Recently I’ve noticed that my gmail had about 4,000 contacts listed and some of my students or family members were listed 4 or 5 different times (with the same name even). Since I have a Blackberry, iPod Touch, MacBook Pro, and Gmail, Gmail wasn’t necessary my contact list of choice albeit this list was out of control!

Gmail contact list just isn’t that friendly and much of the automation is annoying, like adding people to my contacts who I replied to for some reason. If my Mum sends a joke, copies me and a coworker, I reply all, then I am suddenly friends with her coworker. I should be able to choose my contacts. Moreover, Gmail contacts does not have any synchronous connection to my other address books. I can import/export to my heart’s content.

Now my iPod touch is the easiest connection. It syncs in the background with Mobile Me. I never even think about it, and it connects with Address Book on my MacBook Pro. Now we all know that devices that are not natively OSX have a hard time syncing, but we found Missing Sync a few years ago. They aren’t cheap but they get the job down (I’ve used the Blackberry sync but always have problems). Now my Blackberry syncs to my Address Book…. 1,100 contacts!

But I still have that problem with my 3,000 Gmail contacts, many are duplicates and Gmail contacts has no duplicate merge like Address Book does so well. So now I was thinking and this was my final conclusion.

1. Sync BlackBerry to Address Book. Run a Duplicate Merge action on Address Book. Then clean Address Book. Get rid of all the extra copies of addresses and everything. Try to identify who contacts are. I may know that John Franklin and I went on the same European tour with our students now, but in three years I may have no idea who he is. Categories them, or at least add notes.

2. Export my Address Book and call it something like “Pre-Gmail Backup”. Save this file where you won’t lost it. You can just save this as an Archive file.

3. Now go to address book, select All Contacts, and delete them. Yes, go ahead and delete them. You have a back up. Really, it’s ok.

4. Open Gmail Contacts and export them to a VCF file. Gmail should save a file to your desktop called contacts.vcf.

5. Go back into Address Book and open this file you just created. This action will open all of your Google contacts into Address Book. The first thing I did at this point was merge all duplicates. Then I carefully deleted all the contacts who I was positive I already had in my “Pre-Gmail Backup” file.

Now here’s where you have some different options. In your address book, you will have hundreds of email address that you won’t recognize. You can 1) copy and paste each into Gmail to see who it might be. This may take sometime but will help you catch email address you really need to make into contacts, rather than just delete people you don’t know; or 2) delete people you don’t recognize, knowing the ones who matter will probably email you again later. Neither is perfect but neither is being popular enough to have 1K+ contacts.

6. Once you have a pretty good idea of which Gmail contacts are 1) not in your “Pre-Gmail backup” and 2) are needed, export them to a .csv file, which will open in Excel (or any other spreadsheet program). Save this file.

7. Open this .csv file in Excel to make sure the information is all there. (Yes, the formatting will be ugly but it’s the best way I could figure out how to do this without corrupting my clean master address book (i.e. “Pre-Gmail backup”).

8. Go to your “Pre-Gmail backup”. Double Click on that file. Address Book will pop up and ask if you want to copy over your whole address book. Choose YES. This action will now reinstate my Master Address book.

9. Now this is where it’s a little messy. Flip between your Address Book and Excel. Add those people in Excel who are truly missing from Address Book back into your master contact list in Address Book. (Depending on how many you have, this takes time.)

Of course, when doing this make sure to run searches on each of these .csv contacts before just adding them to Address Book to make sure they’re not already there. If they are, do not readd!

10. Once you’ve gone through your whole .csv list, scroll through your Address Book to make sure everything looks right. Then export the Archive file again. Date it and call it something like “Master Archive MMYYYY”. Keep this file safe.

11. Now also export your Address Book as a .vcf file. (This is the easiest file to import to Gmail.)

12. Go into Google contacts. Choose “All Contacts”, then click on the large button that says “Delete Contact”. (Make sure you clicked on All Contacts, not just My Contacts, or you will not fix your problem.) Yes, it’s ok to delete your contacts. You still have them.

13. Now import your Master .vcf file into Gmail contacts. This may take a few minutes be patient.

14. Now that you have all your master contacts in Gmail, you will notice that your Mailing Lists and chat settings are gone. This is a caveat to this process. You need to readd people (but you know what? If your lists were like mine, you need a clean sweep anyway.)

15. Now back to the Blackberry. Whatever sync program you use (Missing Sync probably) will have an option to “overwrite device”. Choose this option and then sync your Blackberry. This will make the Master Address Book match your Blackberry exactly. This also matches your iTouch (through Mobile Me).

Now we all know that as soon as one person emails you that isn’t in your address book, your contacts are off. As soon as you add one person to your Blackberry, your contacts are off. There are things you can do about this, like add in Gmail & mobile simultaneously (will never happen) or never sync anything (which you wouldn’t consider if you’ve read this far).

On more note, I know Gmail contacts now has cloud sync but it’s ugly and if your contact list was messy as mine, this process above needs to be completed first before you play with that.

Hope it helps.

I use to love to check my email. It was that feeling of sitting down at the table, flipping open my computer and logging into email. I would sometimes forget in the evenings or weekends to check work email, so then I would have even more to read and respond to. Then I got a BlackBerry.

Now we’ve got problems. I don’t have that just feeling like it’s Christmas morning anymore and I am running downstairs to see what’s new. Now I yank my phone out of my pocket every few seconds and check. I’ve gotten GMAIL on my phone since the day I bought it, and recently work hooked my up with GroupWise on my Curve, too.

Now I go home, flip open my MacBook Pro to read my email and sit there to a lonely and empty inbox.

Got a new phone this week, and I’ve had some ups and downs with it that I will chronicle here. I’ve been truly trying to find the perfect smartphone for me, and I’ve come close in the last year or so. For example, I had a Sprint 8700 that I thought was pretty cool, since it was my first full QWERTY smartphone. A colleague had the same phone, so we were able to do some fun stuff with it, like tethering. That phone lasted over a year, but I had some problems. It broke and was replaced a few times (ALWAYS get the service plan on Smartphones!). Well, eventually I took it to Sprint and they told me they didn’t carry it anymore and offered me a Treo 700WX. I was intrigued by Treo and ready for a change.

I took the Treo home and thought I would hate they keyboard, but I got use to it surprisingly quick. The phone was a little clunky, but it was smaller than my old phone. The touch screen was smaller, too. The phone was fine. Nothing to write home about and it was solid. I did have a few problems here and there. For example one screen blew totally, and another time the plastic casing around the 2.5mm ear phone jack snapped off. The worse problem was when the speaker in the earpiece blew, and then on the next one, they keyboard started sticking. This was time to move on.

The wife was always complaining about my Google calendars and phone not syncing, and I wanted more control over my online mobile presence. Given my track record of replaced Treos, I figured I could make a pretty good argument for a new BlackBerry. Originally I thought the World Edition was pretty cool, but there was no video or camera, and I really only leave the USA once a year, if that. So next up was the Curve, which was smaller and sleeker. To be blunt, it was pretty damn sexy. Kinda like Tawny Kitaen on Coverdale’s car back in ’87.

Problem was Sprint didn’t have any. They promised me deal after deal, but I had to wait. Finally I got a $100 refund on my plan and $100 off the base price of the phone. So pretty much they paid me $20.00 to take the phone home. Finally by mid July, I was annoyed. The iPhone 3G was coming out, Sprint’s Insight had already dropped and sucked goat eggs, and I had my sticky key Treo. I wanted TwitPics! I wanted Google Mobile! I wanted the opalescent trackball that reminded me of old deodorant sticks! Then my day came.

I called the Retention Department, and, boys and girls at home, be wary of this next step. Tell ‘em you’re outta contract and you’re leaving. They listen up quickly then.

They promised my phone would ship that day through UPS, and it would take 3-5 business days to arrive on my door step. No one in any Sprint store had any idea this phone was back in stock, so I couldn’t just walk in and pick it up.

Six days later a box sat on my door step. It was here. Wow. I took it inside and just sat the box on the table, looking at it. I took a photo. Not of the phone, mind you. Of the cardboard box. I then cut open the box and took more pictures to commemorate the experience. I eventually got to the cool looking Sprint box, opened it safely, and found the phone. It is a greyish green and very pretty. As soon as I loaded the battery, it booted. I hadn’t activated it yet, but I was still too busy drooling.

Later, after it was charged, I called to activate it. They quickly activated it, told me the data and Internet would be on in four hours, and to have a nice evening. Playing with my Curve last night was like playing with my MacBook Pro for the first time. I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

I rolled it, I tried to push the screen (no touch screen, which bothered me for a whole two minutes), and I just tried to figure it all out. At one point I’d looked at the Motorola Q but hated the browser because you had to click through every link on the page to get where you wanted to be. This browser is more like a computer with a cursor and mouse. I still wish it had flash built it so I could enjoy videos (e.g., YouTube, Google Video, etc…).

My friend and colleague offered me a list of “Must Haves” that included installing PocketMac for syncing to my computer and Twitter Berry for mobile tweeting on the phone. I added a few of my own to the mix and was ready to roll.

Morning came and I went to get online. I couldn’t find the Browser. I also couldn’t find any File Manager where I could search for the Browser. I was annoyed so I called Sprint. The woman the night before had not initialized my data plan! This took mere minutes, and we were off. I began by setting up my Gmail through the BB app. Now this was a mistake because immediately all my filtered mail came through non-filtered. All my list servs (100+ emails a day) came rolling into my inbox. I immediately tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. I called Sprint back and it turned out I typed an “m” where I meant to type an “n”, so I wasn’t able to get back into the account. They did it for me. The emails stopped.

I immediately moved onto to Mobile Gmail, which was perfect because it maintained my filters, and everything. Love it! I also installed Google Sync for my calendars. I was told I could only sync my default calendar, but there was the option to pick any and all of them! Woohoo. I synced the calendars, and only ran into one small glitch when it duplicated everything! Fortunately, I only had 8 events; I just deleted the extras and moved on to getting rid of the nasty sig file. I didn’t want to preach that I was sending business emails from elsewhere than work, so why would I want to tell everyone I just sent an email from my BlackBerry? And with “Sprint Speed” no less. Nope. I called Sprint again. The nice lady told me immediately how to log into my webmail (who knew I had that!) and delete my signature file all together.

As the night wore on, I installed TwitterBerry, configured TwitPic, downloaded both Facebook and Flickr, and played a little with the built in GPS (?!) and News.

I finally got around to syncing it with Pocket Mac, and I immediately got an error. The computer said I could not connect to the Curve. I immediately copied the error into Google, as I do everything. After a nanosecond I was on the CrackBerry website (you know, it’s been a day only and my Curve’s already got me blogging a book at 12:01AM). I followed the directions the nice man left in a post, and Nada. So now my work wasn’t done, my dishes are crusty, the kid’s still away, and I am tired. I will call Sprint tomorrow (again) to complain about the PocketMac error and hope they can figure it out. But for now, me and the BlackBerry Curve are off to lala land.

About a month ago I got an email asking me if I was interested in heading to Claremont University outside of Ontario, CA for a conference on facilitating learning communities in higher education. I didn’t know where that university was, but the email said it was all expenses paid. I liked that. It also fell over my mother-in-laws month visit to Arizona (and I do love my mother-in-law) but it was a hell of an opportunity. To go to So Cal in the middle of OH-MY-GOD-IT’S-HOTTER-THAN-HELL-IN-ARIZONA!!!! season sounded ideal. So I wrote back quickly. I wasn’t too sure what I was in for, but it was a free trip.

A few weeks before that I was asked by Shelley if I would co-facilitate our faculty and professional learning community at Mesa Community College. I hesitated because I knew the wife would rather me do less than more while she’s in grad school, but I am a sucker for buttering up the MCC administrators. I agreed shortly, and now I am sitting here in Claremont, CA outside, on the patio, on wireless, with a full moon above head in 75 degree cool weather in my short with not heat or sweat. How nice.

Tomorrow I will learn how to better facilitate my professional learning community, I think. I am eager to continue to find ways to better develop curriculum based around a strong use of technology. A way to meet the students where they are (online, on their computers, on Facebook, using their Blackberries) and how to marry that platform to my pedagogy. Here we go!