My old company used Exchange Server. I used to use Outlook for mail.
My new company uses IMAP. So now I can use Thunderbird for mail (news and RSS).
No more wasted time puzzling over why filter rules suddenly stop working.
No more wasted time messing around with proprietary PST files.
Fast, flexible, powerful search capability.
All my Outlook data imported seamlessly.
Small change, massive improvement.
Up by around 13,000 due to an arbitrary inbound link from the WordPress tags page
Day 202. Technorati Rank: 173,971 (29 links from 16 sites)
However, this may be the last in the very popular 'From Zero' series for two reasons:
I may well now turn my attention to PubSub where my ranking is a much more satisfying 66,425 (InLinks 0, OutLinks 0, Entries 0) and I simply do not believe that hurtful person who told me PubSub only track a total of 66,426 blogs.
Some football fans change allegiance and cheer on other British clubs in Europe. I dont. Good bye, for another season, to the translator.
The Armstrongs is a BBC2 fly on the wall documentary about a small, family owned double glazing company in Coventry.
While this subject doesn't sound too inspiring, the program is absolutely hilarious. Last week, the husband and wife owners travelled to France in an attempt to diversify and increase dwindling sales.
Amazingly, they chose to translate their business proposition using Babelfish which may be adequate for children's homework but resulted in an unfortunate translation of 'conservatory' to 'music academy'. Consequently, the subtitles revealed that couple asked their French prospects:
'Are there a lot of music academies in France ?'
A van driver crashed into the bosses' expensive, prized Jaguar and then wisely chose to resign on the spot.
And we await with baited breath, the update on the young man who joined the company and immediately asked for time off to participate in the World Championships of Othello.
The following celebrities have graced my blog with the odd (in some cases, very odd) comment:
One of these is a joke.
Thanks to Jeff Hunter kindly updating the link on his blogroll, this blog has awoken from a period of slumber.
Day 201. Technorati Rank: 187,013 (28 links from 15 sites)
Don't ask me why 3 links and 3 sites have been added (instead of 1) since the last update. Who am I to question the inner workings of Technorati ?
However, /Message is currently positioned at an impressive 4,586 (514 links from 269 sites) and Stowe Boyd's beaming face and black beret continue to taunt me so the struggle must go on.
I spurned my first few invitations to linkedin.com as I already get plenty of spam email.
However, I finally succumbed but now I am very fearful that someone, someday will receive the following endorsement from me so please, please don't ever connect to my network.
"Simply the best technical consultant, called Norman, who lives in Inverness, I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Mr. N. Brightside has an awesome and exceptional knowledge of PowerPoint internals. Definitely a member of my A-Team. PS. Always stands his round too which is also important."
One of the candidates on BBC2s The Apprentice is a management consultant. He was very keen and virtually begged to be allowed to do the sales pitch on this week's show.
'Please, let me do the pitch. This is what I do. I am world class. There is no-one better.'
And then, in his sharp suit and with his short haircut, he opened his stilted, stuttering, unrehearsed, nerve-ridden pitch to various hard nosed businessmen (about a charity calendar for Great Ormond Street Hospital) with the immortal words.
'Now, please, forgive me if I get a little emotional...'
And all over Britain, the viewing audience cringed with the exception of management consultants everywhere, who exclaimed:
'Oh my God. This guy is simply appalling. I could do so much better. He's not even using Powerpoint. And another thing, just look at that tie.'
Id just like to say that my Palm Vx repaid me today for a small element of all the valuable time it has wasted in the past.
A recent change in circumstance meant some changes to my email environment.
Easy enough to resolve. Synchronise old environment with Palm. Switch into new environment. Reconfigure Outlook profile. Synchronise. Contacts, Tasks, Calendar and Notes all migrated seamlessly. Finished.
Well, I'd like to but I can't.
Lorelle is getting a little vexed about the the precise semantics and usage of tags and categories.
I must confess this isn't a subject that keeps me awake at night although I do agree that the WordPress category list tends to get a little verbose with all those pesky tags.
However, due to circumstances outside my control, I have just had to endure some pain and wasted time converting Outlook Tasks and Contacts to use a flat structure with 'Categories' (rather than my previous folder structure Contacts-Personal, Contacts-Work etc etc). Forgive me, Father. I do not know what I was thinking of.
This is OK but it does mean that when I actually finish something I now have to reassign the category to 'Done' instead of the incredibly satisfying feeling of dragging the Task and dropping it down onto the 'Done' folder.
Maybe Lorelle should tell Scoble that Microsoft Outlook is using the term 'Categories' when they really mean 'Tags'. Shock, horror.
I understand that an individual Contact may fall into several categories - 'Friend', 'Personal' and 'Work' but part of me still thinks in hierarchies.
When I create a directory, I normally have to think about the parent directory so my brain is forced to think 'hierarchy'. I simply don't have 4,563,231 files in the root directory with tags.
When I see an organization chart, I see a hierarchy.
So it is relatively easy to continue to operate in folders and hierarchy mode when organising emails (in fact I still do) and continue in that mindset when dealing with Tasks and Contacts in Outlook. Maybe Foldera will help to change this way of thinking.
Whenever I find myself being lured by the dark side and thinking in terms of hierarchies, directory structures, folders and parents, I remind myself of this excellent technical whitepaper. This document is all about Oracle performance I/O tuning on HP-UX.
Previously I might have saved this PDF to a folder named 'My Documents-Technical-Whitepapers-Oracle-Performance'.
This would pose a problem when I tried to find it again. Where did I put it ? Was it in 'Technical-Whitepapers-Oracle', 'Technical-Whitepapers-Performance', 'Technical-Whitepapers-Unix' or 'Technical-Whitepapers-HP' ? Or did I forget to file it ? Yes. I know all about Google Desktop.
Now I just add it to my BlinkList with the following tags 'Technical, Whitepaper, Oracle, Performance, Tuning, HP-UX, I/O'.
Consequently, I also have now seen the light and removed the two level hierarchy of WordPress categories on this site into a single flat structure.
Now, what categories/tags/labels shall I use for this wide ranging article: 'tagging', 'tags', 'GTD', 'Outlook', 'Oracle', 'WordPress', 'categories' 'meta-data' ? Decisions, decisions.
Oh forget it. This one is 'Uncategorized'