Apple doesn’t allow you to manage your purchases. Patently absurd really. When you’ve lost your iPhone apps as I have done on occasion here is how you can laboriously and tediously recover them.

Launch iTunes. Select Store > View my account

Provide the credentials for your Apple Account and then select Purchase History.

Now you can page through your iTunes purchases and laboriously search > install and then repeat every one of the previous steps. I am sure you will enjoy this superlative Apple user experience as much as I have.

Since I could not find this in my Google searches allow me to include the following SEO: install iPhone apps, reinstall iPhone apps, re-install iPhone apps, recover iPhone applications.

Thank you @gigowey for the timely assist.

You have to love Twitter.

via Dharma Bum

We moved to new offices last weekend. Our last intergalactic HQ was woefully small for how large we’ve grown.

Previous MindTouch HQ at 555 West Beech St. San Diego 92103

In our last offices we did everything ourselves: networking, wiring, PBX (Trixbox) etc… It really showed.

This is Sarah’s desk. Throughout the office cables
hung from the ceiling

In the “Fishbowl”, a conference room, we had a NAS device whirring so loudly you have to shout to be heard.

We had so many people packed into the 5th floor (main) office that for lack of space I was sharing a conference room with Mark as an office. We turned a storage closet into a conference room, hence the name “the closet”. And Roy was holding conference calls in the reception area daily. Worst of all, I’m a little embarrassed to report that we’ve had so many bodies packed into such a small place the place smelled a little funky. Or maybe is was our old fridge that stunk regardless of how much we cleaned it.

Engineering had more space than any other department;
so, the above photo is not indicative of the tight confines.

Yesterday, Monday February 1, MindTouch moved to a new space, two block away from our last, in Columbia Center. It’s twice the size of our previous offices. To commemorate the occasion the sales and engineering team wore suits. I had meetings in San Mateo and missed the affair, but Roy shot some photos and posted them at his blog.

Maxim Mass and Roy Kim discussing pork futures.

Tim O’Brien undoubtedly closing a new customer. 

The new office is located across the street from the W Hotel and is half a block from Carl Strauss. We’ll be hosting an office warming party in the near future. I’m looking forward to entertaining on our amazing patio.

Photo of the MindTouch offices taken from the patio. Above are the conference and training rooms.

On my ride home today I shot this sunset over San Diego from Golf Course Dr. in Golden Hills.

Last year I was in a nasty cycling accident. Scans of my brain uncovered a benign tumor. Well, more precisely a colloid cyst, which I named Lil Craig. I had new scans taken last month. Good news and bad news. First, the bad. Lil Craig is no longer with us. RIP. Our time together was so short. Good news is, of course, I no longer have a growth in my melon.

I requested copies of both the original and recent brain CT scans. Scripps denied my request. Then I asked again, this time even more nicely. They agreed.

The before photos:

and the after photos:

I don’t see Lil Craig in either set! Do you? I thought these would be pretty exciting, but I was disappointed. I will tell what is way more exciting than I expected. The CT Scan of my torso.

Now that is awesome.

This is a kind of cross-post from the MindTouch blog. The original post is about MindTouch hiring. Read that if you’re looking for a job.    

Roy recently started shooting with a Panasonic Lumix GF-1. He’s using a 20mm pancake lens, which I believe is a no-name Zeiss. He recently wrote about the imminent move to new MindTouch offices and shot photos around our current office. Only Roy is more sentimental than me. Or is he? Tim O’Brien is a MindTouch sales representative. Indeed, Tim is the highest earning MindTouch sales representative. He was one of the very first sales hires and has been with the company for 1.5 years. In this photo Tim is on a call with a customer. This customer generates more than $4.5B in annual revenue. We have an exciting project underway.

Pete Erickson was a MindTouch contractor before we had any employees. The guy is brilliant. He was at Great Plains before the Microsoft acquisition. Microsoft recognized his talent and made him a crisis ‘firefighter’ of sorts. When I met him he was the CTO for a fiber to the home startup. It’s a joy to work with and to know Pete. Unfortunately, he still lives in Minnesota and I don’t get to see him much, but he is omnipresent at MindTouch.

Max Mass is another of the many brilliant members of MindTouch engineering. He started with MindTouch 3.5 years ago. It was only earlier this week that I realized it’s been that long. It seems like yesterday. I interviewed him over the phone from an airport, the Minneapolis airport if I recall correctly. I remember giggling during the interview while I addressed him by his full name: Maxim Mass. Say it aloud. Corey Ganser is the gentleman on the left and GuerricS is on the right. Corey has performed the following roles at MindTouch: office admin, trainer, sales and support manager; in that order. He has been a MindToucher since the first year of business. Corey is the reason our customers consistently rank MindTouch support 4.75 out of 5 every month, quarter and year. Guerric is responsible for a lot of the user interface at MindTouch. He’s a real engineer from Urbana-Champagne (he couldn’t get into UNC ;-).

The remaining photos weren’t shot by Roy, but I felt compelled to include more faces in my MindTouch blog post and I may as well keep them here.

Damien Howley is the technical lead for the professional services team at MindTouch. He’s been with us for three years and started as the webmaster. There were fewer than ten of us at MindTouch when Damien started.Sarah Carr is the marketing coordinator at MindTouch. She’s been with us for almost a year.

Roy Kim is a fellow UNC alum. He is also the first employee of MindTouch and our VP of Engineering and the photographer of most of these photos. Roy started college at 16 and graduated four years later with a degree in Economics and Chemistry while simultaneously launching a popular blogging/social site that has only suffered from his investment in MindTouch over the last five years.

The first four photos were shot with Roy’s Panasonic Lumix GF-1. Fantastic! Since this is a post about photography, kind of, I want to share a concept Ricky Montalvo shared over Twitter: FART. I know it’s a disgusting acronym. However, it’s a great system for shooting. Maybe we can rename it though.

The only sport I enjoy watching on television is NFL (American professional football). I don’t watch many games because I’m most interested in spending my weekends with my family. When I do watch games I always time-shift with my DVR. Here’s why:

According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

via Football Games Have 11 Minutes of Action – WSJ.com.

Wow. This is unbelievable. By fast-forwarding I commonly cut a game down to about 45 minutes, but I had know idea actual playing time is only, on average, 11 minutes. No wonder these guys can be enormous and still effective.

My week was a bit too busy to fit in a full week of cycling. Overall I only managed to ride 55 miles. I broke a chain on Saturday. The wonderful folks at Bicycle Warehouse in Pacific Beach fixed it for me free of charge. The service here is fantastic and unpretentious, unlike Mission Hills Bike shop.

Today I rode 32 miles, but I intended this to be a 50 mile ride. I biked the south portion of San Diego bay along the Bay Shore Bike Trail down to National City, up the Sliver Strand and into Coronado. My chain was rubbing against the shifter, which might have caused the chain to break on Saturday. I took apart the component and rebuilt it at Silver Strand State Park. It was better, but still not quite right. I put another 8 miles in and determined I should call it quits until I get it fixed properly.

Cities all over San Diego County have public service campaigns targeting cyclists. Here is an ad paid for by the city of Chula Vista.

These campaigns are targeting the wrong demographic entirely. I commute to and from work 5 days a week by bike. I obey the law and take a traffic lane when there is no bike lane. It’s safer. It’s the law. As a result I am verbally accosted by motorists 3 times a week. Weekly I have motorists feint vehicles at me and lay on their horn. Where are the ads informing motorists to “Share the Road”?