Jamison "JAK" Kissh

An issue that I’ve met head on a few times since getting my Blackberry is I’m randomly greeted with a sync error. It’s an error that’s sort of crushing to see, that and it usually screws up whatever it’s trying to sync. Today I did some searching after my contact list went missing and came across a post over at VoIP Tech Chat where they went over a couple of fixes and I’m now going to go over what fixed it for me.

First I was greeted with this:

Where proceeded to try to retry a couple of times before getting frustrated and started googling. I came across their post where they outlined a couple of fixes that all circled around Mac OS X’s Sync Manager. The last fix on the page was one that seemed promising (that or I’m biased towards terminal based fixes). I opened up terminal and ran the command below:

/System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/resetsync.pl reset

First I ran this with Blackberry Desktop Manager closed and then again with it running. Both times it told me that there were no matching processes but if you watch a list, say the list of calendars it will clear out and re-populate after running the command. Hope this helps!

Go generate your own New Year’s resolution here.

Thanks for the heads up Mrod!

The other day while heading to class on the T I had a thought. Why doesn’t Twitter offer temporary accounts? For example, you have an event that you’re promoting via Twitter and once the event is done you don’t plan on ever touching the account again. Why not have a process to automatically remove these accounts? In comes a temporary Twitter account.

Ideally you would be able to create an account and set an end date on which the account would expire. For example if your event is December 11th you could set the account to expire December 15th so that you can see reactions and respond to them appropriately. On the expiration date the account no longer allows anyone to log in and if a user attempts to visit the account directly it will display a page letting the user know that the account was only temporary and has queued for deletion. Additionally at the same time the account becomes inactive it will tweet on last time so that everyone following the account will have been notified in some fashion, at this time the account will be removed from the following list of any followers for the account. After a waiting period, say 60 days, the account no longer displays a warning message to users and is returned to the pool of available names. This would allow for a wide variety of temporary events to interact while not wasting usernames, often times useful ones.

Let me know what you think of my idea in the comments.

I’ve been on Facebook since it was first opened to high school students, when it was still very basic. It was great, it was fast and much easier on the eyes than it’s dreaded counterpart Myspace. Then it became insanely popular and started to slow down, I understand that happening but it’s been in the news and publicized insane amounts over the past couple of years and it’s number of users has jumped through the roof. Granted I do not fully understand backend development on a site the size of Facebook but regardless, I find it a little pathetic that after all this publicity, money, and users that they still can’t manage to have uptime more than 1/4 (if even) of the time that I try to log on. For any other company on the net this would be inexcusable (look at Gmail’s recent outage and the ensuing outrage) but for Facebook it’s ok? Why?

Facebook’s development is great but to me it seems as though they’re moving too fast for their servers (or even users sometimes) to handle. They open the site to developers, great, but now it’s even slower and more annoying with all these applications. They open up their login to developers, great, but now if you try to use it you just have to pray that at that particular moment the site is responding and you don’t get stuck half logged in with a fancy little lightbox that you can’t get out of stuck over the site.

Today I pose one question and a possibly simpler answer. Why is Facebook able to get away with their terrible uptime/availability? My solution: Slow down. Stop trying to do everything at once, make sure the backend can support these ridiculous things.

I keep thinking that they might get on top of things and every time I do they swamp themselves with another release of the news feed or something of the like. I feel as though this is just irresponsible development and quite frankly, pathetic. I’m just waiting to pounce on the next big social network to get away from this horrid thing.

I’ve been trying to get around to creating a new portfolio for a long time now and I’ve just launched my new portfolio at http://portfolio.jamisonkissh.com. I attempted to keep the minimalist look of my blog that I adore but I’m not sure if I succeeded, please let me know what you think!

I live in a very small town in Connecticut where everyone knows exactly what is going on in town however things can get misreported. This got me thinking as to how things could be better handled in our town and even within the county. A great example can be found with the Boston Police Department. In an effort to spread news of an emergency they turned to the ever popular Twitter to share incidents with the general public and give warnings.

Since moving to Boston in late August I’ve found this service pretty useful although it rarely affects me directly however it certainly has given me a heads up to what’s going on around me. For example, earlier in the week I saw this tweet after I got the alert that the T had struck a car on the BU bridge and knew that traffic was probably going to be even worse and that I should walk down past the incident to pick up the bus or the T to avoid getting delayed and be late to class.

I have a feeling that between the Boston Police feed and the Boston Fire feed any true emergency situation that would affect me directly would be easily conveyed and help keep me and others safe.

Bottom line, Twitter + emergency services = great idea.

Well as I mentioned about two weeks ago I  had plans to call HP’s “Executive Care Office.” Turns out that is possibly the greatest idea that any has given me in a very long time. In 7 minutes I had accomplished more than I had in an hour on my first tech support phone call. Within those 7 minutes, the woman I was talking to had decided it’d be best to have my case escalated to a case manager. The woman in customer relations with whom I was speaking then tried to get a case manager on the line with me however she kept having her calls dropped. She finally took my phone number and agreed to call me back if she managed to get another case manager in the next 5-10 minutes. A few minutes after hanging up customer relations called me back and she let me know that she had finally managed to get a case manager on the line.

I was put through to this case manager who just asked me a few basic questions and to confirm my information. She then created a case ID for me and offered me two options. 1.) She ships me the parts in 3-5 and I do it or 2.) HP picks up the bill (they even send you packaging) to mail the computer to them and they replace it for me. Needless to say I went with the lazy method, having them change it out for me. This was by far the most pleasing experience I had with HP and I’m glad that not all their departments are lazy and incompetent (low level tech support). I’ll post again with how this whole ordeal ended for me.

I’ve always said and thought that social media is here to stay granted I may not like few of the things in it but as someone who consumes vast amounts on information daily via a vast number of sources I know social media and social networking is going nowhere. I feel as though social media is certainly going to play a huge role in the future and I’m even seeing that with the company for which I work. Social media is slowly becoming part of our business model and is slowly driving more traffic and that traffic is converting better and sharing our site at alarm (yet awesome) rates. I came across a video that Mashable had shared and it’s quite impressive and worth the watch.

Some of the numbers presented in this I’ve seen before and it’s done in a form that’s sort of getting old but it’s the numbers that are still the impressive part.

I had a bit of a strange issue when I inadvertently stumbled upon a series of images that I had put online that were inverted in appearance, however this wasn’t perfect either. I went to the server and pulled the folder with the affected images down to my computer and noticed that even in Quick Look I still couldn’t see the image correctly. Going off a (seemingly) unrelated issue I had posted on DesignersTalk.com and will write about tomorrow I tried opening the images in Photoshop and re-saving them, that worked. So I set up a batch and let all the images open and re-save. Now I’m not entirely sure why this was happening however I am able to say that this is certainly a method to try if you ever run into something like this with your images.

I was thrilled to find out that Twitpic does in fact allow you to now email photos to a unique email address that will then post a picture to your account and of course to Twitter. This finally allows us non-iPhone users to post photos on the go. At least provided your cell provider allows you to send pictures to email addresses without using some crazy website (ie Sprint/Nextel). Either way I tried it out a few days ago and it does in fact work pretty well.