I’m toying with the idea of forwarding my .Mac/.Me email account to my GMail account. The reason being is I’m getting a lot more email into the .Mac account it’s getting kind of hard to keep up with it via Mail. I’ve got a good system of organization but I’m duplicating between my GMail account and the .Mac account. It seems crazy when the content coming in overlaps so much.

The other reason behind the move is, I’m really not impressed with the MobileMe website. It never fails, I delete things over there and it doesn’t move it. Also I find their website very slow, no matter what browser I’m using.

My third reason is I’m not as tethered/addicted to getting my emails instantly. I love the .Me push IMAP, but really I don’t have anything coming in that a search 15 minutes from now won’t catch.

Recently GMail left Beta, offered Offline options (yay!) and now offers a slew of Labs extras, like Undo Send.

I have also since setup GoogleApps for my personal domain, which is doing a wonderful job filtering out an incredible amount of spam, from two email accounts Craig and I have had since 1999.

My only hesitation is that I’ve always ran into issues getting iCal notifications to play nice with my GMail account and really that could be eliminated by going to Google Calendar.

Question to the community:

Have you been in this dilemna? Which way did you decide? Any issues I’m not considering?

Audio visual performance created for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria. 1085 LED controllable windows, read more about it here.

lights on from thesystemis on Vimeo.

DiggBar from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

I’m already using Digg a lot more.

I look forward to this future and all it can offer.

(via SwissMiss)

From Jesse Newhart’s post, “How To Effectively Follow 15000+ People On Twitter Using These Tweetdeck Tricks” some great tips on how to use TweetDeck. I made the switch on my desktop from Twitterrific to TweetDeck since I started following more people.

One of the tips I’ve never used but will be is the Filter feature. Jesse suggests using it to search for “?” to help answer people’s questions, along with searching on “http” to see what links people are suggesting. Watch the video for other great tips.

Note: This is going to be a long post.

Part 1:
When we moved to our current residence the cable provider was deplorable so we switched to AT&T for all our communication services (land line, internet and cellular). The first thing we were most impressed with was the reliable service of DSL. It never went down unlike our past two cable services.

Life was good for about 2 years. Then they offered to upgrade our speed about the same time we started doing more podcast and movie downloads via iTunes. Then we started to notice a problem, if Craig was downloading his podcasts and I wanted to use the internet I could barely use it. I’d wait for my pages to load, as if I were on dial-up. We contacted AT&T and they offered to send a new modem/router out since the one we had was now 3 years old and possibly that was the issue.

After we received the new router, it was more problems. We started getting the following two error pages.

and then this one.

Needless to say this was extremely frustrating. A simple close of the browser, wait 10 seconds and reopen it would resume surfing with no issues, albeit slow. I kept checking the speed tests and the router interface kept saying 1.2mb/s.

Part 2:
At the end of December 2008, I called AT&T regarding the problem. After talking to a few representatives, they determined that the cap on our line never got lifted, when they had offered to upgrade our service. But we hadn’t been paying for it because we had been grandfathered in. Ok… the cap was to be lifted on January 3rd. On January 3rd we saw our router now report it was getting a 1.9mb/s feed. Speed tests via several websites including one by AT&T showed we were still only getting 900k to 1.2mb.

Part 3:
We let it go for a few weeks but then it became no longer tolerable and I called again on February 14th. They tried to blame it on wireless cards in our computers. I informed them the issue was still there when directly connected via ethernet.

The conclusion of the third representative was that our line might need to be repaired. They ordered a tech to come out on February 18th, sometime between 8am – 5pm. Nice window.

Our speed on February 17th.

Part 4:
February 18th I took off from work to be home for the tech. Around 1pm the tech arrived, nice guy, he came in, ran some tests of the line, went into the basement trying to determine if the issue was down there. His tests came back saying we were 17,000 feet from the node, and getting the higher speeds currently was impossible. At this point, I figured, fine we’re going to go to Comcast since they just came to the area. The tech was determined though to see if he could get us some improvement.

He went all around the yard trying to look for possible issues. He came back in a few minutes later and said he found a lot of bridge tap in place, caps on the line and said removing the 4,000 feet of bridge tap could help us. He put an order in for a pole worker to come by in the next 48 hours to do the work.

He also told us that there was a remote node only 5,000 feet away. But if it was already filled they couldn’t put us on it. He put a request in for this as well.

Only 30 minutes later another tech called and said he was coming out to the pole work. He let us know the internet might go down and even the phone line for a short period of time. Low and behold it did, and then he came to the door to test the line.

We ended up on a 40 minute call with AT&T technical support from Missouri and Texas. They ran all sorts of rips and rebuilds and several other things I wasn’t sure what it meant. They did finally get the line back up and when the modem came back up we were getting the 3mb/s service.

End of the Story?
Well, that should be the end of the story, but it’s not. For the most part we are getting faster internet, but we still get those error screens from time to time, and Craig’s iMac which solely uses the wireless takes 3 reloads of a webpage to view it.

The iMac issue might be something else. Although I’m not quite sure what. We are still entertaining going to Comcast for broadband. A family member who lives locally is getting 6-8mb/s via their Comcast service.

Has anyone else had any issues with AT&T DSL? Any recommendations on the iMac?

Our local Stop & Shop has now become part of the ScanIt program. What this means is that you can enter the store, get a special cart and a scan tool. You should bring your own bags, and there’s hooks on the side of the cart to keep them open, and then you go around the store and scan your items in.

It’s definitely hoping for an honor system of the user, which they make you sign a waiver to allow an audit of your grocery cart at any time. I’m fine with that, stealing groceries is not how I’m going to jail, if that day were to ever come.

Using the system kind of reminded me of walking around Macy’s scanning items for our wedding registry way back when.

There are several pluses to doing it this way. You get a running tally of your cost. You are alerted of specials through the store. You can remove items if it seems too expensive. Your already bagged and ready to go when you get to the counter.

When your all done you go up to a register, scan a bar code above the register and pay. Your done and ready to go. I liked it and could see us using it in conjunction with scheduled Peapod deliveries.

This is awesome from Hulu!

While laying in bed last night, I was browsing around the app store and discovered the All Recipes iPhone app. I’ve been a fan of the AllRecipes.com website for quite a while. Their app is called DinnerSpinner, the concept is you spin the meal choice, then an ingredient choice and finally a preparation time choice. Ironically enough my day job has a client who wants to do something similar to this for their next website.

Here’s a sample view of the spinner. I’ve selected Appetizer, Cheese and Slow Cooker. You can also click a button that says, “Spin Categories”. That button is currently replaced by the “View Matches” button.

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