Dan Olsen’s Weblog

When the iPhone came out I figured for sure I would get an iPhone when I could afford to one. Well, I have also been looking at Android phones and I have been quite impressed. After looking at my options I think I am now leaning towards getting an Android phone. I like how open it is to development compared to the iPhone. The Android phone also allows background processes which is a nice feature the iPhone doesn’t provide.

I have an iPod touch and I really like it. However, if I am going to go to a smart phone I think the Android phone is the one. My main sources about the Android phones are Sam Curren and Jory Dunn. Both have provided me with great insights about the phones.

Now I just need be able to afford the data plan on Verizon.

I am a Steelers fan and was happy to see them win the Super Bowl. This video was just awesome!

You can go here and see Google’s new favicon and how they came up with it. If you ask me it looks horrible. It reminds me of early web sites that over did it with color.

Jason Chaffetz represents the Utah 3rd District which is the district I am in. Stephen Colbert recently had him on the show.

I just read a tweet from Phil Windley about Zemanta so I thought I would see what it could do. So, I used it in Windows Live Writer to see how it did.

Zemanta looks at your post and tries to pick the right links for words or groups of words. It also tries to find images that correspond to your blog post. Pretty neat tool.

I have decided to start using Twitter more frequently. I have never fully understood what that point of it was. I have found that you have to use it to figure out how you can benefit from it. I have already benefited from it by finding information based on other people tweets.

I am interested to hear how people are using Twitter. Please leave a comment and let me know.

As you can see, I changed my theme. I finally created my own like I’ve wanted to do all along. Please send you comments to let me know what you think.

I am subscribed to emails for both the McCain and Obama campaigns because I want to hear what both campaigns have to say. I have noticed something interesting. When I get an email from the McCain campaign it comes up and just asks if I want to load images. However, when I get an email from the Obama campaign, Thunderbird flags the emails as a scam. Is the Obama campaign a scam?

My personal opinion? I am scared about the change Obama wants to bring. Do I think this country needs change? Yes. Do I think Obama has the right kind of change? No. His ideas seam a little socialist to me. However, I am not too excited about John McCain. I am currently leaning towards a vote for Bob Barr.

One concern I have about this country is that too many people vote for their party instead of the best candidate. I encourage people to become informed voters! I really got interested in learning about candidates working with Phil Windley and seeing him really analyze the issues.

Below is a video from CNN about Utah’s new 4-day work week.

This week I have taken on new responsibilities at work. They have divided the development group in three groups. Internal Projects, New Projects and Support. I am the lead over the Support group which means I make sure the bugs get fixed in all our supported web apps as well as making enhancements to those web apps. I am also now in charge of web site projects. I have felt like I have been drinking out of a fire hose these first couple of days.

This is the kind of stuff I have wanted to do as I started my career in software development. Now that I have the chance I am excited and uncertain all at the same time. The hardest thing right now is just figuring all the things that need to get done. Once I get myself organized I am sure things will run a little smoother.

Just the first couple of days has helped me realize how important it is to be organized and how important it is to communicate clearly. I am in the process of figuring out the best way to organize all the work and how to follow up with developers and then bring it all together to help make solid, educated decisions.

If anyone has any good advice I would love to hear it. I want myself and my group to be successful.

So I switched jobs over a month and a half ago and I have always meant to write about why I changed jobs and I haven’t gotten around to it until now.

I started working at Omniture in May of 2006. I started out as an intern and for the almost two years I worked there I enjoyed it. However, I soon found myself working a lot of hours. Some days I was at work from 8:00am to midnight. A couple times of working late was fine and understandable but then it became a more regular thing.

After the late nights had gone on for a while I was realizing I was a away from my family too much and wasn’t able to fulfill some of my other responsibilities. Well, Omniture had me convinced that they paid really well. So for a while I just worked the late nights to support my family.

After a while I started talking to some of my buddies and found out that I was working a lot more hours then they were doing the same thing. I also found out I was getting paid less then most of them. One buddy told me that he worked for the State of Utah and never had to work more then 40 hours and he thought I should apply. I applied for two jobs at the with the State and was offered a position at the Office of Education. Unfortunately, the offer required me to take a $17,000/year pay cut. The was out of the question. I figured I’d do the other interview with the Department of Technology services. I wasn’t counting on an offer being much better from them. However, in the end I was offered just as much as Omniture was paying me.

My wife and I discussed the new offer and decided it was not a bad deal. Same pay, fewer hours and great benefits. I decided to take the job. Since March 10th I have been a employee for the State of Utah and enjoy that I am home more with my family now with an hour commute then I was with a 15 minute commute.

The point of this is that it is disappointing that there are so many people that ask a lot of hours from their employees but don’t compensate them for the time away from their family. My boss at Omniture told me they pay for all those hours and we shouldn’t need to be compensated. I think people higher up in the company forget that lower employees such as myself don’t benefit from the long hours like they did. They worked all those hours and made a lot of money but when the lower employees put in that amount of time they pay them a measly salary.

Don’t get me wrong. I miss working at Omniture but I had to decide whether Omniture was my family or my wife and kids were my family.

So I was little bored at one point in my life and decided to create a little page for my MyMiniCity.com city. MyMiniCity.com provides you with a link to each city that gives you XML with the current information about your city. So, instead of having to figure out what my city needed and entering the correct link, I just created a page that looked at the properties of my city and suggested the best link for me. So now I can go to http://www.dansworkshop.net/myminicity/olsen-land/ and I will be provided with a link that will best help my city.

If you don’t know what I am talking about your can go to http://myminicity.com and you’ll see what I am talking about.

I also created another page that gives me links that I regularly visit to help others with their cities. http://www.dansworkshop.net/myminicity/other/.

I don’t know how many people have seen MyMiniCity. You can go to my city and see what it is about and then go and set up your own city.

It has been announced today the Omniture will be acquiring Visual Sciences. I had seen stories about this being a move Omniture should make but I didn’t realize it would happen this soon. I didn’t know about it until a company meeting this afternoon.

Technorati Tags: Omniture, Visual Sciences

I am hoping to eventually have a new blog design up. I have mostly used other’s blog templates because it is easy. I finally broke down and have started working on my own. Due to the lack of free time it may be a while before I actually have it up.

I found out what kind of power a single sneeze can have on a person. In early June I was sitting at my desk at Omniture just minding my own business. All of a sudden a large sneeze over took me. Instantly after the sneeze I started to have a pain in my side. I thought maybe I had pulled a muscle because it was quite the sneeze.

Well, I went home that night and started to feel sick. I had a temperature of 102, felt sick, and my head was pounding. I decided to go to bed early with the hopes that I would feel better in the morning. Well, the pain in my side was a little worse and I still had a slight fever. I figured it was time to go see a doctor. The only problem was that we had not yet picked a primary care physician since we were planning on moving shortly. So, we figured I would go to the urgent care and have it looked at.

Right before we left for the urgent care my dad called and said to try a couple simple tests to see if I might have appendicitis. They were some of the tests they had done on my youngest sister when she had appendicitis just months before. Well, in short, those tests hurt and we decided to go to the hospital. Sure enough, it was appendicitis. Not only did they find I had appendicitis but they also found a hernia. Unfortunately each has to have its own surgery.

After I healed from the appendectomy, I went in to have the hernia repaired. The hernia took a lot longer to heal then the appendectomy did. Not only that, my body was hammered and my immune system was shot. So what happened? I got some stomach bug that laid me out for a week and lasted a total of two weeks. This did not make our family vacation to California. I was healthy for the end of the trip and we had a nice day at the beach.

So, there it is, see what kind of power a single sneeze can have upon a human being. Oh, did I mention I also had a cold while I had the stomach bug.

The lesson here is to just avoid sneezing.

Have you wondered how Google’s street level images are taken? Well, go check out the entry on this Google Earth blog to see the 11 lens camera they use to get these shots. The video included with the post it pretty cool as well. I’ve added the video below.

Technorati Tags: Cameras, Google Earth

Regular expressions have always been one of those things that I just never really picked up on easily. I have often wished I knew more about regular expressions because there have been many occasions when they would have been helpful. Well, Robbin Steif from LunaMetrics has written a series of posts about regular expressions. I have tagged all the articles in my del.icio.us account. If you are looking to learn regular expressions I would recommend taking a look at these posts.

Technorati Tags: Regular Expressions, RegEx

Back on August 9th I had iProvo installed in my apartment. My service includes fiber internet and VoIP phone service. It is now November 7th, almost 3 months since the install happened. I filled out a form that said Veracity (now Nuvont) can have my phone number ported over to them from Vonage. The problem I am having is that my Vonage service is still active and all
my phone traffic is still going through Vonage.

When I had my new services installed I was told it would take about two weeks to have the number ported over to my Veracity. Well, a couple weeks went by and I called to check up on the porting process. I was told the port was still pending and it usually takes about 4 weeks for the porting to be completed. After a month and a half I called again and they said the port was still pending. They eventually had me come in about two weeks ago and fill out another form.

Now, the one thing I am pleased with is that my phone service has not been interrupted. The thing I am not pleased with is that I have to call Veracity every month to tell them not to charge me since the porting has not finished.

I was told by Veracity that they are waiting for Vonage to release my phone number for the porting process to complete. I talked with Qwest to verify that Vonage would have to release my number in order for another company to have it ported to their service. Once I was told that I tried contacting Vonage. However, whenever I tried to talk to someone about it at Vonage they were not very helpful and refused to confirm any such action on their part.

The point of this post is that VoIP is an emerging technology. I would assume that by having such technology there would be things in place that would make porting phone numbers quick and easy. Boy was I wrong.

Technorati Tags: VoIP

I am writing this blog post in Microsoft Word 2007 with its publish feature. It’s always fun to try new things.