Ever since I got an iPhone as a birthday present (thank you Courtney!) in July of this year I have been using Twitterrific as the Twitter app of choice. At that time, it was one of the first apps to market and it worked fairly well. Plus, it’s FREE!

However, over the past several weeks the application started crashing, being slow and at times fairly annoying to use so I started my Google search quest for a better alternative. Last night, I came across a post among my RSS feeds (a bit behind on those as you can tell) from Yoast.com (btw, a great resource for WordPress plugins and tweaks) that suggested TwitterFon as an alternative.

I gave it a try and absolutely love it! Great app, responsive, allows fast scrolling and it doesn’t freeze (unlike the above mentioned app), it allows you to see your “Friends” (time line), @ replies and direct messages. You can even search from the app as well as look up the people you are following (no need to remember their @cRaZyunIquEnaMe nomenclature). Also, FREE!

Now, if I could only find a good Plurk app…any suggestions?

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Twitter from an iPhone

What do meetings bring to those who attend? Are most of them annoying, boring and a waste of time or is there a valuable component to them?

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What is it about meetings

Here are some of the plugins I use (alphabetical order):

The above listed plugins are in use now with another 5 or 6 currently in testing. You have seen my favorites, now it’s time for you share your favorite plugins.

How do you decide on a plugin, how do you determine that it is valuable to you? What are your favorite/must have plugins and why? Please share them and I will compile a list for everyone to see and will take a look at them myself.

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WordPress plugins

While driving around over past week or so I have noticed a free (unlocked/unsecured) Wi-Fi network called “optimumwifi” pop up along Rt. 23, Rt. 46 and Rt. 3. I have noticed this in towns of Riverdale, Pompton Lakes, Wayne, Totowa, Little Falls, Clifton and Paterson in northern New Jersey. I know that someone will ask “why are you on your phone while driving,” well I’m not really as that drives me crazy, I was simply checking the whether (as seen above) or one of the “brief info” apps (i.e. Currency) I use on an iPhone.

I don’t remember hearing about this getting announced or marketed anywhere so I’m wondering if this is a test of some sorts or Optimum’s plan to deploy their network throughout the area before announcing it and possibly securing it in order to charge for usage.

What do you think, have any of you (NJ people) notice this as well?

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Optimum Wi-Fi

We ran into several issues while getting some well deserved and a bit over due paperwork through certain channels, but it is nice to know that we have internal support at least. Our vertical chain of support is very strong, it’s when we have to work with some horizontal departments (which don’t have insight into our daily operations) that we run into difficulties. This relates to the previous post of “people matter” and goes a step beyond selecting right employees for the job. Having a great manager in place who understands employees, works well with them and is there to provide support in every way possible is the final component in building and sustaining an amazing unit.

Once you have a well functioning team and things are working smoothly it is important to maintain that group and do what’s needed to help these professionals achieve personal and professional satisfaction and recognition. It is the manager’s responsibility to promote their employees throughout the enterprise, fight for more resources and recognize their accomplishments.

Having a great team which is poorly managed will eventually cause one of the two (or both) things to happen:

1. Team will start falling apart (performance wise or literally), and/or

2. The manager will be severely disliked (poor working environment) and in some instances even pushed out.

It is essential to understand that everyone works together towards a common goal. Each of the team members have different rolles and responsibilities, but are equaly important to the success of the team. While a great group of individuals is essential to productivity and efficiency, the significance of a well repected, qualified and knowledgable leaded should never be underestimated. That leader must manage his or her team, focus their energies in desired direction and fight for that team every step of the way.

All managers must understand that once you give up on your team, they will give up on you.

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Managers matter even more?

This video was prompted by a phone call I received yesterday from a person whose department clearly doesn’t understand the value of good, professional and knowledgeable individuals.

Make sure you appreciate good people you are surrounded with, whether they are on your team/department at work or in your personal life, because they don’t come around often. Once you have great friends, family or co-workers everything else will fall into place and things will get easier.

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People matter

I normally try not to rant online too much as it is really pointless and generally counterproductive. We have all experienced poor customer service, long waits and rude representatives, but at times certain behavior exceeds all stupidity. This is one of those times.

Today, at 12:30 PM I have tried to log into an Aetna account and wasn’t able to so. The login fields are visible and available on their homepage, but once the info is inputted, I would be transferred to the above displayed page. Now, 12:30 pm GMT-5 (or EST if you prefer) is right in the middle of a work day here on east coast; it is also 9:30 AM GMT-8 (or PST) on west coast (meaning people are already at work) and even if you were somewhere in Europe, London for example it would be 5:30 PM GMT(0) which also means that people would need to have access to their system during that time.

Dealing with servers, databases and web front ends myself I can appreciate that at times things happen and go wrong without notice, but the way this situation is handled is what makes it bad and a bit surprising for a company of that size. Even now, an hour later, there is no update on their site informing clients that the system is inaccessible; the login fields are still visible (even though they don’t let you login) and their tech support sucks! I called them as instructed by their page and was given an attitude and nonsense answers.

Here’s a brief exchange I had with one of their techs/customer disservice reps:

Me: I can’t login to my account on your website and was instructed to call you.
Tech: Yes, the system is updating itself.

Me: Updating itself, as in on its own, just decided to do so in the middle of a business day?
Tech: Yes. It’s strange, it normally doesn’t do this, but I guess it decided to pick a different time today.

Me: So your system is not experiencing any technical difficulties, it simply decided to update itself?
Tech: Yeah, I know it’s weird, but nothing we can do about it, it just started updating itself.

At this point, I’m clear that I’m dealing with a moron, but have decided to ask another question or two. Btw, she was dead serious while providing those answers.

Me: Do you know how long it will take for it to update itself?
Tech: It normally takes anywhere from an hour to two, but not sure. Try logging in in a couple of hours and if it doesn’t work I guess it’s not done yet.

Me: Thanks! You might want to post a note on you site informing visitors of this change.
Tech: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

Me: No, thanks! You have done enough already.
Tech: I’m glad I was able to help you. Have a great day.

Furthermore, besides the technical “expertise” I’m starting to wonder what kind of system are medical records and personal information stored on if they can’t provide something as simple as a failover or any kind of redundancy for their customer information system.

I still have to call them back, but I refuse to do so just yet, I need some more “down time” first.

Post from: Milos Topic

Aetna web maintenance

It’s time once again to re-organize my office, file paperwork and get rid of all the unnecessary things which have been cluttering my work space. I’m not a big fan of doing this frequently as new files, invoices, requests, propositions and notes will come across my desk again and again, so I figure what’s the point. However, I’m aware that if I haven’t been going through this potentially futile exercise every so often I’m sure that I would have no place to put my laptop and actually do some more interesting work. I see it as one of those so called “necessary evils”, you hate doing it, but you need to in order to get some other things done and move along.

On the other hand, while going through some of the paperwork I kept asking myself do I really need to keep this? It’s online, I can get a copy when I need it, but yet again somehow most of those papers found their way into neatly organized folders where they will be filed away until I go through this “infinite loop” again.

I understand the need for some documents to be printed, especially the ones requiring signatures, or exam questions, but most of those can be computerized as well (i.e. digital signatures, online testing). In any event, I have started to move everything that can be moved at this time online in order to reduce paper use as well to enable myself (and others) to search for files and have access to them from anywhere. A good portion of our faculty have also started to post majority of their materials on Blackboard (our CRM system), but there’s room for improvements on that front as well. Bottom line, going away from paper is slowly happening, but there’s still much work to be done.

Besides the green initiative and desire to save trees which are extremely important in our Ecosystem, what is your take on paperwork you have to deal with; is it necessary (all of it?); can it be replaced somehow and how often do you go through your piles of papers to get them down to a more manageable size?

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Reducing paperwork clutter

I changed my Twitter background and in order for me to “peek” to the left of the Twitter time line resolution suffered. It’s not my best photo editing work, but it’s good enough for my first attempt.

Here’s the full resolution JPG file in case you want to tweak it for your own background.

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Twitter background

As you can see, your site will get the “famous” iPhone gray look. You can even add an iPhone icon (size: 57 x 57 pixels; format: .png, .jpg) during this process.

All you have to do is provide your website’s/blog’s RSS feed, name the site, add an icon, and then add the generated JavaScript code inside the “head” tags of your site. Here’s the code generated for this blog:

I tested it, looks good, but have decided to take the code out and here’s why:

Overall it is a cool service and I’m sure will be quite useful to many people. Try it and let me know what you think. So far, I’m back to my “as is” look.

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iPhoneize your website