April 2007

As a follow-up to my post titled “Buying a New Computer“, I wanted to let every know {start sarcasm} what a great experience using Vista is {end sarcasm}.

As you may or may not know. I bought a new Dell Dimension E521 with Windows Vista Home Premium. I unpacked the box, connected the peripherals and turned the machine on and……..to keep a long story short, I bought a new monitor (the old one was ugly with Vista) and a new graphics card (Radeon 1300 w/ 512MB RAM) to get the most out of Vista.

This machine is primarily used by my wife and needs to work without any intervention by me. Needless to say…it didn’t ‘just work’. My wife is fairly computer savvy and can work around most issues, but Vista caused so many problems that she has given up hope for this machine.

I’ve had the machine for about a month now and it seems like every day some new error message pops up or something stops/starts working again. A few examples:

• Our printer (an HP Photosmart C5180 connected to our network) has had to be reinstalled 4 times…for some reason Vista (or the printer) loses touch with each other (even though both are using Static IP’s).
• iTunes won’t import 1/2 the music in the music library. It’s funny that in WinXP, iTunes loved these songs, but in Vista it hates them.
• If I want to install software, I can use the software that I ‘ve already purchased…oh wait…no actually…sometimes I can’t. I have to buy another version!!??
• McAfee firewall (installed as a trial by Dell) caused such a lag in network response as to make the system unusable. With McAfee firewall turned on, it took 30 seconds to Firefox and/or IE to load up and show a web page. Without McAfee it was virtually instantaneous.

Well…after the month of frustration, I have decided to start from scratch and install XP on this box (it seems I’m not the only one…check out Chris Pirillo’s ‘Windows Vista: I’m Breaking up with You‘ post). This morning I backed up the data, formatted the hard drive and installed Windows XP. Vista is no more….and the experience has left me much less happy with both Dell (because I couldn’t order the machine with XP) and Microsoft (will I ever buy another Microsoft product?).

I can’t imagine what someone without any real computer knowledge must think of Vista. If they had the problems that I did, I’m sure that they are very very unhappy.

[tags] Microsoft Vista, Buying a new Computer[/tags]

For as long as I can remember, I have been looking for a simple way to capture tasks for later review. I’ve looked at many different time management systems (Franklin Covey, David Allen’s Getting Things Done, etc) and have tried to implement them in my everyday life but none of these systems provide me with enough flexibility. It seems that there is too much structure involved in them to be useful to me (or perhaps I just get lazy!).

I’ve run across a few blog posts about using email to capture Tasks/To-do’s and after a little thought I realized that this might be something that would work better for me since I almost always have access to email (via computer and BlackBerry). I looked into using Firefox Extensions or Greasemonkey Scripts but those required that I be sitting at a computer with a firefox browser and I wanted something that was mobile and accessible anywhere.

So….after reading a few blogs about using Gmail to capture tasks, I started looking into…and found that this is the perfect solution for me. Gmail provides a function whereby a user can add a “+” sign and additional words (e.g., user+tasks@gmail.com) to their email address to differentiate the incoming email from regular email. In addition, Gmail provides filtering capabilities (Gmail’s Filters How To) to review incoming email and perform a function on it (i.e., add labels, archive it, etc).

Using the above Gmail features, I have setup a few filters to check incoming email for keywords such as ‘@Work’, “P:” (for personal tasks) and “@Blog” that are sent to my ’special’ gmail email (myusername+tasks@gmail.com). Gmail filters these emails and archives them with the appropriate labels. I then review these Tasks on a regular basis to review what I need to do.

Reviewing these tasks are easy…within Gmail, I just select the label I am interested in reviewing (@Work for example) and can easily see what tasks need to be accomplished. In addition, the use of Gmail Mobile and my BlackBerry allows me to get a great view of what I need to do while away from my computer.

To send a task to my gmail, I can use any email platform (computer, blackberry, internet, etc)…but being the geek that I am, I wrote a little program in Visual Basic that I run on my computer to quickly email tasks to myself….this little tool is a time saver as it keeps me from having to open an email program and compose an email. With this little program (which I call SendTask), which I leave running all the time in the system tray, I can just enter the subject and message and hit “Send” and my tasks are sent to my new “To Do” list. A Screenshot of the SendTask program is provided below…mainly just to show it off a bit

I also use Jott to send tasks to myself if I’m on the road and not able to send myself an email. I had been using a notepad to write down a note and then hopefully remember the note as a To-Do but now with Jott, I just call and leave a voice mail that gets transcribed and emailed to my Gmail account. Using the filters within Gmail, I can then filter the task into the appropriate Label and view it later when I am reviewing my tasks.

I’ve found that this system works well for me but would like to hear from others what they use (if anything).

For further reading, check out these blog posts:

• Email as a Task Manager
• Using Gmail to…
• Creating My ToDo List Through Jott And Gmail

[tags] Task Management, Jott, Gmail, To-Do [/tags]

If you see any quirks with this blog/website please let me know (via comments or email). I have recently setup this blog to update the blogging engine (Wordpress) using the Wordpress subversion system (SVN). When I setup the SVN connection I accidentally chose the developers trunk instead of the stable release trunk…therefore I am now running the latest and greatest pre-release version (currently at 2.2) instead of the stable version (2.1.3). So far everything seems OK, but I am curious to see if there are going to be any issues.

[tags] Wordpress, SVN [/tags]

It seems like an eternity since I’ve posted something here but its only been three weeks.

I’ve been busy getting settled into a new job…I’m now working for DigIT Technologies as Senior Project Manager responsible for managing the professional services functions for all DigIT Enterprise clients.

DigIT Technologies has developed a product to streamline and automate the functions of search, collection and preservation of Electronically stored data for litigation purposes.

The job is interesting and the people are top-notch and it looks like it will be a fun ride here. I’ll post more about the job and company as time permits but yoiu can read more about us at http://digittechnologies.com/

[tags] Project Management, Enterprise Search, Knowledge Management[/tags]