Notes from a Tool User

So many shiny smart phones - which one to pick?

For a whole bunch of reasons I've decided to buy a smart phone and pay the usurious rates for mobile use that the big carriers charge. I've discovered that there doesn't seem to be any good forum to discuss what options are open to Canadian's at the moment.

My needs are:

• Email (currently my domain is hosted google apps - in a pinch I could become an exchange user).
• Good (at least better than adequate) web browsing.
• Battery life - needs to last the day
• Good phone
• Calendaring support
• Keyboard - I expect write some emails but not it won't be my bread and butter
• Wifi support - where possible I want to save money and get better performance
• GPS is cute - but I usually have a very good idea of where I'm.

Presence on Globally Dispersed Team

My current development team is spread across the globe. As a result we're always trying to do a better job of simulating presence (tools so far IM, Google SpreadSheets). This week the team has asked to try VOIP. My question what headset do you use?

Don't use Network Attached Storage for backups - save your $$$

Last year I decide to fix the backup problem in our house. They happened so rarely they were almost useless. After some research I bought a Buffalo Link Station to attach to the network. Think of it as a harddrive with a network card – you plug it into the network, turn it on, install from software on your computers. Now you have a network harddrive. 

Mistake

 

Desktop Search Insanity

I like to be able to find my stuff quickly. I like to be able to do it without extraneous results. Unfortunately I need to be able to search three very disparate groups of data completely separately.

In order of frequency searched:

1. Email (only certain folders) and some folders under My Documents.
2. Various batches of code: my own, sample code, ....
3. Blog Posts (I use Attensa for Outlook - so blog entries look and behave like email).

Vonage - Customer Retention - End Game

After my previous encounter I was prepared for the worst. By comparison this almost went well. The story so far - after nearly two years we've decided we no longer need a second telephone line in our house. We've decided to cancel our Vonage VoIP line. In the first part of this saga I detailed the pain of trying to cancel outside of the regular business day.

Friday at lunch I called Vonage, following the previous script I identified myself and asked to cancel my subscription. The 1st level account rep. said I'm sorry sir I can't handle that, I will have to pass you over to an account rep. Ring, Ring......

Customer Retention Department - Vonage Customer Service Sucks

or Missing in Action - Vonage Customer Service

For the last two days I've been trying to cancel our Vonage service. Not because of quality or price issues. Just because we no longer needed a second line in our house. On Tuesday morning (June 12) I called Vonage to cancel. After twenty minutes and two dropped calls I finally reached their call centre over a very crackly line (do they run their call centre over VOIP?). The person I talked to apologised and said they're computers were down, would I please call back after lunch. I tried again in the mid afternoon. Things had improved it only took five minutes to answer my call (another crackle line). This person said the computers are still down - please call again tomorrow. Which brings to this evening's conversation (over a good line):

Time to Trash PowerPoint? No just be smarter in using it.

I've been doing a number of presentations in the past few months and so was very interested when I came across an newspaper article  saying:

"The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched."
                                                   — John Sweller 

Sweller's key point, far to often we repeat the words on the screen. So people read them and then ignore what we have to say. If we don't want to go as far Sweller suggests then use fewer words. Up until last week I thought I was doing pretty well on this front. My slides have tended to be a few key sentences - but now I realize that my audience could read my key points and so didn't really hear me. The litmus test a copy of my PowerPoint slides was useful without me.

Is Outlook 2007 slow to respond? Do you often get the "Not Responding" message?

On my wife’s brand new Dell Inspiron 6400 (Core 2 Duo 2 gigs RAM, 7200 RPM harddrive) – Outlook 2007 often slows/is blocked with the message “Outlook is Not Responding”. My wife is frustrated because her new computer appears no faster than the five year old AMD it replaced. As the house IT guy I’m frustrated.

Driver woes on Vista? Sonic Solutions DLA problem solved

Everytime my wife’s new Dell Inspirion 6400 boots she gets an alert from Vista saying: Sonic Solutions DLA driver blocked. I tried looking at the Dell support site nothing, nada, nil. Searching google for Sonic Solutions DLA turned up a thread on CNet: “Windows Vista: Driver Blocked Due to Compatibility Issues”. After some playing with CNet’s interface (its not well designed to quickly read threads of 50+ messages) I found a link to the Roxio website: “DLA driver blocked on Vista launch”. Hopefully this post will save others a few minutes (and maybe boost the google juice of the patch itself).

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Newsreaders for Windows

Every few months without fail someone (on the Win Tech Off Topic mailing list) asks about replacements for Outlook Express as a NewsReader (ie the nntp protocol. not RSS/Atom) at least once a month. Here is the list of options that I'm aware of:

1. Thunderbird (free; companion to Firefox)
2. Omea from JetBrains (free).
3. Agent from Forte ($29; also has free version)
4. Xnews (free)
5. Newsgator has an NNTP plugin (but no posting support)
6. 40tude (free for personal use; shareware for commercial)
7. NewsRover ($29.95)

Try DMOZ for more.

I currently use Thunderbird – which for my very limited needs reading/posting the eclipse mailing lists is quite sufficient.

I've not tried any of these and have no idea if they even work. Finally, I've heard warnings about  the quality (both the application and the support) of "MAPILab's NNTP for Outlook".

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