Rix Bits

Today I had a doctor's appointment. When I walked in, the standard ritual began. Fill this out, give me your insurance card, sign here, etc.

I started thinking about this process - in 2008, these doctor's offices are still doing the same things they did when I had doctor's visits in the 90's and even the 80's:

• new patients have to fill out forms of the same standard name/address/etc information - more paper
• they use a big photocopier to scan my little insurance card - more paper
• i assume someone later types all this into an antiquated medical document system

Is this a "crisis" of information management? The quantity and rate of data that we want to store and manage in the world is growing every day - why isn't everyone embracing new content management systems that maximize the use of that data??

This I must ponder....

Okay, anyone that knows me knows that it takes a lot to get a Mac compliment out of me. :) But I must admit, Mac made a small victory with me today with a little feature it has that apparently Windows doesn't.

Actually, the victory comes in using Mac's built-in email viewer vs. Microsoft Outlook. The other day my friend sent me about 10 emails. Each email had 1 photo attachment.

In both Mac and Outlook I had a way to preview the image w/o actually have to double click the file and open it in some other program. Outlook, however, required 1 click for the Preview, Mac didn't require any.

But that's not the victory yet. What I realized is that I wanted to save all 10 images into a folder on my hard drive. What's the easiest way to do this? What I would assume is that I can just highlight all the emails, and save "Save All Attachments".

In Mac, that's exactly what I was able to do.

Apparently Outlook couldn't fathom that such a scenario would ever occur. :) Outlook assumes I'd ever only want to Save All on a per-email basis - not across multiple emails.

So, for once I had a pleasing Mac experience while trying to do some practical work. Who would've thunk it... :)

How do you go about storing your emails?

In the past, I've always used PST files from Outlook. Every year or so, I spit out a huge honking 1 Gig PST file that represents all the emails from the previous year. Store it somewhere nice, do a big, time-consuming Import later if I ever feel I need it again.

Okay, that's getting old. What I really want is to be able to access 60 years worth of emails right at my fingertips without having to do any importing/exporting, and w/o having a huge data file in Outlook that affects performance.

Two options I'm looking at right now - both are "desktop search engines": Vista and Copernic.

Copernic will index and search emails just fine. It pretty much does what I want except for one thing: it wants me to keep those emails in Outlook in order for it to index them. I don't want that. I know that Outlook isn't going to be happy with me keeping tens of thousands of emails in its data file.

What about Vista's search engine? Turns out that yes, Vista will index my emails within normal file folders. Great! So now, instead of PST exports, I can just copy the raw emails to file folders.

The caveat - it doesn't seem to be working right:

In the corporate enterprise, content management issues are no surprise. How do we as an organization manage, store, search & retrieve the huge amount of data that makes up our business? Emails, documents, images, etc.

There are certainly plenty of fancy tools and options at our disposal for helping with this process. I myself and currently involved in the implentation of MOSS 2007 at my job, which seems to be one of the more popular ECM solutions right now.

But the interesting thing for me now is that, after 15+ years of being a power user of my computer and related technologies - as well as being a pack rat who can't throw away his digital artifacts - I realize I'm now facing the same issues that many large organizations face:

• What do I do with 8 years worth of personal emails? What's the best way to archive emails 8 years ago in such a way that I can still find it easily if needed?
• How do I store/search/retrieve old documents?
• How do I search thru my e-books for specific information?
• What's the best way to organize terabytes of data spread across 8 different hard drives that I've accumulated over the years?
• How do I categorize physical backup media? Data that I've burned to CD/DVD for backup - how can I find it now that it's sitting on the shelf?
• What kind of distaster recovery processes should I have in place? ie, how do I keep from losing gigabytes worth of precious digital family photos? Do I trust my hard drives? Or do I trust physical media like DVDs as backups? Will any of these technologies last as long as my grandmothers old picture scrapbook? - will I be able to show my grandkids my childhood pictures via DVD???

I'm gonna explore these issues over the coming months, and try to document my findings. I mean, if big business can find a way to manage its content, why can't I? :- )

See, what did I tell you? Vista ain't so bad after all. :-)

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sPv8PPl7ANU

Well, there certainly are a whoooole lot of tweaks and fixes included in the latest Leopard OS update. I even see a few STABILITY fixes in there.

Now that I'm a Mac owner, I'm privy to these updates and what-not. Prior to, I never would have known that Mac's required software updates. In fact, it seems like everytime I turn on this Mini in the couple of months that I've had it, seems like I always see that little Update icon bouncing around. When I go see what the big to-do is, I see a list of some hefty-sized updates it wants me to download.

Hmmm - they're certainly not putting THAT little factoid in the commercials... :- )

(originally posted 2/12/08)

Got a hands-on introduction to the Air laptop today. It felt a lot more sturdy than I thought it would be for its size. Also seemed like it was handling heat dissipation pretty well. If it wasn't for the outrageous price it might make for a pretty good compliment to a moofing lifestyle.

--sent from mobile phone--

(originally posted 2/12/08)

I read an interesting article talking about the upcoming service pack for Vista and XP. Some of the folks commenting on the article started the standard debate among Windows OS users about how XP is better than Vista (aka "Vista sucks").

I actually upgraded to Vista on my main machine a few months ago. I did it for a few reasons. One, I was doing my personal bi-annual "build myown monster machine" routine, and so I figured I might as well put the latest and greatest on this new machine, especially since I knew my hardware was beefy enough to handle it. Also, I know that Vista will ultimately become the OS of choice, despite what the critics say, and I made the decision that I was ready to deal with the standard headaches of the early-adopter until Vista got nice & stable & popular.

Anyway, I thought some of the comments in the article were both quite ignorant and quite eloquent. Check it out:

• "if XP can perform 5% better than Vista...it means Vista is crap..."
  - I would say it a different way - "Vista has a ton of new features, has a fully-overhauled and visually pleasing graphic interface, and with all that it only performs 5% slower than XP..."
  
• "XP can perform better on older computers and Vista requires some pretty heavy hardware to be useful..."
  - I think it's funny how people still want to be able to use their grandmother's hand-me-down computer for the next 20 years, and if something new comes out that doesn't work well with their hamster-driven machine, they have a problem. Nevertheless, as someone pointed out, if you actually go price a new machine these days, you'll see that you can buy a new machine that is fully Vista-capable, plus some extra memory, for as little as $400 if you shop right. If your money is too funny for that expense right now, then sure, stick with your Hyundai without making fun of our Escalade.
  
• "Notice how few folks are around saying that XP's an abortion and Microsoft should have stopped with Windows 98? The trend is already starting to turn around in exactly that way for Vista versus XP..."
  - Amen, brother.

It's true that we as consumers basically tell folks like Microsoft, thru our behavior, that we want NEW NEW NEW and we want it NOW NOW NOW. So when they speed-push the new stuff to market, it's funny how we then complain when a few bugs got thru in that hurried process. Oh well, I guess we'll all have to wait and see how this new generation of OS's turns out. Tho I have a suspicion that I already know..... ;- )

(originally posted 2/1/08)

I went to a microsoft event tonite (yes, that's how I spend my evenings) and won this tshirt in the door prize giveaway. Had to take a picture to capture the unique packaging - figured that posting it here was the best way to document it. :) in case you're wondering that symbol is for Visual Studio, a Microsoft product.

--sent from mobile phone--

(originally posted 1/24/08)

I think I've found a good analogy that describes my experience thus far with the Mac:


Let's say this remote is my Mac. Obviously, very simple. Some might say even stylish in it's simplicity. This remote probably has about 10 features, and each one of those features it probably does flawlessly. Everything's laid out intuitively and you never have to worry about getting lost. You don't have to worry about it accidentally turning on/off any of your other devices, because it only works specifically with the TV that it came with. It's not a universal remote - you can't put codes in it to operate your other entertainment systems. And not much thought is required about "how" to use it - you use it the way it's designed. If you had some other ideas about how a remote should work, you should forget them.

Now, in my house, I own a universal remote called the MX-500. It's a fully-programmable universal remote. You can map actions to the hardware buttons. You can program macros commands (I have a macro that turns on/off the tv, cable, audio receiver, and DVD with one button. I have macros that change the tv and audio receiver configurations for, say, DVD-viewing vs. VCR-viewing, etc.) The buttons illuminate. The remote can "clone" another remote by pointing the IR sensors together. It can even be programmed to remote control light dimmers should I be adventurous enough to install them.


Nevertheless, as a result of all these features, I will admit that this remote is not very "friendly" to the casual user, including my wife. (over the years, she has grown to live with it and learn just enough of its features to get by) You would not be able to just look at this remote and figure out how to use it the way I do. (You wouldn't know to press "Main", then hold down one of the panel buttons to run a macro). And if you pressed the wrong sequences of buttons, you might find yourself stuck in some state that you would not easily be able to recover from, thus making the remote useless [for you] until I came over and helped you out.


But - and ay, here's the rub - I wouldn't trade this 1 remote for any of the 6 stylish and simple remotes that it replaced in my house. I gladly give up simplicity and even stability for the God-like power to control and interface with any and everything, and to do things with this remote that perhaps the manufacturer hadn't even thought about. Many times, I do experience limitations. It happens when my TV's manufacturer, for instance, doesn't give my remote the proper access or code authorization to access all of it's features. So, every now and then there's some sublte, hidden feature of my DVD, for example, that I can only access by getting up off the couch and doing by hand, or (heaven forbid) grabbing that DVD player's remote to access the feature.


But do I fault my remote control for this? No, I give it a pat on the back for doing a 85% good job of interfacing and playing nicely with all these other components. My remote has made a decision to bravely enter and play in the world of other electronics. It has not required me to make my home on an island called Basic Remote - an island with one TV, and one set of rules, and one way of thinking.


Rather than being the ruler of that island, a small kingdom though tightly controlled, I'd rather rule the world. Yes, I may have only loose control: a few riots every now and then, a recession or two, a stock market crash maybe, a war here and there. But still - I rule. Ask your boy GW Bush - he'll tell you the same... :)

(originally posted 1/21/08)

I was reflecting on Apple's commercial where they were making fun of Vista for its new security feature, which asks for your permission everytime it wants to do something that could be potentially dangerous.

Well here I am on my MacMini, and lo and behold they have the same thing - every now and then when I try to do something, the Mac confirms that I want to do it. To do that, it asks for my user password (on Vista, you can just hit Continue). I found this very interesting.

Well, let me get back to troubleshooting my Mac printer installation - the very process that one of my friends went on and on about in terms of Mac-simplicity. Perhaps I'll blog later on the details of my printer woes, but the short story is that I installed from disk the drivers to a Mac-compatible Canon printer, but yet now I find it hard to find anything related to the printer driver i just installed. Perhaps the Mac is hiding the details of the installation from me in an attempt to "keep things simple". Yeah, that's working out real well...

(originally posted 1/20/08)

I just learned a new word that describes my lifestyle pretty well - moofing. Mobile out of office. Describes 'where you are/ what you're doing when you're not at your desk or office but yet fully contactable and able to work as normal'. If you arm me with my trusty tablet pc and my pocket pc cell phone (which doubles as a wireless modem), then a moofer is what I become!

Unfortunately my mac mini has yet to prove itself as an ally in my moofistic lifestyle. Being that it is morally opposed to my windows mobile device, and thus refuses to sync nicely with my calendar items, puts yet another barrier between it and my coveted primary workstation area. :)

--sent from mobile phone--

(originally posted 1/4/08)

So, I hooked up with some of my Mac buddies - two in Cali, one in Ohio - and got a 4-person video chat going. As you can see from the snapshot, it's got a pretty impressive interface. What was also impressive was the file/photo sharing. I was able to stream a Billy Ocean music video ("Caribbean Queen", of course) and an Al Green mp3 to the other 3 people, pretty seamlessly. Nice.

So, I'm like just a couple weeks into my Mac ownership, and already i'm using the 'task manager' to kill rogue processes? In this case, one of the disc mounting processes was running in the background and keeping me from ejecting [another] disc. Hmmm...seems like i'm using all the same troubleshooting skills I learned in the Windows world. I didn't think I was gonna need those bag of tricks in Steve's world. :)

I also tried to do a screenshot of my error message using the Grab service. Thought I could capture the image and paste it into an email message. Does that sound too much like right? Wouldn't let me do it.

I also realized that I never liked the menu bar for the apps always being context-sensitive and sitting at the very top of my screen. "Attention managment" is important to me - seems inconvenient to have to take my eyes all the way up to the top of the screen to do something with a window I'm using near the bottom of my screen. And that's if the menu updates to the new context fast enough, and is not still showing the menu for the last window I clicked on. (hmm, maybe that's a Mini thing)

To top it all off, I love the message Mac gave me about my problem from their Help files:

"If this happens, WAIT A FEW MOMENTS and try again..."

Who is this message written for? Are there computer users out there in 2008 that actually DON'T wait a few moments prior to being frustrated enough to check the Help files??? And apparently, in this case a 'moment' was like 10 minutes before I started having to search for a process to kill.

So far, I feel right at home in my Mac world - my woes thus far are very familiar..... ;- )

(originally posted 1/1/08)

Step 1 for my new blog is to migrate my technical posts to this blog from an older blog I have (those posts weren't really appropriate there). Then the fun will begin...