A week after our conversation, I began playing with WordPress on my own webserver and started putting together a website mock up with a template from WooThemes and content from their existing site.  It was fairly easy and I like playing around with websites like that.  WordPress worked pretty well for the basic site.

WordPress also provided them with an easy way to keep the website up-to-date from the road or from their iPhones as they traveled and snapped photos.  WordPress is supported and updated as security problems were found and should help them stay secure in the future.

Useful Plugins for Musicians
After putting their existing information into the site, I started looking at what else would be good on the site.  I located the fantastic website of developer Dan Coulter, http://blogsforbands.com/.  He had developed several WordPress plug-ins for bands, including a gig calendar and discography.  I added the discography plug-in to a new install of WordPress and began adding songs from the past album that I had.  It worked wondefully — allowing me to post each album, the songs, words to the songs and links to buy the songs from iTunes, Napster or Amazon’s MP3 store. It also allowed a link to buy a physical copy…  but from where?

Enter another plug-in – Tips & Tricks HQ – developers of the WordPress eStore.  I had used WP E-Commerce in the past, but it didn’t want to install on my musician’s web host and it didn’t easily offer digital downloads, but WordPress eStore did…   We added the plugin and began populating it items, like T-Shirts and CD’s.

Our musician friends utilize ReverbNation heavily and so I was able to find their widgets (which our friends were already using on their original site) and place those into text widgets on the sidebar.  The cool thing about this approach is that it allows them to update their music players, gig calendar and mailing list all within ReverbNation and have it feed their website.  Likewise, their website is feeding ReverbNation new mailing list addresses for future mailings and it is collecting stats of who is listening to their music.   ReverbNation is a free service, but offers enhanced and additional pay-for services.

As we were going live and testing everything, I found a couple things – like emails being sent from the eStore were sending from “WordPress”, but Tips & Tricks HQ had another plugin to allow us to customize the friendly name of the sender.

If any other bands or musicians are looking for a solution, I’ll be the first to recommend WordPress!

I had been contemplating getting a Mac Mini to replace my aging Apple TV at home and to offer us the capability of watching NetFlix or Hulu directly on our TV.   I had found dongle cables to offer video and audio to HDMI on the last revision of Mac Mini and was just waiting primarily on our house build to get going to see how our money looked as we were finishing the project.  I have been trying to be very good about my technology purchases – since I felt like we had higher priorities.

And today, I am glad we waited.  I hope to add a new Mac Mini to our collection at home soon as our media Mac – our home base for iTunes content and photos.  I still feel like I need to wait, but my wishlist of Apple products keeps growing…  An iPad, a new iPhone 4 and now add a Mac Mini.  I also want to replace my aging iMac with a new version for video editing…

The biggest issue with the Mac Mini media “server” I see going forward is software, given today’s hardware revision.  I had blogged before (here and here) about wanting some of the iTunes capabilities brought over to iPhoto – to be able to setup a library and have all my photos automatically push up to it and to be able to pull down photos easily in iPhoto from a central library.

I’ve mentioned my friend before with the agency, and good photo management is a problem that they have in their all Mac environment.  They currently have their photos on a file share, but iPhoto is much better solution since you could add keywords and ratings and all the other metadata that iPhoto allows.  But this same need applies to the multi-Mac home.

On a personal note, my wife and I are in the final stages of planning our new home, which we hope to begin building in the coming months.  Any free time that I would have had to blog about my experiences has been consumed with house plans, builder meetings and other items to prepare for this major undertaking.  My wife is attempting to chronicle our build on her blog, My Green Glasses.  The house will be a certified green home, Energy Star certified and *possibly* LEED certified.  We know that we will be close to meeting requirements for a LEED certification and we are looking at what additional things need to be done to make it happen and whether it is worth it or not.

For those in the beta test program, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise.  Quicken Financial Life shows a lot of promise, but many of the features are yet to be implemented.   The release was supposed to come during the summer months of 2009, but any reference to that release have since been hidden on the Intuit website.  Pages of information previewing the release have been removed and the Quicken Blog post is the only source for any current information.

My personal frustration over this release is apparently shared by many users, judging by the comments left on the blog post.  I wonder why it taking so much time to show any real progress in the product.  QIF import, for instance, isn’t implemented making transferring your historical data next to impossible.  The only way to import historical data is upgrading from Quicken for Mac 2007 – which I don’t own.  Capturing what’s left of the switchers, like myself,  is a big way that Intuit could capitalize and profit with this release, but it seems to be ignored.  Oh, well, time will tell.

As I’ve chronicled, I think the initial backup is the biggest challenge for all online backup solutions, Mozy included.  My experience taking one month really isn’t that bad given a relatively slow upstream connection and 60GB plus of data to backup.  The process was relatively easy, though I needed to throttle the bandwidth to keep my Internet connection usable while I was at home.  Thanks to a comment on an earlier post, I was able to find that very hidden setting in the Mozy client.

Throttling the bandwidth solved one problem, but presented a new one – it took longer to completely my initial.  Even with bandwidth throttled, it seemed to affect my normal activites online were degraded.  So many nights, I’d stop the backup when I arrive home and start it back (when I didn’t forget) before going to bed.

All in all, I’m impressed.  Its a nice product and the price is right.  Even though I had the paid account for a year, its taken me to month 11 to actually let it back something up, so I get to renew my newly backed up account at the end of this month.

The feature that I liked most about this product is its smart filters.  Out of the box, the configuration screen comes with a set of handy filters to easily pick and choose what to backup.  For instance, if I’m a writer and I want to protect all my Word documents, just check the box for Word docs and whalla, its going to find those on the entire hard drive and back them up.  And in my Mac version, it includes filters for iCal, Mail, Pages, Numbers, etc. out of the box.  Its a very intuitive package and would be easy for any in-experienced user to use.

HTC has been looking into reselling the Mozy service to our residental customers, and after my experience, I can say that I fully endorse that option.  I think this is a service that all users should have, even if not for all their data, for their critical data.  As a matter of fact, I have several that are coming to mind right now that I should sign up for a free 2GB account.  I guess I have a few emails to write and a few phone calls to make…

My wife and I went into Circuit City yesterday to purchase a new printer.  We found and purchased an Officejet with an attached document feeder for the scanner.  So, yesterday afternoon, I got it all setup and running at home.  I started scanning some of my mortgage documents and trying to store them.  Some quick Google searches later, I’d found how to create searchable PDF’s in Adobe Acrobat Pro, and I was very happy with my results.  I finally had a pretty good solution.   Between Spotlight and my folder structure, things looked pretty good.  Documents were fairly easy to find.  But it wasn’t perfect.  

A few Google searches later, I was demoing DevonThink, which is a great product.  Unfortunately, the Pro version is very pricey and the scan features are currently disabled in this current release, although the very kind error message said they’re working to get that back quickly.  I really liked the software and its very full features, maybe a little too much so for what I was looking for, so the search continued.  

A MacRumors forum post then pointed me to a little app called Yep.  I downloaded and I’ve been demoing it overnight.  Color me impressed.  

This little app is wonderful at what it does – it finds and categories your PDF files.  You can limit it to your home directory, the whole computer, or just your documents folder.  I opted for the latter, since that’s where all my relevant PDF files are at.  

Yep lets you add tags to your PDF files to for quick search.  Much like a blog, you have a tag cloud that shows you which tags are most used in your PDF collection.  You can organize the PDF’s into logical collections of PDF files, too.  The PDF’s all stay in their original file system location (no duplication here) and renaming or updating them has no effect to their record in Yep.  

Yep lets you do a full preview (even full screen view) of your PDF document.  You can open it with your preferred “normal” PDF viewer/editor if you would like to perform touch-ups.  You are able to view documents in your Finder filesystem locations in one view and by collection with just a simple click.  

The downside to all this is its PDF only…  So it won’t be tracking your original documents in Word, iWork or OpenOffice.  But that was kinda my point.  I wasn’t looking for something to track everything (that’s call the filesystem).  I was looking for a nice program to help archive my documents and keep it all straight.  

If something catastrophic were to happen, I need help finding my key documents and getting that information to put things back on the road, and I think this app can do that.  There are some things left to do for me – like finding and backing up its database of tags (or does it attach them to the PDF file??).  All in all, I think I’ve found the perfect solution to my document archiving.

I realize that there are lots of affordable online backup solutions available online, including one that we provide here at HTC.  These are all great solutions.  The killer for all is the initial backup and how it is handled.  Our backup solution here at HTC offers the ability to backup locally to a disk, ship that disk to HTC and then we restore it on our “Vault” back end.  At this point, our software does block-level, incremental backups forever.  And the incremental backups are fast.

From my testing with Mozy and a couple other solutions, its painful to try and backup my 14GB of photos or 100GB of home movies through my internet.  The biggest restriction on broadband is usually the upstream bandwidth.  I could allow this to run for a month or two, saturating my broadband all the time and this might complete, but at a cap of about 50K upstream, its not appealing to me.

The same held true when I setup the backup solution bundled with Norton 360 for a friend of mine.  I was very selective in getting only her documents and email to backup, rather than her iTunes library and everything else.

But enough about the problems with other solutions, what is good about these?  Well, plenty.  First, there is no recurring cost.  Just buy a storage device and find a buddy.  I guess this could be a problem for some of our geek types, but most of us are social enough – at least with other geeks.

CrashPlan is nice in that it offers software for a many operating systems – Mac, Windows and Linux.  You are able to do both on and off-site backups.  It encrypts the data before transmit and includes a feature that it calls “archive tampering protection.”   I hope that is exactly what is sounds like and there is some security on the archive of my social security numbers and bank records that my buddy can’t just break into…  Guess that wouldn’t really make them a buddy, but more of a frenemy, but I digress.    But, the big one for me is that you can start your backup locally and then move it to an off site location and continue backups later.  And this is the differentiating factor for me.  Solutions like Mozy and other online providers don’t offer a way to take a full backup of everything, restore that onto their storage in some way faster than uploading everything over the Internet, and then just adding differentials after that point.  

CrashPlan comes in two versions of software for the home user.  There is a standard version and then a plus version which offers continuous data protection and versioning.  These are two enterprise class features that only seem to exist in these direct to disk backup solutions.

It should also be noted that CrashPlan has an enterprise product as well for larger environments (advertised for 10 or more computers) where it includes a local backup server running CrashPlan Pro Server and the ability to send that data offsite.  One thing that is particularly compelling is that CrashPlan includes a VMware Virtual Appliance of the Pro Server software.  CrashPlan Pro uses 448-bit Blowfish encryption.    Also important to note for medical businesses, the enterprise software is HIPPA compliant.  I do wonder how this solution will do for more enterprise type applications like databases, email server and other more specialized data types.

Cucku is a bit different, but has many of the same features as CrashPlan.  The solution is unfortunately Windows only, which is a major drawback for me.  I have only briefly looked at this solution since it won’t work for me.  But I did want to mention it for others who it might work for.

On top of this, their last release – Quicken for Mac 2007 – hasn’t been aging gracefully.  My biggest heartburn is the lack of import or transport for my years of data held in the grasp of Microsoft Money.  I simply can’t find an alternative that meets my needs, and so I am desperately hoping that the ground-up rewrite of Quicken will do that…  I’m not a serious number cruncher when it comes to my personal finance, but I want a couple things:  1) the ability to carry over all my prior transactions AND their categories and 2) the ability for the software to automatically download my transactions from my banks or credit card companies.  

All the while that our Office programs have been growing more compatible with interchangable file formats, our money management software has us locked into their proprietary grips.  Sure, there are QIF and other interchangable file formats, but we all know that the bulk of our data won’t move using those file formats.  And, call me lazy, but I don’t want to go and re-do all the work that I have completed for years and years of transactions just to move into a new program.  So, alas, I find no good MAC alternative for money management and I continue to use Microsoft Money in Windows in VMware Fusion on my Mac…   

I have also examined the online alternatives, including Quicken’s free online tools, Yodlee, Mint and others.  But those tie me down to my internet connection.  I have more than once balanced my checkbook while whizzing down the highway……………. no, my wife was driving, not me, just for clarity sake.  Anyways, enough rambling.  I just wish I could find the solution… Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

After the offer of the computer purchase plan was made last year, several of us contacted our internal HR person who coordinates this and asked that she try and add Apple computers to the plan.  Thanks to her hard work, we were able to get a Mac this year on the plan.  I don’t think the response has been huge and I think my order was the first processed and to arrive, but there is a lot of interest.

Within my department, there is a fairly good following for Macs.  I know we have two converts who are purchasing their first Mac this year through the employee plan.  There are two more that are seriously considering it.

Yesterday, my MacBook Pro arrived and I got the call from our supply department to come and pick it up.  I took it back in the help desk and it was like Christmas for all of us.  Everyone got to look and watch me unwrap the power up the laptop for the first time.  I have it at work again today… I just couldn’t bring myself to leave it at home.  Poor thing doesn’t need to be left all alone!

But seriously, I’m liking it a lot.  I ordered the base model MacBook Pro but customized it with 4GB of RAM.  The dual video cards are a very cool concept and the ability to switch between them is great to conserve battery life.  I, of course, switched to the performance setting instead so I’m running on the NVidia 9600M GT card right now and loving life.  I really need to move my Photoshop and some other apps over to this laptop and seriously give the graphics card a workout.

Oh, and I’m sure its been noted elsewhere, but this MacBook Pro shipped with OS X version 10.5.5, which I don’t think has been released to the wild yet via software update.  I though that was a little interesting.

Virtual PC was a nice first step into the virtual world.  It came along at time when I was working for a University and was not in the sys admin world that I find myself today.  I found Virtual PC so sluggish and slow that I never was able to really use it.  So it collected dust on my hard drive for a year or longer before we purchased our first Intel Mac.

Around the same time as the Intel iMac purchase, Parallels released a beta of their Desktop product.  I quickly installed and used this version at home.  If memory serves, they did not have the Transporter product at that time and so I was forced to do an install of Windows XP.  The quick install for Windows was a great thing.

Fast forward to version 2 release for Desktop and I believe Parallels had added the Transporter feature – maybe that was version 3 – but anyways, that gave me the ability to utilize my actual Virtual PC image.  After a successful test, I reinstalled Virtual PC and loaded a fresh XP image.  Then I shutdown and saved the VHD file out on my NAS for the future…  That future was this week.

After importing my VHD file into Parallels Desktop, the automated upgrade process was very smooth.  It took some time, but everything completely successfully.   The image is very fast and starting with a clean image isn’t necessary a bad thing with Win-doze.  Unfortunately, I lost the few Windows applications that I depend on – Symantec Antivirus, Microsoft Money and the Savings Bond Wizard from the Treasury.

Both Symantec Antivirus and Microsoft Money are electronic delivery products.  And while I love the convenience of purchase and instantly download, reinstalls are a major pain.  In the 4 or so times I’ve reinstalled Microsoft Money, its always been a major pain to redownload and install the software.  So, I’m currently running a 60 day trial license and plan to pickup a box copy at Sam’s Club this weekend or next.

Norton Antivirus was far more of a let down.  Their new Norton Account “feature” and license restrictions is a big problem.  Granted, I was within a month of my current subscription expiring, but I found that I was unable to unlock and move my copy of Norton Antivirus to the new VM.   To that end, I purchased a new copy of the Antivirus at a much higher price point than my yearly upgrade.   I do like their subscription model, but the inflexibility of being able to move my copy as I move machines is a major pain.  Fortunately, I hope never to have to re-do my image again…

I think Symantec could do a much better job of allowing an unlock at least once a year or at least letting you move your subscription to a different PC.  Because of the activation process, they can lock down the Liveupdate process for virus definitions and updates.  So even if you leave the old copy running, you wouldn’t receive updates…  Anyways, just a pain, in my opinion.

But today, things are settling out.  I just upgraded to a brand new MacBook Pro and I have moved my Parallels Desktop 4 from the iMac to the new MacBook Pro and it is working fantastic.  I will say that the iMac seemed more sluggish running a Parallels Desktop 4.0 virtual machine configured with 512MB of RAM than the prior version did.  Maybe it was just my impression, but I didn’t think it was as fast.

The new version does add a lot of functionality, but it seems to be at the expense of performance – at least footprint – for the software.   Running the virtual machine does seem to be faster, though I’d beg to differ with the 50% increase in speed.  I will say that Parallels has always impressed me with how well it runs Windows XP.  Windows runs better on a Mac and in Parallels Desktop than on any piece of physical hardware I’ve ever run it on… so I’m just saying.