Another Photo of Filomena Tobias and Joakim Noah

Filomena Tobias & Joakim Noah

Here's another photo of the Bird Lady Filomena Tobias at the Miami Heat Game versus the Chicago Bulls.

Google Apps Downtime still better than 99.9% This Year

This morning a little after 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time, Google Apps went down. I received a text message from a client that they couldn't access their email. After a few minutes, I discovered that Google Apps or Google Mail was down.

Google Apps or customers most likely noticed this when using their iPhone or Outlook Client, the message received was:

 "Cannot Get Mail" The user name or password for "user@domain.com"is incorrect.

Or, when they tried to login to their mail via their web browser, the message received was: "502. That's an error. The service encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request." or the other message below.














Google Apps Mail Outage Error Messages

Like many other Webmasters, I took to Twitter to find out what's going on. Despite Google promising 99.9% Uptime Guarantee for those of my clients that have a paid plan, the Google Enterprise Support Number 1-877-355-5787 was busy. The first thing Twitter users pointed out was that the Google Apps Status Dashboard did not display the Service Disruption. After more than 30 minutes of downtime, there was no indication that Google was acknowledging the Outage. However, by the number of tweets,  you could easily see the severity of the outage.

 Google Apps Status Dashboard


When these outages occur, the first question many of my clients usually ask is if any email will be lost. That prompted me to send a test message to myself to see if Google was able to receive mail during this period and if they will hold it their queue for later delivery. More on that later. 

When these events occur, I also

Eventually, the Google Apps Status Dashboard was updated and I learned for the first time that Google was acknowledging a "partial" Service Disruption. This was for Google Mail, Google Drive, Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets, Google Presentations and for Admin Control Panel / API.

The problem with an outage like this one is that most users immediately think that the problem or issue is with their computer, their email client or their password. Since Gmail or mail was still working for their personal account and Google Apps Mail rarely goes down, they think it might be something they did. The error message in this case "the user name or password is incorrect" is certainly deceptive or misleading. In addition, between 8 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time is probably the worst time of the day to have this type of a issue. You could also see that the webmasters in the Twitter Community were starting to get anxious about the length of the downtime, with no detailed official word from Google.

On or around 9:30 a.m., after almost 90 minutes of downtime, I noticed from a Google Support Forum that users were reporting that their service was back up and running. When I checked my email, I saw email with the correct time stamps (between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. ET) started to arrive in my inbox including the test email I sent to myself.

Finally, I also took the time to review the Google Apps Guaranteed Uptime. It was 99.9%, which means that even after 90 minutes of downtime, this was still in the acceptable level. If you do the math, even though their service was only up 94.75% today, 99.9% per year uptime would be 8 hours, 45 minutes and 20 seconds of downtime per year. Google Apps still has over 7 hours of downtime this year to stay under the 99.9% threshold. Luckily, that's unlikely and when reading tweets from earlier this month, like the one below, I'm still a big fan of Google Apps.



For information on my company's products and services, visit www.OgawaDesign.com.

Displaying a Twitter Tweet on Your Website

Like many basketball fans, I too saw the infamous Miami Heat Harlem Shake Video. So as a Social Media experiment, I decided to post of photo of my company's attempt to identify the players in the video. For example, it certainly wasn't difficult to recognize @KingJames or the King, Mario Chalmers or Bosh but which player was wearing the Bear or Ted-like head? Which player was the #Horsetronaut or was the Horse? Who was the Clown? Which ones were Joel Anthony and Jarvis Varnado? So we took my firm's best guess and sent it to Miami Heat Sun Sports TV Reporter Jason Jackson's Twitter Account. And he tweeted back: The Twitter Tweet

RT @martinog: @thejaxshow - Did we name the Miami Heat Players correctly in their Harlem Shake Video? #nba twitter.com/OgawaDesign/st… <--perfect
— Jason Jackson (@TheJaxShow) March 1, 2013

Miami Heat Harlem Shake Video

The code from the Tweet could be embedded on a company's website as a Social Media Promotion Tool.

YouTube.com Video - How To Post

Posting a YouTube.com Video

This video was imported to iMovie, edited, then uploaded to YouTube.com.

AT&T International Plan for my iPhone 5 and iOS 6

Today, I signed up for an International Calling Package for a Family Member for a short to Europe. AT&T continues to change their International Calling features and for this trip, my family member wanted to leave on her iPhone during the entire trip, check email, receive text messages and use her the iPhone for browsing the web. Here are the details:

1. AT&T International Plan Customer Service 1-800-335-4685 - I decided to call AT&T Customer Care rather than use the myAT&T App on my iPhone. In the past, the AT&T Customer Care Reps were very helpful and courteous.

• AT&T World Traveler- $5.99 per month (calls in most European Countries and back to the United States are $.99 cents per minute)
• AT&T Global Messaging -- They had plans for 50 messages-$10.00/200 Messages-$30/500 Messages-$50. These plans are for Sending Text Messages since Text Messages Received are covered under your current U.S. Plan. Some things to consider: 1) A $.35 cents per text message applies to overages; 2) Photos and Video Sent/Received will apply against your International Data Plan. 
• AT&T Data Global Add-On for the iPhone -$30-120MB; $60-300MB; $120-800MB. These rates have decreased against since the last time I was abroad. That said, some of us in the U.S. are use to Unlimited Data Plans. AT&T bills this Data on a Monthly Plan so your vacation dates and the AT&T Billing Cycle will affect the pro-ration. In my case, the AT&T Rep back dated the Data Plan to the beginning of Billing Cycle and also inserted a Termination Date. This was a huge benefit that AT&T didn't previously provide, I no longer had to  remember to cancel the plan after the trip. In addition, see the example from a older blog below on how AT&T calculates the Data Plan Charges.  
• Here's an Example: AT&T takes your total MB per month and divides by the number of days until the next billing period. If you travel started 1-day before your new billing period, then you would have 1.67 MB and $5.00 per MB for any overage. So if you used 3.67 MB the first day of your trip, you would be charged $59.99 / 30 days or $2.00 per day + $10.24 (2MB overage @ $5.12 per MB ) = $12.24. The second billing period you will be billed at $59.99 under the same formula. (Yes, it sounds complicated but worst case if you you pay$119.98 for two months for 50 MB iPhone data usage. (more later on data usage) In my case, the Rep back dated my contract 30 days so I had 7 days to use 50 MB which was more than enough.

2. Forwarding -- Before leaving the United States, I recommend forwarding calls to a Free Google Voice number. When someone leaves a voice mail message and you are Forwarding your calls to Google Voice, you receive a text message with a text transcript to your iPhone. This is a great feature.

3. iPhone Usage Reset Statistics - Before your plane takes off from the United States, Reset the iPhone Usage Statistics Settings: Settings > General > Usage > Cellular Usage: Reset Statistics

4. Location Services - Settings > Privacy > Location Services -- Before leaving, I would recommend disabling all Apps with Location Services using this setting. You can individually turn them on as you need them.

I would recommend turning off Location Services and Keep it Turned Off.

5. General Tips for Using your iPhone while Traveling Abroad

• Use +1 or 001 when dialing U.S. Phone Numbers if the 10-digit phone number does not work from your iPhone Address book. 
• +19168434685 is the phone number for AT&T International Care when you are abroad. There is no fee for this call. 
• iPhone vs iPad -- During my last trip, I enabled a Data Plan for my iPad. With the larger Screen Size, the Data used was exponential more and I went through my Megabytes in several days. I would suggest enabling your iPhone instead. 
• Wi-Fi - In your Hotel, make sure you get the user name and password for Complimentary Access during your check-in. 
• Email - Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data Fetch: Manually - Make sure Fetch New Data is set to manual. Retrieve your Email in the Hotel Room using your Wi-Fi connection as often as you can. Use this time to send email with Photos or Video.  
• Call Forwarding - Settings > Phone > Call Forwarding: On - Forward your Calls when you are traveling Internationally until you need use your phone. 
• Text Messaging - Use text messaging. 
• Friends - Notify your friends that like frequently call you or that Group Text Videos or Photos that you will be traveling abroad. 
• Facetime - Skype or Google Voice - If you have a Wi-Fi connection, use one of these to call back to the States. For Skype and Google Voice, you will need a separate account. 
• Location Services -- Turn off Location Services on each App before you leave the country.  

AT&T LTE on iPhone 5 - How to Disable, if you have poor coverage.

I ended up upgrading to the iPhone 5 and discovered that with the upgrade, AT&T will switch you to their new AT&T LTE or "Long Term Evolution" Cellular Service. This service is being currently being aggressively rolled out to new Cities in the U.S. The first thing I noticed that the Cellular service is much better than the 4G, except in some areas such as inside certain building. In one particular case, I was unable to call from a Conference Room where I had previously made many phone calls. So in this case, the only way I could make a phone call (I had only 1 bar using the AT&T LTE Service) was to use the manual procedures below to disable AT&T. Apparently, there are some phone using other services that don't allow this option, but the iPhone 5 with iOS 6 has this option. Below are those instructions. Unfortunately, to re-enable LTE, you need to power off and power on your iPhone.

Finally, for those non-techies, AT&T LTE is not "Lite".  AT&T says that it is 10X Faster than 3G.

Instructions to Disable AT&T LTE

1. Setting -> General -> Cellular -> Enable LTE: Off

2. Your phone should switch to 4G

Instructions to Re-enable AT&T LTE

1. Settings -> General -> Cellular -> Enable LTE: On

2. Power your iPhone Off, then Power On

(otherwise, your the data only will switch to LTE, your cellular connection will not change back to LTE)

AT&T LTE Coverage http://www.att.com/network/

Installing iOS 5.1.1 on my iPhone & iPad

Apple released iOS 5.1.1 today this morning and I installed this release on both my iPhone and iPad in about 15 minutes. Here are some observations:

• Wi-Fi - You can install this release over your Wi-Fi connection, you do not have to be connected to your computer.
• Power Source - You do not have to be connected to a Power Source, although Apple warns you that it will save you device battery life. 
•  Here's the Link to Apple's iOS 5.1.1 Support Article with a list of the bug fixes and security updates.