In my last post, I shared my excitement at find the brilliant World War II history project called Real Time World War II that is making use of Tweets to recount the war years 72 years later.  It turns out that there are other similar projects using Twitter to tell historical stories.  Here are three more:

@BBCCov1940

This is a day by day account of life during the World War II Blitz in the Coventry and Warwickshire area of England and covers 1940.  (The Blitz was the bombing of English cities by the Luftwaffe.)

@UKwarcabinet

This is a day by day account of United Kingdom War Cabinet actions during 1942 in World War II.  Tweets are based on original Cabinet Paers from 1942 held at the UK National Archives.

@JFK1962

This is a project of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library and recounts the President’s 1000 days in office.  Tweets are currently following events in 1962.

In one of the most innovative and best uses of Twitter ever, @RealTimeWWII is providing updates via Tweets on a daily basis of events as they happened 72 years ago to the date.  This project started with events in 1939 and has now moved to 1940.  The project will continue through the remaining six years of the war.  Every day you will be able to see multiple Tweets describing events as the happened as though the writer is Tweeting directly from that time period. I can’t think of a better way to engage people with a detailed history of World War II than these bite sized bits via Twitter.  It is ittle wonder that @RealTimeWWII has about 194,000 followers. Thumbs up!

You can also see the daily Tweets via Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Real-Time-World-War-II/323597664320621

Today’s Real Time World War II Tweets noted  British cinemas were showing a war newsreel about the sinking of the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee.  The Tweet linked to this vintage British Newsreel from January 1940.

Aside from video links, these Tweets have including an amazing number of vintage images to illustrate individual tweets.  You can see them at http://twitter.com/#!/RealTimeWWII/media/grid

Recent Tweets have covered the failed Soviet campaign in Finland , rationing in England and Germany, and much more.  Highly recommended.

Basically, I am an Apple enthusiast and am hooked on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac Mini.  They are all wonderful for the most part, but I have to say that my list of Apple annoyances is starting to grow.

iCal and iCloud Calendar

You can easily subscribe to additional calendars  like national holidays, moon phases, sunset/sunrise, and much more via your iPhone or the Mac with iCal.  And they sync almost right away so that whatever you have displays in both places.  Now the rub is that if you want to see your calendar via the web using iCloud, none of those subscribed calendars will display.  What the heck?  That’s right, you cannot get them to show up via the iCloud Calendar which seems to be limited to three basic calendars and those that you manually create on your own.  Subscribed calendars just don’t work.

Other cloud calendars allow you to easily add key holidays and the like, but not so for iCloud.  What’s the point of a cloud calendar if it only displays a fraction of the data that you want to see?  This needs to be fixed and there have to be better solutions than some of the convoluted stuff that people have resorted to doing like (1) subscribing, (2) saving the calendar to the desktop, (3) unsubscribing, (4) creating a new calendar in iCloud, (5) importing the saved calendar, and (6) repeating whenever the subscribed calendar is updated.  The whole point is that iCloud ought to work seemlessly with iCal on the Mac and the iPhone.  And for those without a Mac, well I guess you are just out of luck because the above convoluted workaround is not going to help you.

Which iCloud and Why Two Accounts?

I’ve tried to help people migrate to the new iCloud and I have to tell you that they get the deer in the headlights look when you explain that they have to have two Apple accounts – one for iTunes and one for iCloud.  This ought to be simple with a single account, but it isn’t.   Most people that I know just can’t get their arms around why they have to have two accounts with Apple and so some of them have decided they don’t need iTunes and some have decided they don’t need the iCloud that they don’t quite understand anyway.  Then of course you have to deal with having an additional email account to monitor as well.  It sure would be a lot less frustrating to have a simple one account setup for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

iCloud SetUp

Personally, the process of setting up the iCloud went fairly well until I got to the part where the online prompts suggested that I needed to delete any Mobile Me accounts associated wtih my main account now  because I wouldn’t be able to access them after I upgraded to the iCloud.  We had accounts for various family members tied to the master account.  One family member had already migrated and the other professed not to be using the account, so I followed directions.  That immediately killed the calendar and wiped out hundreds of notes for the previously migrated family member who had to get email reopened with the loss of any saved email as well.  The other member discovered that yes indeed that toasted all the Mobile Me stuff on the iPhone and that she would need to create a brand new me.com account and start over.  Nice work.

The next thing to do was try to help the family member who had to have a new account.  We went through that process and at a critical juncture, there was a question about importing contacts from Outlook.  Of course the answer was yes – do that.  Suddenly the address book in the iPhone swelled from a few hundred to thousands of addresses.   Many of the addressses were in German and we couldn’t figure out where they came from and still don’t know.  We also found that an anti-spam program had been collecting thousands of addresses into a contacts folder that was pulled into the iCloud when we imported contacts from Outlook.  Fortunately we had saved a duplicate pristine copy of that family members contacts in a separate folder, but first we had to delete all the contacts in the iPhone, iCloud and Outlook to get rid of them.  Then we had to get rid of the nasty contacts folder with all the spam addresses.  Only then could we copy the contacts back and resync to Outlook.  What a thrill all that was.

After all that we discovered that the migration hadn’t gone as smoothly as we had hoped for any of us.  Addresses for contacts were missing, calendar appointments had gone missing, and notes had disappeared.  For some contacts there were now as many as five office addresses listed requiring a labor intensive manual editing of each contact to clean it all up.

Bottom line is that this did not go well and there were a lot of glitches that shouldn’t have been there.  There shouldn’t have been any prompt to delete accounts – they should instead have just been peeled off and left to the user to manage.

iTunes Updates

I started out as a Windows user and still use a Windows 7 64-bit machine as my work horse for web development and gaming.  So naturally that is where I started using iTunes and where I keep my iTunes library.  And goodness knows there are a whole lot of people using Windows 7 64-bit machines as their only computer, so you’d expect that iTunes ought to work well with this version of Windows, but that just isn’t so.

It appears that despite hundreds of forum posts complaining about the below error message, that nothing has been done since it first started showing up in July, 2011.

The end user either will have to live with this error message every time that Windows boots and related problems or learn to manually move the file from Program Files (x86)> Common Files > Apple > Apple Application Support to Program Files (x86)> Common Files > Apple > Mobile Device Support.   This sort of thing should have been addressed when it was first reported.

To add insult to injury, when I and others contacted Apple about what to do to fix this problem, the standard answer was:

1. Temporarily shut down anti-virus and firewall software
2. Open Control Panel, Programs and Features (or Add and Remove Programs), and go to the uninstall section
3. Remove all Apple products in this order – iTunes, Quicktime, Apple Software Update, Apple Mobile Device Support, Bonjour, Apple Application Support. You do not need to remove Safari
4. Restart computer
5. Go to Apple.com and download newest version of iTunes
6. Re-install

And of course this did not fix the problem because the critical file was still getting placed in the wrong folder by a bad install package.  This needs to get fixed.

Mac OSX  Lion, Entourage, and Mobile Me

Okay, I understand that Entourage is a Microsoft product, but you would think there would be some coordination between Apple and Microsoft by now on replacing references to the defunct Mobile Me with iCloud.  If you want to use Entourage, the choices for syncing your calendar still include sync with iCal and Mobile Me vs sync with iCal and iCloud.

Automated Support

As a new Mac Mini owner and a new iPhone 4S owner, I thought that I was entitled to some minimal level of real support for the period advertised.  Instead, each time that I wanted to get assistance with an issue online, I ended up with an automated help system that ignored the fact that I was a new owner and when I called I was advised that I needed to pay for each incident that I wanted to discuss.  That’s not the way to breed customer loyalty in my opinion.  Seems to me that Apple needs to alert to new owners and provide the proper level of support instead of diverting to the free support system.

The free support system gives every appearance of being an automated AI system with nobody on the other end that has the ability to think.  Questions get a hit or miss answer that ignores what you have written for the most part.  If you reply, you are more apt to get more useless information and after several attempts it becomes obvious that nobody is reading anything that you have written.  A friend who also happens to be a shareholder, was so frustrated that he called shareholder relations for assistance and that was the only way he could get to talk to a real person to try to solve a problem where his installation of iTunes wouldn’t even diplay the iTunes store.  There has to be a better way to handle customer support folks.  This just frustrates the heck out of loyal customers that believe in and want to support Apple.  Sure it costs money to have real people doing support, but at the price we are paying for Apple products, we kind of expect to be treated better than when we buy from lower priced competitors, who as it turns out tend to provide a person on the phone to help instead of some sort of automated gibberish.

Well other than that, I’m pretty much a happy Apple customer, but these kinds of frustrations take their toll over time.  This is not the time to sit on your haunches and gloat in success.  Technology marches on and those that don’t keep the customer happy fall by the wayside.  One only has to look at what happened to Kodak or what is happening to Blackberry to appreciate that not staying in tune with the customer is a perilous practice.

You are probably thinking – what the heck (or stronger language) right?  How could that be?  Well the answer is that somebody grabbed an account on Twitter, @GhostOfKimJongIl, shortly after the North Korean dictator passed away, gave the account location/address as Hell, and started tweeting as though he or she was the dictator making comments from the afterlife.

Whether it is good humor or extremely bad taste is a good question. A few of the tweets are assuredly in poor taste, but there are also a few that may make you smile.  Whether or not the account will get terminated by Twitter probably is a good question as well and remains to be seen.  Around midnight last night the dead dictator’s afterlife Twitter page at https://twitter.com/#!/KimJongIlGhost looked like this:

Aside from this bit of mockery, Twitter has been blazing with comments about Kim Jong-il.  See,  https://twitter.com/#!/search/%22Kim%20Jong%22.  Mashable notes that comments using the term “Team America” also started trending.  See, http://mashable.com/2011/12/19/twitter-kim-jong-il-dead/

I’m always on the lookout for good mystery novels adapted for the Kindle.  This afternoon, I heard about an interesting book via word of mouth.  Just the title alone got my attention: Outsourcing Murder (A Miss-Information Technology Mystery) [Kindle Edition]. Now that title just drips with mystery and geek appeal from the start.  That got my attention.  So many authors sidestep technology because they are fundamentally uncomfortable with trying to figure out how to incorporate that into the narrative. No so here – the authors have a firm footing in the IT world and are not afraid to enter the geek scene.

And the authors don’t disappoint either.   As the investigation begins, a detective notices a missing bit of information on a Blackberry.   The geek in me is thinking this is good – I want to read more and see where that leads.   It is evident that the authors were interested in exploring some of the inner-workings of the Corporate and Technology worlds as the story progresses.

The authors have worked some real magic with character development, which when mixed with vivid descriptions of the scene, gives the reader some great mental pictures of the action as it progresses.  I particularly like the way they handled dialog where they have used slang, popular idioms, and conversational structure to build the story in a way that makes it all just a little more believable and easier to read.

You may be asking why I have used the word “authors” when the book was written by Maddi Davidson.  Well, it turns out that two sisters wrote the book together and decided to self-publish. (Their author site is at http://maddidavidson.wordpress.com/)   Both sisters have had worked in the IT field and are no strangers to corporate weirdness.  In their own words the book is part “chick lit” and part “IT geek scene” and they think that the IT industry is an untapped genre for murder mysteries.  I happen to agree and look forward to more from them.