During an upgrade of Adobe AIR, the following error message appears: “An error occurred while installing Adobe AIR. Installation may not be allowed by your administrator. Please contact your administrator.”

I had the Adobe AIR Uninstaller. I ran it a couple of times. I tried all the suggested command line prompts. I tried everything logged in as the root. Nothing was letting me reinstall Adobe AIR.

So I posted to Twitter and  did Google searches. The Google searches took me back to the Adobe Forums. Other people where having the same problem I was having and it looked like this had been going on for a while. One of the posts, “Adobe AIR not installing properly.”,  had a great tip, look at the log files!

My log file had something odd in it:

Jul  9 20:27:24  /Volumes/Adobe AIR 1/Adobe AIR Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe AIR Installer[1088]: error during install: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="Unhandled exception Error: Could not create directory /Applications/Adobe/Flash Player/AddIns/airappinstaller" errorID=3010]

Why on earth could it not create the directory? So I took a peek in the Application folder and there was an old text file called Adobe. I renamed the text file and ran the Adobe AIR installer. I was pleasantly surprised when it announced it had completed the install. As soon as I was successful, I went back to the forums to post my solution. I figured it was the right thing to do since I posted my issue as a reply to a few other threads.

Now I’m a happy camper with Seesmic Desktop running again!

ps…I tried the Seesmic Desktop 2 Preview. It’s nice, but does have all the bells & whistles yet. On the plus side is didn’t need Adobe AIR.

It would have come in handy when I was at the Atlanta Gift Market trying to find a wifi signal to demo the social media tools with my iPod Touch. The larger screen would have also made it much easier to view what I was trying to show to the various vendors I was talking with.

Branding Expert Rob Frankel had the following comments about the iPad:

1. It’s likely aimed at the business market, where cloud computing
and SaaS technology is accessed by companies with large staffs.
Those staffs, like nurses, would carry an iPad rather than a
clipboard, updating a patient’s records on a central server.
Warehouses, shipping and just about any other highly-populated
business would benefit, as would teachers with lots of students.

2. No USB and no camera pretty much supports the business
deployment, since most businesses have security issues: they don’t
want photos or data leaked outside their domains.

3. In order to gain usage and acceptance, it would make sense for
Apple to launch the tool to the masses, including the capabilities of
download and e-book reading. This would integrate into the
employees’ lives outside of business.

4. Apple is probably looking to gain a foothold niche in business
the way it has dominated education for years. This would be perfect.

5. With the demise of printed publications, iPad may be the bridge
that brings Rupert Murdoch’s dreams into reality, by essentially
forcing everyone to buy some kind of device in order to read the
morning paper or magazine.

Bottom line: A nurse grabs her iPad and jumps on the train to work,
reading her paper or listening to downloaded podcasts/tunes. She
gets off the train, walks into the hospital, logs on to the central
system and begins her rounds, checking on patients whose records are
constantly updated in real time.

That’s pretty much the way I see it from here. That’s also why I
don’t think the mass consumers are going to want an iPad for a while.
Version 1.0 isn’t really for them.

I might have issues with the touch screen keyboard and the while the docking kit looks nice, it might be cludgy to carry around while traveling. I’m sure that will generate a lot of carrying case business.

Only time will tell. I don’t plan on being an early adopter of the iPad, unless of course Apple wants to give me one to test and review online for them

I intently listened to the problems he was up against with Facebook, Twitter and other “Social” online applications. He talked about how it cut into productivity with all the games and such. Not only was he having to deal with the deluge of email related spam, now he was having to handle company resources being eaten up by all the bandwidth to the Social Media sites.

Then he said something that reminded me of the AOL Chatroom days – “people say things on Facebook and Twitter that they won’t say to your face.” It’s beyond the old, now updated, joke “What happens in Vegas winds up on YouTube.” Comments made in cyberspace can be far worse than accidentally hitting Send All on something you probably shouldn’t have been forwarding in the first place.

In Tamar Weinberg post The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook she has some great common decency tips:

“Publicizing a private conversation on a wall post. In case it isn’t obvious, Facebook wall posts are completely public to all your friends (unless you tweak your privacy settings). Private matters should be handled privately: via email or even in Facebook private messages.”

Read more: http://www.techipedia.com/2008/social-media-etiquette-handbook/

Forbes.com asks the question Are You Practicing Proper Social Networking Etiquette? It touches upon the conversation I was have with my friend:

“where managers have limited or banned Facebook for being a distraction and monitor employees’ personal pages for images or comments that might reflect poorly on the business.”

Chris Brogan addresses the Facebook games that I so dislike in his 2007 blog post Considering Social Network Etiquette

Don’t play along, if you don’t want. It sends the message of how you want to use the app. Don’t feel that this is a ‘when in Rome’ situation. Use the networking tool the way you want to use it.

As users of Social Media, we have to remember that we are putting ourselves “out there”. It is something that even I have to remind myself, to “practice what I preach.”

Although the Seesmic Desktop had been suggested to me just a little while back, I was hesitant to download yet another application for Twitter. I needed an app that can handle my multiple Twitter accounts. Twhirl seemed to be the answer for me, but I really liked how TweetDeck is laid out. Unfortunately, TweetDeck can’t handle my multiple personalities.

So today, I decided to give Seesmic Desktop a run. I’m not trying to push any limits with it yet, I want to get comfortable with it first. So far I have 5 accounts set up. I like how I can drag each account into the desktop window. But what really caught my eye was how it “knew” which personality I was sharing from. I have on occasion, sent out a political tweet into my business user name. Makes me wonder if deleting a tweet really works. My next favorite feature is the “Home” panel. All of my account tweets go into this panel, sort of a running total.

Decided to watch the Preview after using the app for most of the day. It pretty much says everything I’ve just covered.

Seesmic Desktop

We got in yesterday, greeted by beautiful mild San Diego weather. The day started at 3AM our time. We left the house by around 3:30AM and headed to our “pick up point” to have a friend take us to the airport. I have a lot of negative things I could say about the baggage check in process, but I’ll let it go. Security was fun, I’m always prepared to pull the laptop out, put it one bin, take my shoes off and put them in another bin but I got extra special treatment this time. I decided I would dress for the plane. I’m always cold when I fly, so I wore a nice big warm sweatshirt pullover. Since I didn’t “have a t-shirt underneath”, I got patted down. It was very professional and I took a very light hearted approach to it.
The flights them self were uneventful. We have come to the conclusion that my flight related migraines are due to the altitude and pressure changes. It probably didn’t help that our breakfast consisted of nutra-grain bars that we brought along. Those were consumed by 7AM our time. No real food was served on either flight. I nibbled on the bowl of cheerios, but Jeff passed on them. Couple that with the dehydration that comes with air travel that probably contributed to the perfect storm for my migraine.

First thing I did when we landed was to call our kitty sitter to let her know we made it safely. We made it to pick up our rental car, seems they overbooked themselves and didn’t have the type car we reserved. As we stand next to a Chrysler Sebring convertible, the agent says “How about this?” Well, duh.

We made our way to the hotel, got checked in and turned right around to go find food. We had been pretty much running on empty for hours. After finding food we both needed to crash. After Jeff caught a few hours of sleep we ventured out for dinner. Old Town parking was a mess due it being Ash Wednesday, so we plugged In-and-Out Burgers into Nuvi and found our way there. The one we found was packed, the drive up was backed up around the block and it was standing room only inside. We stuck it out and had some pretty good burgers. The fries were fresh cut – we actually heard the guy working the fry cutting machine.

Now to plan out today’s adventures – I hear there is a Miva Merchant Conference mixer that starts at 6PM tonight. Time to get the camera out and ready.