I am solving two little annoying problems by using a 'two heads are better than one' strategy. It's helping me to think about what I've generally considered 'whale' problems a little differently. By 'whale' I mean it in the Las Vegas context. Early Adopter, Big Spender, Gadget Geek kind of person who has to have it all. If I think of myself as a workgroup, I tend to solve problems that I get when I scale out of stuff, and I don't have to pay whale premiums. At least, that's what I hope to find if I continue this way of thinking.
The first problem is that I've got >6K contacts in my Outlook. I've been reducing this number over time. Once there were about 9800. And since I recently switched over to the iPhone (sorry Pre, you've been pre-empted) I've had to deal with that old MobileMe issue again. So I have decided to simplify. Instead of carrying around all of those in the phone, which it can do but slows down search a whole lot, I will maintain a 'Dunbar Set' of about 500. Then I will have a 'Dossier Set' of the other thousands back in Outlook.
What I discovered is that Google Contacts (which now works independently) and MobileMe both choke when you start dealing with that many contacts. It's because of AJAX I think. They've been a bit too clever with databasing in the browser and it doesn't scale well. So now I will become two people in order to handle that. This means I export my Outlook contacts to the Dossier Set and reduce to the Dunbar Set. When the Dunbar Set is done, I have something of a new problem - which is, how do I keep all of my contacts synched and backed up in the Dossier Set. I just use a different me. So I've created another Google identity to handle the big set,(and Thunderbird on another server to handle the big contact set) so that when the technology catches up, I can snap over.
But even if it doesn't, what I'm basically doing is tiering my own services and giving that version of me a different account. This is going to be very useful as I look at other problems I'm dealing with.
The second problem is that I have five consumers of iTunes music and AmazonMP3 music in the house. They all come through me and I do the central purchasing, but I've been distributing the data to multiple machines. That's a problem because I don't want to spend 50 bucks each per year for every machine I backup through Carbonite, which won't let you backup network drives. So I've invented a new Bowen, Medea Bowen who is a user on my big server in the living room.
Now everybody is instructed to synch their iPod under Medea's account on that one server. Not only that but also download your digital photos to Medea's account which will get a Picasa identity. Sorry Flickr, but you get no new net adds. And unless I'm mistaken, Flickr seems awfully one way. I want to bulk download my Flickr pictures in case Medea doesn't have a few of those, but last time I checked it was onesy twosey. Picasa is better on that score. But all of Medea's photos and songs are going to be JungleDisked up to my AWS bucket. (Sooner or later), which will be a 250GB mirror of an external USB hard drive (Porsche Design, like the ones that Will Smith used in I Am Legend).
So currently there are about 14,000 songs and 53,000 photos that I'm dealing with spinning on that one drive under Medea's control. That needs to get redundant real quick. I just hope that iTunes and Picasa can handle that. Because I'm actually thinking that maybe it's time to give Winamp another looksee.
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