Schedule messages on Android

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Happy to see Google messages getting schedule messages at long last. Its been a long time in coming after Gmail’s schedule send last year.I have been using the beta and enjoying sending messages at 1am for a quite some time now.

Be great if Signal also added scheduling, although I did buy tasker to solve the scheduling of text and signal but haven’t sat down and played with it yet.

No more Google SMS notifications for events

phonesauri

Important: SMS notifications not available after June 27th

Starting on June 27th, 2015, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will no longer be sent. SMS notifications launched before smartphones were available. Now, in a world with smartphones and notifications, you can get richer, more reliable experiences on your mobile device, even offline.

Shame because I got use to text messages 30mins ahead of a event as a sign I should go. However they are right, notifications especially since I have the Pebble smartwatch are good enough now.

Art of writing dating profiles

Sad Staff Robot is sad.

There is a lot to be said about dating profiles… Some are much worst than others (and I’ve seen some very bad ones)

Just the other day I saw one where the question was, 6 things you couldn’t do without… She wrote (and I quote) $$, $$, $$, ££, ££ and ££. I mean really, no wonder she was 76% enemy!

Of course it really depends on what your after, but rather than point out some of the crazy profiles I’ve seen, Tom Morris has given a nice overview of the mistakes people make, beyond the usual spelling and grammar stuff. Actually on OKcupid you can make edits to peoples profiles, so I guess I’ve made a few edits to other peoples profiles which have been accepted. Anyway…

Although I’m not sure if Tom is actually suggesting I do this for my own OKCupid dating profile? Maybe he should rewrite mine…?

I’ve also helped copy edit people’s online dating profiles. And I’ve seen plenty of crap online dating profiles too. These hints are derived from some of the stupid shit I’ve seen.

  1. Basic spelling. You are a 36-year-old and you talk about how you want to go out for a “coughie”. What’s that sound? Oh yes, the sudden penile deflation of every man who actually finished primary school. Grab a dictionary, grab Google, grab Wikipedia, whatever. You aren’t writing a dissertation, you are writing a few paragraphs. There’s no reason not to get the spelling accurate.
  2. You aren’t a teenager anymore. I’m not one of these people who gets all huffy about teenagers writing “im” and “cu l8r” and all that in their texts. But if you are old enough to have an OKCupid profile, you are old enough to not write in textspeak. Do all that stuff your English teacher taught you: spaces after full stops, commas between items in lists, apostrophes, the capital “I” in “I’m” and “I’ll” etc.
  3. No LOL. “I like beer lol”: I saw that on a goddamn profile. You are laughing out loud about the fact that you enjoy drinking beer? LOL is fine in chat. It’s not fine in your profile. If you’ve written something that’s actually funny, you don’t need “lol”. And if you aren’t saying something funny, “lol” won’t make it funny.
  4. This one’s for the straight guys: yes, I get it. Saying that you are a “vagina inspector” or a “trainee gynecologist” is what you consider hilarious banter with the slack-jawed cretins you so affectionately call “mates”. Well, I consulted my friends with vaginas and they tell me that you probably won’t get any pussy if you put that crap on your profiles. In addition, you make all men—straight and gay—look like horrible, insufferable wankstains. Just sayin’. Don’t say sexist, racist or homophobic shit in your profile: ignorance isn’t attractive to anyone, it just makes you look insecure. There’s a time and place for moronic banter—actually, no, wait, no there isn’t. Grow the fuck up and read a book.
  5. You don’t need the abbreviations. Yes, you might be seeking some NSA S&M with a 24/M/UK GWM. (Aren’t we all?) There are circumstances where that kind of thing might be appropriate (hookup sites) but on a dating profile, you don’t need all this clutter. You are trying to find a human being, not a home cinema system, even if you are only going to, err, tweak their Dolby Digital Surround for one night only.
  6. You are from California, not “california” or “cali”. Proper names need capital letters. Go on, you can take the time to write out the full name of the city. “London” not “LDN”, “Atlanta” not “ATL”. See previous point about abbreviations. Abbreviations are bad enough, dumb abbreviations have no place in your profile.
  7. Cut the lists out. I saw a gay guy’s dating profile recently that had a section heading with a list of items, each suffixed with “= turn off”. On this list, he had smokers, heavy drinkers and sex addicts. Okay, there’s no problem with having preferences (although wanting men who aren’t sex addicts might limit the pool somewhat), but if he had written a paragraph instead of a list, it would come off much better: more like a human wrote it and less like it’s a warning sign next to a parking meter. When there are negatives you want to exclude, rather than making a list of turn offs or forbidden characteristics, write a short paragraph trying to turn that into a description of what you do want. Like “I want to meet people who don’t smoke, don’t drink to excess and can think about things other than sex.” It still comes off a bit weird, but a lot less harsh and checklist-ey than writing a list.
  8. Match your text to your picture. I saw a hilarious Grindr screenshot recently of a big ol’ dick pic (Grindr is not known for subtlety) with the words underneath “Not seeking NSA”. Sorry, what, you’ve got a picture of your dick as your profile but you don’t want no-strings attached hookups? Are you shitting me?! Work out what message you are sending with the pictures and then make sure that what you are writing doesn’t contradict that message.
  9. Don’t attempt poetry. You will probably suck at it. And because of the Dunning–Kruger effect, you’ll never know quite how much you suck at it.
  10. Don’t get over-romantic. Again, you will probably suck at it. Don’t talk about wanting a partner to “complete” you, unless perhaps you want an inflation fetishist who knows the Aristophanes passage from Plato’s Symposium off by heart.All the spiritual shit about wanting to live forever together with flowers and rainbows and ponies everywhere? Cut that right out. You’ll probably be telling me next that you want to tune into my fucking chakras. No, no, the point is showing that you are a nice, non-psychopathic, down to earth person, the sort of person who you’d like to share a drink or a meal with, not that you are desperately seeking a missing puzzle piece from your self-indulgent personal development plan.
  11. Show, don’t tell. I’ve helped people I know write personal statements for university applications. Dating profiles are more personal, obviously, but the rule applies. People go on about how they are “passionate” about something: opera, reading, fondue cookery. Whatever. Don’t tell them that, show them that. What do you do? How do you do it? Where do you do it? “I’m passionate about windsurfing” becomes “I’ve gone windsurfing at places X, Y and Z”. “I’m really into music”? Yeah, so is everyone. Talk about the bands and genres you like and talk about how you are really excited by this band’s new album or went to this other band’s show.
  12. Get someone else—preferably someone who can write—to read it before you post it. Yes, yes, you are embarrassed to tell your friends that you are using online dating… well, get the fuck over yourselves, 21% of Americans do it, it’s not like telling them you are gay (oh, wait, actually, if you are using the phrase “throbbing hot rod”, they might suspect something). Anyway, if the are going to judge you, at least you’ve given them a legitimate reason to judge you, namely your terrible grammar. If you can, get a friend of the gender it is aimed at to read it.

There is much more that can be said but maybe best left for another day’s Relationships 2.0.

Notification and email management

Fedora 16 & Gnome3

Been thinking about replacing my work mobile phone for a while. Its a XDA Windows Mobile 6.1 phone and to be honest the battery life and general use it shocking. Unfortunately the BBC don’t support Android for work mobiles but they do support iPhones and Blackberry. Interestingly they also don’t support Windows Phone 7 either which is strange because they did support Mobile 6.1/6.5.

I almost went with the iPhone option as it has the advantage of remote BBC email and a familiar modern operating system.

However I’ve been thinking about my email management…

There was a period while I was running BBC backstage when I was getting roughly 150+ emails a day not including any mailing lists emails. I was dealing with it, only just… I felt crap because I was missing stuff and not really catching up with people I promised email back. Not only that, I knew I was much less productive because I was always firefighting emails coming into my inbox. This was confirmed by using Rescuetime for about a year or two. Once I get it working with Ubuntu, I’ll be quantifying my work more often. Rescuetime say they are working on a Linux version which is easier that.

I recently also adopted the 4 sentenc.es thing after seeing Oli Woods email signature one day…

The Problem
E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.
The Solution
Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.
four.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be four sentences or less. It’s that simple.

Everytime I send out a email to someone new in the BBC, they reply and also said they like the idea of 4 sentenc.es but can’t imagine adopting it. I use to think the same, but with a little thought, I manage to condense at least 90% of my emails exchanges down to the 4 sentences. The footer message helps to explain to the recipients that you will be very brief. Not only that, it helps to separate out email responses too.

Seems theres nothing worst than getting a chain of emails with multiple ideas and thought in them. Although I can be as much to blame for this as most others.

What I’ve recently been doing is only checking my email once every few hours. This is partly because I have to switch networks to get my work email. Yes I could mess with proxy settings and setup routes but actually I quite like disconnecting from the corporate network to catchup with Twitter, Gmail, etc. Don’t get me wrong its not just personal type stuff, its google docs, evernote, dropbox syncing, etc. All part of working life… But if they are, what isn’t?

Recently my manager gave up his blackberry, I’m sure his life will be better without it. I don’t blame him really.

The notifications can be worst than the email itself, I’d contest..

I’ve been showing people Gnome Shell or Gnome3 recently specially since I got my new replacement Lenovo X220 Thinkpad (which I’m now starting to love, now the hardware works correctly). I’m finding the management of notifications really useful and the idea of hiding that stuff away really good for getting stuff/things done. Once it really gets going, its going to be awesome for notification management.

In the meanwhile, I decided not to upgrade my phone and I’ve put the Sim into my thinkpad to use for work when I can’t get use Wifi or a network connection. Now if I could just find a Linux application which allows me to manage texts and phone calls… then I’d be very happy.

New Services I’ve found interesting recently

I’ve been playing with a few services recently and I thought it might be worth blogging about…

  • Diigo.com
    while moving away from delicious I found diigo did everything I needed a whole lot more.
  • Ifttt.com
    also posted about if this then in a previous post too but I’m finding nice new ways to use it for example to get read items on my kindle back in a form I can blog about again.
  • DeskSMS
    Not quite installed this yet but I’m very tempted because I’ve always wanted a way to manage text messages from more than my phone and it looks like DeskSMS might be the best way to do so. Although a lot of people swear by Mighty text too
  • Glos.si
    I read about Glos.si in the Lifestreaming blog, and decided I’d give it a shot because its been quite some time since I’ve really played with a decent lifestreaming service. The one I host on my own blog is alright but is missing quite a few of the great stuff Glos.si or the old fav’s Sweetcron and Storytlr had. This also reminds me I should kill all the other lifestreaming services I’ve used in the past
  • Storify
    This has always interested me but its only now I’ve gotten around to looking at it with some time.