James Poling

I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man. 

Twitter has harsh penalties for losing your password

Here's the deal. I have quite a few twitter accounts, each of which has to have it's own unique email address. Besides the fact that this is a very annoying issue that Twitter needs to address considering so many people have personal and business Twitter accounts, apparently it's a pretty unforgiving place to misplace your password.

I was actually using the password retrieval to try and figure out what account was associated with my personal email address. When I clicked on the "Lost Password" link and entered my email address this is the page I was directed to. I still haven't received any password instructions so not only do I still not know what account my email was associated with, it may be a mute point since it quite possibly was deleted for no apparent reason other than using the "Forgot your password" link.

This isn't the first time this has happened but this seemed less flukey which made it more annoying.

Thanks Twitter, once again you're proving my point that you'll be irrelevant by year's end.

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How to Keep Google Buzz Updates Out of Your Inbox

It seems like one of the chief complaints about Google Buzz is that all of the updates land in your inbox and clutter things up. I was surprised to see Steve Rubel, a big fan of most things Google mention that most people don't even know that filters for gmail even exist.

I'm not sure if that's true or not but either way, it's easy enough to get in and get your hands dirty with Buzz without having to worry about clogging up your inbox. In 5 easy steps your inbox can be buzz free.

  1. Click on the "settings" tab in upper right hand corner of your Gmail account.
  2. Click on the "filters" tab on your settings page.
  3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page (if you have filters to scroll down to) and press the "Creat a new filter" link.
  4. Set up your filter just like this: add the word "Buzz" in the subject line and click the Next Step >> button
  5. Set up this screen with these options:
Click the Create Filter button and you're all set. Not only will all future Buzz alerts skip your inbox but they'll be labeled as they come in to make it easy for you to access them all at once. Enjoy!

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No mas

   
Click here to download:
No_mas.zip (184 KB)

Sent from a magical box of wonder.

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Posted from Staten Island, NY

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And this is before the heavy snow falls

       
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And_this_is_before_the_heavy_s.zip (576 KB)

Sent from a magical box of wonder.

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Posted from Staten Island, NY

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Twitter gets local

Twitter has a new feature that allows you set your location to see the trending topics in your specific area. As of now it's pretty general, unless you live in a decent sized city you're stuck with either picking the closest one to you or just narrowing it down to the United States. Which I guess would come in handy to make sure you don't see any weirdo trending topics about Formula 1 racing or soccer. Stick with the United States and you're sure to get some bad ass relevant tags about the BGC ("Bad Girls Club for all you squares out there) or how some skank named Amber got beat up on the BGC or some other compelling trending topic that gives you hope about the future of our country.

   
Click here to download:
Twitter_gets_local.zip (34 KB)

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Thanks for the heart attack Twitter

I just went to Twitter.com and found this page waiting for me. I mean, imagine if my Twitter account had somehow been accidentally deleted. It's unthinkable. You'd be hard pressed to find a tragedy in recent memory that is proportional to the amount of people, not even including myself (I'm a giver), who would be forced to go without my 140 characters or less insights on the world. Fortunately I was able to login, but it scared the crap out of me for a second.

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Google's in the Outfield

Ok Google, my patience is waning. I've been a loyal Google fanboy for far too long to be treated like this. I've been using gmail since it was only a few months into beta. I talked until I was blue in the face to convince virtually every one of my family and freinds to switch to gmail. Granted that's only about 7 people, but, well...shut up.

I remember when gTalk came out and I stayed up until 1 a.m. to download it. Of course no one I know was stupid enough to do that, nor had they even heard of or cared about what gtalk was. For months I was forced to chat on gtalk with complete strangers. God knows what could have happened to me. Do you know what happens after you spend months IMing with perfect strangers? Well apparently they "don't know you" and have a hard time recognizing sarcasm via an instant message and just want you to "leave them the hell alone before they call the cops". And where did that leave me? Do you have any idea what it's like to try and IM to yourself?

I pay for extra Google storage to have space for my photos that I organize with Picasa which I use to share my pictures onto Picasa Web. Right now I only have 42 pictures online but someday I plan on taking a lot more perhaps and I'll need some place to store them.

Sadly, I once dumped a girl I had had a crush on since the first grade and had been married to for 22 years, because she refused to give up her Yahoo! Mail.

I made a special trip to China, not, as you might think, to see all of the beautiful sights and take in the amazing culture of a 5,000-year-old society, but so I could set up a proxy server and do Google searches for "democracy", "capitalism" and "porn".

Now, almost four hours after announcing to the entire world that Google Buzz was launching, out of the hundreds of thousands of servers you have you still haven't randomly gotten to the batch of servers that my Gmail account is hosted on and turned Buzz on. How on earth can I not take this personally?

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One Big Happy Family

For the past couple of years I've lived a double life of sorts. Three if you count the cross-dressing, carny-working, drug mule part, but for the purpose of this post, we're just dealing with the first two. As I've branched out into consulting and operations strategy I, like many others, have found myself using two main portals to stay connected, Twitter and Facebook.

Up until now I've somehow managed to keep the two largely autonomous. Twitter was for my of my geek talk, for meeting like-minded Brooklynites and following some incredibly smart, well informed people to stay up on the latest dish in the tech community. I've made so many interesting and meaningful connections via Twitter that I feel it's time to actually make my personal Twitter account, well, more personal.

Facebook has been my go to place to keep up with my family, friends and people I haven't spoken to or thought about since high school. With Facebook's finely tuned privacy controls it's a great place for me to be able to upload pictures of my daughter and control who has the ability to see certain photos that are meant only for my family.

(cut to the following day)

Before I could even finish this post last night, I woke up this morning to find out that Google Buzz is being launched today. I don't really care whether or not it has Facebook or Twitter functionality in it. I'm going to try it out and if it's something that is well thought out and can do the job it will definitely be the one place I consolidate my personal online presence.

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NYC schools have already been cancelled for tomorrow. So lame. We never had snow days when I was a kid. I did grow up in south Florida but..

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Progress!

   
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Progress.zip (250 KB)

Sent from a magical box of wonder.

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Posted from Staten Island, NY

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