Time & Billing Roundup

For those unlucky souls out there still running on the hamster wheel billable hour, TUAW has a really great roundup of Timekeeping & Billing applications for Mac OSX. MacLitigator, filtering out the useful legal bits from the noise so you can keep on billing 🙂

TUAW Time & Billing Roundup.

UPDATE: The response was so great to TUAW’s first round-up that they went ahead and added Part II for even more Time & Billing options.

Somebody Finally Said…

what we’ve all been thinking, there may be “rot at Apple’s core” according to The Dallas’ Morning News Techblogger Victor Godinez. According to Godinez, the rot shows through because of shaky iPhone 2.0 software, the MobileMe fiasco (wherein loads of paying .Mac customers have lost emails or been frozen out entirely), and the ‘bundling’ of Safari and forced installation of MobileMe components alongside iTunes on Windows platforms. Linkbait? Maybe. My own personal experience while attempting to purchase a 3G phone seems to support the decay of a shiny Apple into a razor blade loaded Halloween treat.

While at the local Apple store, I considered picking up a new 3G iPhone. I dutifully went to the end of the line and asked the Apple store employee how long the wait would be and he informed me about an hour. Eeeesh. O.K. well, it’s Sunday and I have a good book in hand so, I’ll wait a while. After about fifteen minutes, another fellow queued up behind me. I noticed he had a small white tag which read “3G” in big letters. I asked him about it an he told me that I needed a ‘pre-qualification’ tag in order to be in the line I was in. Back inside the store to get the prequal tag, the manager pointed me back out to the line I was just standing in and told me I needed to ask the Apple employee for the prequal and that there was a ‘separate’ line in that line outside. “Really? I line to wait in line? It’s not like the Beatles are playing here.” Smug smug Apple certified smile and no vocal response, only a finger pointing me back outside. By now, five other people had walked up to the line. I decided to go read my book at home.

Of course, this doesn’t mean Apple is rotting away, growing moldy, wormy and ridden with holes. Rather, this is the inevitable slide that customer service takes whenever a huge success occurs. I simply cannot imagine anyone is more disappointed in the iPhone activation and hour plus wait for purchase than Steve Jobs. So, here’s hoping that the company can get through the growing pains of such enormous recent success and move back toward the solid company and customer service we all know and love.

Return from the Wild.

MacLitigator is back… early no less. No, it wasn’t the lack of internet or the inability to watch reality t.v. (ugh) that prompted an early return. Rather, the program which drew me into the wild just didn’t make a good fit with me personally. So, on to the tips regarding remote tech.

  • Prepare in advance. Let the important folks know you’ll be gone and leave forwarding phone numbers for emergencies.
  • Piggyback wireless wherever you can find it, and you can find it much easier with either macstumbler or kismac/istumbler/netstumbler.  Caution should be used as some view an using open wireless as pirating, while others view an open wireless connection as an invitation. 
  • For cell phone service, get up high, at the crest of a hill or on top of a butte.
  • Boost your cell phone signal with a booster antenna… I used Cell Ranger STIX available at www.repeaterstore.com for $129. Yes, it really works and works very well. However, with two cell phones running off the same repeater, sound quality did degrade somewhat.
  • Most importantly, relax. Much like a long running soap opera, the fast paced interwebs change microscopically in the big picture. Some RSS fees were up over 400 on my return. After bouncing through the first few entries, I realized that much of these little blurbs are, well, just blurbs and I missed nothing of consequence by my absence.

Gone Fishin’

For the next 3 weeks, MacLitigator will be in the wild and completely unplugged. Not a vacation by any stretch, especially for a tech addict. The place holding MacLitigator hostage has 3 pay phones, one fax machine, no television (no real loss here), no internet and no cell phone service and a sign out front of the barn that reads “Welcome to Hell.” Be prepared for a host of tech survival tips upon my return, assuming I can get good enough GPS reception to find my way back.