Have you ever taken one of those surveys that Microsoft presents you from time to time? Who comes up with these surveys?!1?!1?!1?! (one oneado for those who understand!)

If you take a survey from MS it is something like this:

“The following survey consists of 12325 questions that all look the same, it will take you about 3 hours and we are not so sure we will take your response too seriously, we will just average it with the rest. Thanks for all the fish!”

I know that asking a bazillion 1 to 10 questions makes the survey easier to grade and come up with averages and all sorts of charts, complexity all around which makes these people feel important. But it forgets the most important thing, the customer.

When you have a survey, focus on the customer and leave it an open response with perhaps just a few options. Let your customer tell you their experience and either you or hire people to analyze the response and file them accordingly.

I just took Fitbit’s support survey and loved it. Simple, focus on the customer, open answer. Let your customer provide you with the info you need and do the hard work on your end! You will get more of what you need.

Also Kudos to Fitbit on their support, it was great and so its their product.

So I installed iOS 7 in my brother’s iPhone today. I had his iPhone 4 registered properly but I forgot this is a new phone. So now I have:
– A phone that is locked
– I don’t my Mac at hand, only Windows machines
– It is a pretty boring drive at 10 pm and I can’t leave him several days without a phone

Tadaaaaaaaaaa. Get it from the device manager. Just one word of advice, it NEEDS to be typed in developer.apple.com in all lower case. If you write it in upper case it will not be recognized.

It is the last string in Device Instance Path

Hello iOS 7!

iOS 7 is out. I need to give it a try, even though some people say you shouldn’t mainly because it is beta as this post from cult of mac says –> http://www.cultofmac.com/231392/why-you-probably-shouldnt-install-ios-7-right-now-opinion/

In any case this guy says you can downgrade: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/06/11/how-to-downgrade-ios-7-to-ios-6-1-3/

But let’s cut to the chase. I downloaded the software from developer.apple.com – you need a dev account for that. And so I have the dmg file in desktop. I go to iTunes now and it doesn’t let me select the dmg file. Crap I forgot that #1 the ipsw is inside the dmg file, #2 my Mac Book Pro is at work and #3 I don’t want to wait for tomorrow as I only have Windows on this side of the city.

Solution:

Download Power Iso (http://www.poweriso.com/) and open the dmg file. The dmg file is just like a zip file in logical terms, extract the ipsw and install from iTunes.

Voila! iOS 7 installed and I am ready to suffer bugs, bad battery life and everything that comes with a beta!

La pagina del Banco Nacional esta diseñada para ser tan inusable… es para proteger su dinero!

Es increible que haya un lapso entre ingresar una cuenta para hacer transferencia y poder hacer la transferencia. La gente tiene prisa, tiene que trabajar, tiene que seguir adelante y una transferencia hacerla de inmediato y no en dos pasos.

Esto es como hacer fila pero virtualmente. Es simplemente tonto!

(Si yo se que van a decir que es una medida de seguridad, como la vara de Java de la entrada y la tontera de cambiar de clave a cada rato. Con el token es la mejor medida de seguridad y con alertas de transferencias como el BAC. Aprendan de los que si saben hacer las cosas bien – LAFISE tambien te estoy viendo…)

So yes I am annoyed too. I am one of those who thinks Win XP is the best OS from the Microsoft family… however I got to like Win7 a lot.

Now I am in Win8 (and Server 2012) and the horrible usability gives me a hard time. Only accepted a bit by the nice looks of it and speed.

So trying to make my life easier I just discovered the nicest short cut (apart from Win + C for getting the oddly name thingie on the right)

Win + X. A geek’s new best friend in Win8

Take a deep look at Windows 8 screen.

Now think hard… What does it look like? Hint: see below

The Windows 8 screen is just the Windows 3.1 one with a blue background! Is Microsoft saving some money in design here or did they bring someone old back to the team?

Well basically it happened to me today! Mainly because of Memorial Day, I had the chance to clean up my inbox. However this does not mean only reading or glancing one email after another or “Mark all as read:.

Do the following (some taken from the “Getting things done” book by David Allen, just a bit modified for my needs)

– If there is nothing you can do about it, simply mark as read and let it go. This is the most difficult one of all categories because it is hard to accept that there is nothing you can actually do about it. Accept it

– If you can do something but not now and it is not that importante, then [create a task in Jira (I have my own) or some other task tracking/Kanban/post it/whatever system you use] so that you can take care of it later. This is your “do it later, not important queue”.

– If it is important, you can complete it now and it is (relatively) quick then

– If it is important but you can’t complete it now, then schedule it in your important queue. Use Kanban when possible. No more than 5 important tasks queued as then you will only be moving your mess from your inbox to your task list and this is not the idea. Scheduling is key, else you can just kick the bucket.

Remember never to procrastinate!

I recommend also reading the Productivity Manifesto by Nathan Barry too, which is very good however in some cases it is not possible to follow his advice. I can’t do blocks of 25 minutes of my time, else some people of my team could be blocked and waste minutes of their time. And no, I am not that important but in some cases dependencies arise and minutes count.

Simply because Google Drive is crap. Here is a list of things it did to me:
– No LAN sync, don’t know if already fixed but it is impossible to sync 100GB on each machine, and they are next to each other in the same LAN
– Duplicated my files, when I reformatted the computer and tried to install it again. Dropbox recognizes it is the same folder and files so no need to redownload the 100GB again
– Have two computers, next to each other, and they show different file counts. I reported to Google and they said just restart Google Drive. No luck
– And last but not least, I turned if off a few days and not tried to turn it on again. Guess what… It “forgot” I had already downloaded my many GBs of files and is trying to set up a new folder. Which will duplicate my files again and again and simply just make me lose my time.

Bye Google Drive, welcome 200 GB Dropbox

Do no harm (but take no shit)

IMHO Jira is the best bug tracking system all around. It is very user friendly, it is extremely extensible, there are tons of add ons to customize to your needs and GreenHopper brings Agile to Jira. There are many other things worth looking for, but the one great feature where I needed some help was in the worklogs.

Basically when you have a task assigned to a developer, you would like to be able to know what kind of effort/time went into completing it. Well, there is one flaw with this plan and that is that developers need to be very disciplined into entering their hours daily.

Also, they need to make sure that they did not leave any tasks out. So for me the easiest way to make sure that a dev did fill in all of their hours properly was by adding the “Recent Worklogs” add on to their tasks dashboard.

Click here to get the add on

Check it out:

Now devs do not have any excuse of forgetting to fill in their work logs. They can see this dashboard and immediately know which day they left out.