cmurray.org

+  + I am all about convergence. I love that my phone can act almost as a secondary computer. While I tend to write about all the nifty gadgets I find for it, it actually has become a huge part of running my business. But here again, I’m gonna write about the fun stuff.

I’ve been spending more time with Facebook lately, posting some inane things, but mostly writing about experiences from my work. And I’ve really enjoyed finding all the applications you can add to Facebook to make it more useful and more integrated with other services. This morning, I found an app that grabs all the photos (in their galleries, no less) from Picasa and displays them to a tab in my profile page. Because I use Photoshop Lightroom 2 to process my images and then directly export them to my Picasa web, I now am able to update Picasa while also updating FB with my photos.

But wait … now there’s more. It turns out this plugin I found doesn’t work so well, and also, only displays the photos and galleries in a tab in my profile, with no announcement on my wall that there are new pictures. And now I find something that is already built into FB that will accomplish this for me, without an additional application. Do this:

Go to your Profile page in FB
Click on the Settings button just below the What’s on your mind box
Here you’ll see a bunch of options for connecting to services like Picasa and Flickr
Just click on the service you want and enter the username used in that service
Done!

To further my aspirations for convergence of everything I hold dear, I even added my deli.cio.us bookmarks to my twitter feed so they also now will end up on my FB page. I am at one with the cyberverse.

I’ve recently noticed several posts mentioning mind mapping and other forms of defining process and capturing ideas. I can’t tell you how many tools I have used over the years for this purpose, Visio being my absolute least favorite. (I’ve also run the gambit of note-taking applications, from OneNote to EverNote, my current favorite.) But mind mapping is a simple and cool visual way to illustrate how a process or system might work. This little example below was quickly done on my iPhone using SimpleMind, which I then saved as an image, then imported into this post (using the WordPress iPhone edition). It’s a simplified example but it does show how easy it is to diagram the initial stages of thought for a project. I’m gonna kick this one around for a while, and see if there is a more complete version for the desktop.

There’s not much more to this application. You create related boxes and can move them about the screen. You can change the color scheme and either export it as an image or export it to the paid version ($6.99). For free, this is definitely worth trying out, especially if you’re like me and finding your phone a bigger part of running your business.

This is cool for two reasons: I love the TED talks, and I can now watch them on the iPhone.

For those unaware of TED, it is basically an online archive of lectures/talks by thought leaders and other fascinating people.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

One of my favorites was Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and educator at the New England Conservatory. I met him a couple times while a student there, but this venue really brings out his passion and joyous personality.