Second Half

Posted by Bob Monsour at 8:50 AM | Permalink

Posted by Bob Monsour at 8:53 PM | Permalink

Posted by Bob Monsour at 8:26 AM | Permalink

click on the image to go to thefoodtimes.com

Posted by Bob Monsour at 1:14 PM | Permalink

Posted by Bob Monsour at 6:39 PM | Permalink

Just checked out They're Beautiful, a virtual flower shop with its own virtual greenhouses.

Here is a look my the flowers in my own virtual greenhouse. Enjoy!

Posted by Bob Monsour at 4:03 PM | Permalink

I just recently learned that Google Reader, Google's feed (RSS/Atom) reader has a new beta. So I decided to give it a try.

I am very much liking what I see and the fact that it's not another app, that it's in my browser, is nice (but that has its own problems that I'll write about some other time). It's got some nice keyboard shortcuts, and as long as you can export your current newsreader's subscriptions into OPML, you can import them right into Google Reader.

Give it a look, if you're looking for a strong browser-based newsfeed reader.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:13 PM | Permalink

Do we all not realize that every time that homes are demolished, when fathers, uncles, and cousins are killed, that hate becomes far more easier to instill in small children. Do we consider the perspective that those children, as grown men, will have toward all of "us", our countries and our people. Do we never think that this is a consequence?

The entire region thus continues to breed this hate as more homes are destroyed and more fathers, uncles, and cousins are killed.

Are we all so incapable of seeing back a mere 50-100 years to understand the pain of losing land, of losing homes, of losing more fathers, uncles, and cousins? of having to flee to Jordan, then Transjordan, to Lebanon, a state carved out of Syria after World War I, and to refugee camps in other parts of what was the land of Palestine?

This is not an argument for what they call "resistance", and I do not agree with terrorist tactics. You can call this empathy, you can call this understanding, you can call this facing the facts. Until we indeed face these facts, this region of war will to continue to exist as a region of war.

As an American of Lebanese descent, I often wonder whether or not I'll be able to visit the country of my ancestors in my lifetime. I was hopeful just a couple of years ago, but now I honestly cannot see it happening (and I hope to be alive for about another 30 years or so).

Posted by Bob Monsour at 12:11 PM | Permalink

From a handful of great guys in Vancouver comes Dabble DB, which, as the company puts it: "...combines the best of group spreadsheets, custom databases, and intranet web applicaitons into a new way to manage and share your information on the web."

Thanks to Tim Bray, via his Ongoing blog for the post that mentioned it.

Anyway, I started a 30-day free trial of Dabble DB back on June 27th. Since that time, I have been impressed with both the product and the company. The product basically, as they say, gets you out of all those database applications that we wind up shoe-horning into spreadsheets because they are just two-dimensional tables and Excel makes it easy to make those. The problem is that once you really want to do anything remotely interesting with your data (and I'm talking mostly non-numeric data for me), you're not quite sure how to go about it and it's definitely not straightforward. Dabble lets you import a spreadsheet with ease and then you can ease your way into managing and slicing and dicing and organizing and filtering and grouping so you can get the data represented and presented in a way that makes the most sense for your use.

The most interesting attraction to me (as if the above were not enough) was that once you've got your categories (read as tables) and fields defined, Dabble DB lets you "export" the code for a web-based form that you can drop into any web page. Once you do this, and someone fills out the form, the data goes right into your database. This was a survey waiting to happen.

So, with Dabble DB in hand, and me being in a new job involving trying to find out what was on the mind of nearly 400 college students, I set up the database with questions for field names and posted a survey to the web. Not only was this insanely simple to do, but within 24 hours of sending out the email request to students, asking them to complete the survey, I had a Dabble DB database with 100 responses (ok, it helped that I offered a chance to win an iPod Nano). The survey started on July 18th and by the deadline (August 15th), I had 201 unique responses. And all of the data was in a form that allowed me to analyze it in a myriad of ways with very little effort. I found myself waking up in the morning with a new way to look at the data and literally minutes after I sat down, I had the view of the data as I wanted.

Interestingly, since the product is relatively new, along the way of my 30-day trial, the guys at Dabble DB, happened to be adding features to the product that made it even easier to do certain types of tabulation. I know they weren't just for me, but their responsiveness to requests was nearly frightening (I do hope they sleep).

They have a wonderful User Forum set up and they are incredibly active in reading every single posting and responding in thoughtful ways and, if needed, requesting direct email to resolve an issue. I cannot say enough positive things about how this has gone so far. The forum itself is now open to the public, so you can even get a sense of the action and positive vibe before you sign up.

The database is multi-user, and you can allow read-only access or read-write or read-write with build privileges.

I think that these guys have reached just the right balance of functionality and service and the pricing is reasonable. I'm using the "Basic" level, which lets me build up to 10 applications with 5 unique users and it includes SSL.

If you're looking for a sharable web-based database app, I'd strongly encourage you to at least take the 30-day free (no credit card needed) trial.

No disclaimer needed as I have zero financial interest in the company; other than it's saving me a ton of time and, as we know, time is money.

P.S. The company also has a blog.

P.P.S I only mentioned a handful of the many features of the product. There's lots more that I haven't even taken advantage of (yet).

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:04 PM | Permalink

Can anyone make sense of why, when the file browser opens to attach a file to an email message in Apple Mail, there is a check-box asking if you wish to make your attachments "Windows Friendly"? See below.

I don't understand this at all. Is there any advantage to sending attachements that are NOT "windows friendly"? If anything, it's a complete and total annoyance and simply silly not to always send such attachments. What happens if you forget to check the box? I have at least one person that I send attachments to that cannot read the attachments I send unless I check this silly box. Again, why would this not be always set internally and NEVER presented as a choice?

I could find no preference setting that would let me set this to be true all the time.

Apple Mail has held up well for me. Its search serves me well and with add-ons like Mail Act-On and Textpander available, I find it quite efficient. But this one "windows friendly" thing has me completely baffled. Last I checked more than 90% of the systems out in the world today are "windows" systems.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)