few things that are must-haves both in hardware and software.

First, the Innocell 1400mAh Extended Life Battery from Seidio is a must.  The original stock battery would not get me through a day unless I plugged it in at least once at my desk during the day.  If I turned WiFi or any other options (location, Bluetooth, GPS) on during the day, and did a moderate amount of surfing in meetings, I was done.  This new battery seems to last a lot longer, and allows me to use the phone off and on throughout the day, with WiFi, and without any problems.  Much happier.  Too bad T-Mobile didn’t ship this with the phone…

Next, for work email, the K-9 mail application.  This app works far faster with remote IMAP servers than the default one, and has a lot of good support for Exchange server.  It’s also got a great interface for quickly deleting and reading messages, and actually supports deleting messages on a remote IMAP server, which the default app doesn’t either.  It has a streaamlined interface especially if you have the phone opened with the keyboard exposed – one line per email message – very efficient.

Of course, Anycut is a must for creating shortcuts to other apps elsewhere.

Another great application is dgAlert Prefs – it allows you to customize what happens when you get an SMS.  The default sound choices for me, and lack of repeatability and control were always a bother.  I get a decent amount of SMSes for work related purposes, and want to make sure if I miss one, it re-notifies me.  dgAlert does this, as well as allows you to control the LED color and blinking when a message is received.  It takes a bit to set it up as the UI is a bit rough, but it has worked very well for me since then.

Another one for SMS is Chomp SMS.  It has an iPhone like interface and works even with the keyboard hidden – nice for a quick SMS.  The screen space and key size in that mode are a little hard to use sometimes, but it’s better than opening the whole keyboard.

The last one is PixelPipe.  This app allows me to snap a bunch of pictures, and then add titles and details and upload to Flickr with a quick click.  It’s also capable of sending photos a lot of other places.

steve Uncategorized android, g1, google phone

Seattle from Kerry Park

After threats of it over the last 2 days, and having gotten a light sprinkling earlier in the week, we’re finally getting a decent amount of snow here today.  Temperatures in Seattle have been really cold this last week – the coldest in 20 years – and they’re supposed to be even colder over the next few days.

It was fun watching folks try to drive on it today – there were the really timid folks who braked constantly and ended up sliding, and then the folks who chained up but their chains weren’t quite right, banging their car loudly.

I walked into work and took a few pictures over on my Flickr site.  I hope the snow stays around a while!

steve Uncategorized seattle snow

I’ve been struggling for a while finding something that I can put all of my passwords in for online stuff that doesn’t have limitations or security holes.

For a while, I used Splash ID on my PC and phone, which was convenient.  But it was a piece of software I had to have on one computer, and I couldn’t find my passwords when I didn’t have that computer.  I used it on a BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile phone in conjunction with the PC app, but it wasn’t that terribly useful to have it on the phone, except when I was away from my normal computer and needed one of the passwords.  It also was somewhat buggy and crashed at the most inopportune times.

I was somewhat worried about the data being secured enough – these apps claim they use good encryption, etc. but I also didn’t think it was a good idea to have all of this on my phone and on my PC.  I was afraid of my phone being stolen and then the passwords being retrieved from it.

So I began using common passwords for things by adding numbers and other items in front and in the middle.  That resulted in forgetting a bunch of the passwords, and making me feel less secure because the passwords weren’t that good.

Recently I looked again at options and found Passpack.  The difference with this solution is that it’s all online.  While that might sound like a worse idea because the passwords are stored somewhere out online, it’s important to understand their security model to know that it’s not possible for them to even read your passwords.

I also like the idea of disposable logins, or one time passwords, as well as their multiple levels of login and authentication security.  I’ve set up all of the features, and it is very clear every time I login to the site that I’ve gotten the right site, right place and nothing strange is going on.

I generally use these sorts of tools for storing things that are medium security, like logins to online stores and such.  I never use them to store bank account, email, or other critical services like that.  Those passwords are unique and I never even write them down.  It’s a must, though for the hundred or so online places that I have accounts with, and I much prefer using something like this for a number of reasons.

First, it allows me to generate a unique password of varying lengths for every site I login to.  No duplication.  Second, it allows me to get to them from anywhere – since all of these passwords are for online resources, I’ll already be online when I’m trying to login.  And finally, the auto-login functionality is very helpful for those really long, 20+ character passwords – typing those can be a pain.

So far Passpack has really impressed me with their UI, feature set, and reliablity, and especially their security model.

steve Computers, Uncategorized online password storage, passpack, security

I have moved hosting companies again after a day long outage with no communication or updates from DreamHost.  This wasn’t the first outage, but it was the worst, and although they gave me a free month of service as a result of their error (they deleted my apache configuration) it still didn’t make up for it.

There have been ongoing issues with their service that a lot of people are complaining about on their blog, including the lack of notifications when updates or upgrades are being rolled out.  I was down for 6 hours while this happened as well.  

Now, I don’t have mission critical sites, but I do have other boxes out on the ‘net submitting data to these, and they get really upset if they can’t do that.  

I moved back to WiredTree, which had awesome service, awesome support, but it was just too expensive at the time.  The funny thing is that when the outage happened at DreamHost, I looked at what I pay per month, since I upgraded to their Private Server program, and it turned out to be really darn close to WiredTree.  

So, here I am, moving things back again.  Hopefully all of the DNS changes and such will be done in the next couple of days.  Sorry for any broken links or problems you might have.

steve Uncategorized hosting companies, wiredtree

I upgraded WordPress today to version 2.6 which I had been putting off for some time.  The upgrade was surprisingly easy, but there are a few things that aren’t working after the upgrade.  My Flickr photo plugin appears to be activated, but doesn’t seem to be serving images, or causes the browser not to load anything except the header.

I’m still trying to figure out that piece, but everything else seems to be working correctly.  The upgrade wasn’t supposed to provide a huge amount of new features, but there are a few nice things such as the word count, Google Gears compatibility to make things a little faster/smoother, and a few other things.

I also started using the WordPress app for the iPhone and have posted a few times with it, even with pictures.  I started using it with my first gen iPhone and it seemed to work just fine for standard posts, although it was a bit slow.  Uploading pictures is not tenable with the first gen iPhone – it takes too long over the EDGE network.  Wireless of course works fine.

Overall, I love WordPress and have had no problems with the core software.

steve Uncategorized iphone, wordpress

Summer is good.

steve Uncategorized

After a lot of shuffling, I’ve moved all of my sites, content and mail to two places. It was sort of fun, although took a while for DNS and other setups to be finalized.

For mail, I moved everything back to Google Apps for all of my hosted domains. I even went as far as paying for 2 mail accounts through Google Apps – an upgrade to the Premium version. This enabled me to use the IMAP import features which simplified moving my 2GB of email into Google Apps with a few clicks.

I had used Google Apps a while ago to host my personal mail, but wanted a bit more control over things. I ended up not being able to control what I needed, even running mail on my own, and didn’t like just using gmail.com because of some service issues. I’m very happy with Google Apps and won’t be leaving for a long time.

For the rest of the stuff, I chose Dreamhost. This was after evaluating Virtual Private Servers (Media Temple and WiredTree), Grid Computing (again at Media Temple, and also at Mosso), as well as shared hosting at over 10 other location.

Virtual Private Servers aren’t new to me, and were pretty slick at both MT and WiredTree. WiredTree had the best setup, and hands down the best support – usually I had responses in less than 5 minutes, even late in the evening. Unfortunately, for the price I wanted to pay, I wasn’t getting much of a server. Even just running Apache/PHP with MySQL and a few other things resulted in out of memory problems, which are expected by most of these places.

Grid computing is an awesome idea, and I wish someone would do it right. Mosso cost way too much, and is geared towards someone reselling services to clients. Their control panel is really dated, even their new one, and they do not allow SSH access, which was a huge problem for me.

Media Temple’s grid service is really frustrating – their control panel looks very well thought out, and has far more features and controls. By far, I liked Media Temple’s control panel more than anyones. But that doesn’t really matter if half of the features don’t work, and their support sucks, and the actual grid service went down 8 times in the first 24 hours. And did I mention that my first “server” that was provisioned was done incorrectly 3 times before it finally started working? But it didn’t matter because the cluster went down then….

The rest of the shared hosting providers were either really scary, really horrible, or mediocre. The only one that stood out was Dreamhost.

From the beginning, their control panel and options looked like they were setup by someone who wanted something reliable and easy to use, while still having control over enough technical areas to make it useful to someone like me who’s used to working on deep technical systems. The features, bandwidth, and options they offer include just about everything anyone would ever want, and then a few more nice features others don’t offer.

So far I have several web sites hosted under my simple account, and have no outages, no problems, and no issues. I have filed a couple of tickets about minor things that I needed some assistance with, and got prompt responses. I am very happy so far.

Now that I’m moved, I’m looking forward to getting my other sites working again, and all linked into this one main blog.

steve Uncategorized hosting companies evaluation