Travel Tech

Travel into the 21st Century

If you only take one bit of advice from this post, let it be this: Organize all your travel plans with Tripit.com

This site is where travel utopia meets trip utility. Everything you need to know about your hotel confirmation, flight details, or car rental all comes together in one beautiful itinerary.

It’s simple and free. Create an account a Tripit.com, then just forward all your trip confirmations to [email protected].

That’s it. Tripit sprinkles pixie dust and builds your whole trip.

I can’t begin to cover all the amazing features of this site but here are a few notable highlights:

Tripit’s universal app for iPhone/iPad fantastic. You can add and edit plans, click thru for maps and they even provide links to checkin to your flight with prefilled info from your itinerary.
Weather – They determine your location for the day and pull the weather for that locale. A simple but brilliant feature that keeps you from watching 4 different forecasts.
Social – Family picking you up or want to coordinate with friends. Add them as TripIt contacts to share your plans.

I can’t say enough about how useful and wonderful Tripit has become. Use it.

Track Flights

Keeping track of gates, departure times, and delays can be a hassle but not if you have FlightTrack. The app is $10 but don’t blink at the price it is totally worth it. You can import your Tripit itinerary to see all of your flights and it will show you gatemaps of the airports. It’s an all-in-one Air Travel app that keeps an obsessive type like me breathing easy.

On the Road Apps

3 apps for exploring unfamiliar roads:

Waze – See real-time traffic information, hazards, and speed traps submitted by other Wazers in the area. Waze is awful for routing but is the best at real time info.
MapQuest – Yes I know it isn’t 2002 and I’m recommending MapQuest but honestly their app is really well done. I prefer it over the Google Map App in unfamiliar areas because it offers voice navigation. It works really well.
iExit – Need to find a Chick-fil-a or the next Holiday Inn? Which exit should you stop? iExit does a great job of showing what resources are available at upcoming exits. Yes this info can be seen in other ways but iExit does it best and when travelling 70mph on the interstate ease and speed of info are priorities.

Where to Eat?

There is no shortage of apps recommending places to dine but I still default to Urbanspoon. I use a combination of Foodspotting, Foursquare, and Gowalla to give specific tips and dish recommendations at a restaurant but I always start with Urbanspoon.

Stay Informed

You know I couldn’t leave out my beloved Twitter.

Take the time to build a specific Travel Twitter list that includes the airports, airlines, major news outlets from your destination, and look for Fed/State departments relevant to your trip (State Dept, Texas Dept of Transportation, FAA etc..). If you have really done your research find a few tourism accounts or locals to follow. This Twitter should be seen in 2 ways:

Trip information and enrichment
Holy smokes something happened, what’s going on feed. (I was a Boy Scout and I take that “Be Prepared” stuff pretty seriously. Ask my wife about my emergency planning tendencies.)

Parting Advice

Get a good weather app, The Weather Channel Max is my personal preference
Download a Wifi locator app
Digitally document your credit cards in case they are stolen. I just stick them in as secure notes in LastPass.

Finally don’t forget to setup “Find my iPhone” prior to the trip and set lock password on your phone.

There are many more travel apps that I hold in reserve but these are my essential toolkit. What would you add? How do you geek out your travel?

For more apps see my “21st Century Travel Apps” list on Appolicious.

Check out my app picks for “21st Century Travel Apps”

Getting started with Evernote

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Evernote is a vast and powerful system but it takes time to discover its place in your work flow. You’re confident that it solves a problem but you aren’t sure which one. Don’t worry, I think that may be the common experience. I had Evernote installed for months before I really began to use it but it didn’t take long for me to integrate Evernote into most every area of my life.

So let’s focus on where to start using Evernote.

Start with the Muddy Middle

In most projects there are items that aren’t quite tasks nor are they calendar items. They are reference material, research, and notes and often associated with upcoming meeting or a project in the works. These items are what I call the muddy middle. They don’t belong on my calendar or tasklist but its info I need to reference and possibly update at a moments notice.

This extra info belongs in Evernote.

I’ll share a few specific examples:

Meeting Prep: Meeting agenda, notes, ideas, and references all sit in Evernote. Probably in my Work Notebook and I tag them as meeting. (Bonus Tip: Take a photo of the whiteboard and record an audio memo on the way out of the meeting for a more complete record of the conversations.)
Client Projects: Documentation, phone call notes, ideas – all of this sits in Evernote. Begin thinking of Evernote as a brain offload, things you don’t have to remember.

Go Beyond Work

Evernote is more than just for work, its flexible enough to handle personal items as well without clutter or confusion.

You might find it a perfect place for your recipe notebook, travel research, or most anything else. The trick here is to build distinct notebooks that fit you. There isn’t any one way to do it but here is how I organize Evernote.

My primary notebooks:

Work
Church
Content Production

This three areas are places that my brain has ideas at strange times. If I’m asked a question or need to capture an idea I just drop it into the appropriate notebook. Once you begin using this system you’ll never wonder “where did I put that?” – It’s obvious you put it into your second brain, Evernote.

In addition you might start adding some tags to help you drill down quickly.

Evernote has a great search function if things get lost but its easy to adapt this system to however you choose to work.

Final Tips

2 killer tips that keep me sane.

Save your evernote email address to your contacts – Anything you email to this address is added to Evernote. I BCC: the address to save a step when scheduling meetings and it means I can import data from anywhere because everything supports email.
Setup Tweeting to Evernote – Now you can @myen or dm myen to send data. Great for flagging a link for followup or texting yourself and idea.

If you are brand new to Evernote check out their Getting Started guide and see some more ideas in the Evernote Tips Blog

This is part 1 of my Evernote Worthy Series on using Evernote.

Life Enrichment through Evernote

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I’m starting a new series on one of the most flexible and productive pieces of software I’ve ever used. Evernote.

I find myself spending more time discussing Evernote in my presentations and having conversations about it on a weekly basis. I’ve become an unofficial evangelist because this beautiful and simple system has transformed how I get things done. It is my briefcase, my brain, my planning station, my research desk… see what I’m saying?

My Goal

I want to open your eyes to the potential of Evernote by sharing how I use Evernote and some of the tips I employ on a regular basis. In addition I’ll point you to some of the best Evernote learning resources that I still return to for ideas.

This is where you come in…

What do you want to know?

Do you use Evernote currently? If not what are your questions?

What is Evernote?
Why should I use it?
What does it do?
How would it help me in this scenario?

I’ll try to address scenarios and your questions specifically to see if Evernote could ease your information collecting, gathering, and managing. I promise it can.

Already an Evernote user?

I want to hear from you. Share your usage tips and process in the comments or if you need a longer forum I’ll gladly let you guest post during this series.

Evernote life changing software. Let me be your guide.

Share in the comments or tweet your question with the hashtag #EvernoteWorthy

In addition to these posts I’ll be exclusively sharing more juicy tips and goodies in my Network Insider emails. So take a moment and subscribe today.

Create timely tweets

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Send Later…

Those are powerful words. It allows me to produce when I can and publish when I determine. I schedule blog posts and delay delivery time of emails (Tip: Try Boomerang for gmail) so scheduling tweets made sense to me from the first day I discovered the function.

Scheduling tweets enables me to:

Talk when others are listening. Posting links at 2am just won’t see much traction.
Prevent flooding my friends timelines. I read hundreds of blogs via RSS and I doubt anyone wants to see me share 20 items at once.

Social dashboard apps like Hootsuite and Cotweet introduced this ability but we are now seeing a new breed of apps that aim to simplify the process. Instead of requiring you to schedule each tweet you focus on creating and the schedule is predetermined.

Don’t miss the great comments below. @BufferApp responds concerning mobile updating, @tacanderson shares how he uses a combination of these 2 services, @nwbingham brings up an additional issue I failed to mention.

Introducing Buffer

Buffer helps you build a queue of tweets that will be posted on a timeline that you predetermine. Set your schedule and write tweets. Easy.

To get started visit BufferApp.com and create a free account. (They do offer pro plans that allow multiple accounts and larger buffer starting at $10 a month but for most individuals the free account will work nicely.)
Create a schedule of the days and times you want to tweet.
Write tweets and add to buffer.

Buffer has a nice analytics dashboard so you can judge the effectiveness of your schedule and they offer bit.ly API integration for link shortening. They also offer a number of browser extensions and bookmarklets to ease buffer creation.

2 criticisms of Buffer

Their lack of a mobile app and or mobile web page. (Buffer if you are listening I hope I can scratch this statement very soon.)
Buffer should remove the “Suggest an update” field it is bot-like behavior.

Introducing Timely

Timely.is is a competing solution build by the folks at Flowtown. The major difference is they tweet at the times they determine to be most effective for your account, it’s a very cool feature but personally I prefer a bit more control.

Time.ly doesn’t offer the extensions or bookmarklets like Buffer but they are worth a look.

Concluding thoughts on scheduling

Some folks don’t care for scheduling tweets. I can respect that but I find this function useful for the reasons I stated above. However, there are a few considerations to keep in mind.

Don’t schedule when you are unplugged – If you are going to be away for hours on end don’t tweet. If you can’t be responsive in a reasonable amount of time then you are sending the message you aren’t listening.
Be prepared to pause – Sometimes big things happen and your scheduled tweets will look thoughtless. So when a major quake devastates a country or the President is announcing the death of a major terrorist pause your queue.

Your turn…

What would you add to this list? What are you thoughts on tweet scheduling?

Overcoming iTunes sync issues in Windows 7

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I just discovered how to overcome a strange iPad/iPhone sync issue using Windows 7 and iTunes. Since it took a bit of digging I thought I’d share to this tip to help some Google searcher in the future.

The Error

"iTunes was unable to load data class information from sync services"
"iTunes was unable to load provider data from sync services"

My specific error was the second on but apparently these are identical messages written in a different way. Is Apple taking error message tips from Microsoft these days?

The other symptom of this error is that iTunes was unable to sync “Info” services to my iPad. Not usually a big deal since my contacts and calendars are in the cloud but I really needed to sync bookmarks with safari.

Apple says that support article TS2690 is the fix. Balderdash.

According to my searching this is not an uncommon issue with Windows 7. Here is the real fix.

The Solution

Unplug iPhone and close iTunes
Open task manager and kill the process SyncServer (for good measure kill any “Apple” process)
Browse to “C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\AppleComputer” and rename the SyncServices folder to SyncServices_Old
Reconnect iPhone and open iTunes.
Rejoice and Repent of all curses on iTunes for Windows developers. [optional]

For completeness I’m using:

iTunes Version: 10.4.1.10
iOS Version: 4.3.5
Desktop OS: Win7 64 Ultimate

A Closing Gripe

“I’m a PC” and also a fan of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, that said, iTunes for Windows is the buggiest and slowest piece of software I’ve ever run on my computer.

It may well be a panacea on the Mac but since this is the only piece of Apple software I run it leaves a very poor taste in my mouth and a lack of confidence in developers. Ask me how I became an semi-expert on iTunes libraries… ugh.

Klout lists cool, helpful, but smack of Jr. High?

Exploring and building

The basics are straight forward. Log into Klout, visit your dashboard and look for the import twitter list button. Klout will import any public twitter list you created.

First, I wanted to see the influence and reach of people on my politics and infosec lists. It’s interesting to see not only the scores but also the topics associated with different accounts.

Next I built a Little Rock locals list. I’m always looking for a way to provide others with a shortcut to get plugged into twitter in Central Arkansas and lists are a good answer. Here’s how I built it:

I used Formulists to build a dynamic list of everyone I follow that has Little Rock, Conway, or Central Arkansas as their location in their twitter profile.
I imported that list to Klout.

Now let’s get to the reason behind writing about this list…

Perception and Usefulness

Why build a list for Little Rock? Is it useful?

I think so, it encourages connections and gives insight in to community activity. If you are new to Little Rock or new to Twitter you can easily discover some of the most active or listened to people in the area.

Klout also shows topics and allows you to see explore who someone influences or is influenced by. With some time you could really mine a network this way.

So what’s the problem?

Influence ranking feels like a Junior High popularity contest.

Influence is Analog (IRL)

I like @amybhole and @cottonr, both are close friends but depending on your perspective, interests, and sense of humor they may not be the first people you would want to follow. They top the list but following them (or me for that matter) if you are new to twitter is a good way to get overwhelmed.

Klout scores just aren’t all that indicative of “true” influence. Take @johnwhardin for example. His score is almost 25-30 points lower than the top of the list but I can tell you for a fact that guy is one of the first you’d want to follow. He is genuine, kind, and is truly listened to. I have the unique perspective of being a loud mouth that is still invited to quiet discussions on porches and DMs and I can tell you that if I gained 100,000 followers I wouldn’t carry the weight of John’s words.

Why? He has real influence. It can’t be measured in metrics of clicks and RTs.

Influence is subjective.

One more example – My wife and pastor (@wymanrichardson) have scores in the mid 20’s but there are only 2 people that I subscribe to their tweets as text messages. Care to take a guess?

They have real influence in my life.

What my list can’t tell you is most of the people in the 40’s score range are the heart and soul of my twitter community.

Conclusions

I think these lists are useful when viewed with the proper perspective. They can be informed connection points but the score is an arbitrary number they doesn’t reflect a person’s real influence.

In the end the entire list is people I follow and without exposing my private lists that is about the best recommendation I can give.

By the way, @Klout if you are listening I’d love to import a private list and keep it private.

Your Turn

Is the list useful enough to leave it up? Does it encourage connecting or feel too much like a popularity contest?

Also take a look at @mqtodd’s article on using Klout lists, really great ideas.

KnowtheNetwork.com

Be more Connected, Efficient, and Secure

Travel Tech

Travel into the 21st Century

Track Flights

On the Road Apps

Where to Eat?

Stay Informed

Parting Advice

Getting started with Evernote

Start with the Muddy Middle

Go Beyond Work

Final Tips

Life Enrichment through Evernote

My Goal

What do you want to know?

Already an Evernote user?

Overcoming iTunes sync issues in Windows 7

The Error

The Solution

A Closing Gripe

Travel into the 21st Century

Track Flights

On the Road Apps

Where to Eat?

Stay Informed

Parting Advice

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Start with the Muddy Middle

Go Beyond Work

Final Tips

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My Goal

What do you want to know?

Already an Evernote user?

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Introducing Buffer

2 criticisms of Buffer

Introducing Timely

Concluding thoughts on scheduling

Your turn…

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Am I Alone?

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The Error

The Solution

A Closing Gripe

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Exploring and building

Perception and Usefulness

Influence is Analog (IRL)

Influence is subjective.

Conclusions

Your Turn

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