Divermarv

“Foolproof systems don’t take into account the ingenuity of fools.” – Gene Brown.

“Morons. These people who live in my apartment complex are connected to my wireless. They must think they’re super-cool hackers by breaking into my completely unsecure network. Unfortunatly, the connection works both ways. Long story short, they now have loads of horse porn on their computer.” – Mootar from bash.org.

“You know you’re a geek when… You try to shoo a fly away from the monitor with your cursor. That just happened to me. It was scary.” – Juuso Heimonen.

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” – Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“I rigged my cellular to send a message to my PDA, which is online with my PC, to get it to activate the voicemail, which sends the message to the inbox of my email, which routes it to the PDA, which beams it back to the cellular. Then I realized my gadgets have a better social life than I do !” – Tom Ostad.

Well, here we are again. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or whatever. Me, I’m just an old man trying to keep up with the continually changing world. Working for a software company does make it a bit easier, but it’s all still just a tad foreign to me. Sort of like a language learned in adulthood, sure you can pretty damned fluent in it, but the nuances and intricacies, mostly societal of course, will kill you.

The gist of this post is semi-rhetorical, in that I’m trying to create my digital environment to be something flexible, simple, and as omnipresent as possible. I use MS Outlook for work email, primary calendar, and for my main contact repository. This calendar and contact repository is synced with my apple iPhone, and iPad via MobileMe. But my personal email is handled through hotmail via Live Mail Desktop (beta). So I’d like to come up with some scheme whereby I can use each of these tools, yet allow them to interconnect/interact so that I can have one consolidated calendar “view”, and one pool of contacts.This is my goal.

I have been experimenting with different tools and such to try to achieve this ultimate goal, but currently it’s about like the grand unification theory. The tools I use were chosen because of expediency (e.g. Outlook at work for scheduled meetings, and all other employees use Outlook), and for features. I like the junk mail tools of Live Mail Desktop, but they are crappy in Outlook. I did try to start using Google mail, but I just don’t like the interface. I know a lot of it is what I am used to, and I am willing to try new things to make things “more better”.

So if any friends, or web stumblers would like to make suggestions, feel free. But please note that if you just start bashing a certain company, read Microsoft, or try to proselytize me into the church of open source I will probably not approve your comment. That being said, I won’t just disapprove a comment because it disagrees with me, but I want constructive, not destructive comments.

As you were.