Travel curse
Posted on June 30, 2006
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Is it possible to be cursed by a travel demon?
Earlier this month I had my little adventure getting to Atlanta.
This week I had a meeting in Albany, New York. Not quite in the middle of the flood zone, but close. My train to Albany on Wednesday was canceled, and luckily I was able to get on the next one, getting to the hotel close to midnight (instead of 9 pm as I had planned). Last night, I got on the train home at 7 pm. The conductor announced that a tree was down on the tracks. Two hours later the train started moving. Switches were down along the line, so at points I could have pushed the train along faster. At 11:55 pm the train finally pulls into New York Penn Station (original scheduled arrival: 9:45 pm). At that hour NJ Transit trains run locals every hour, and I missed one by 5 minutes. I ended up getting a 12:42 am train home…walking in the door at 2:20 am. 7.5 hours of travel for what would have been a 4 hour drive on a good day.
::yawn::
It could have been much, much worse and I’m tired but not really complaining. I’m only around 10 miles from Trenton which suffered some bad flooding in parts. But here you’d never know there was a problem at all.
I (heart) my printer
Posted on June 28, 2006
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I’m getting ready to go do an exhibit in New York, and my HP DeskJet 995c is sitting here chugging away. 25 copies of this,
30 copies of that. Never a jam, never a bad print unless the ink is running low.
If you know me, you know I get bored with technology easily. For me to have a PDA for more than 2 years is unheard of. I’ve never had a computer for longer than 3 years.
I’ve had this printer since late 2001. Part of me wants it to die already to justify buying something else, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. What if the next printer doesn’t perform as well as this one has? What if it jams? I’ve had to fish paper out of this thing exactly twice in the last 5 years. I’ve printed invitations, labels, envelopes, duplexed documents…you name it. It even has a handy “cancel” button which instantly stops the job in progress before you waste 10 pages after sending the cancel
command from the computer. It’s starting to sound a little creaky in its old age, but still hasn’t let me down. Watch, this post will jinx it.
Good anti-smoking ad
Posted on June 28, 2006
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I think I’m going to share it with my kids as yet another reason not to start.
Office 2007 test drive
Posted on June 27, 2006
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Want to take the new Office 2007 for a spin to see what’s new but don’t want to actually install it? Microsoft has made Office 2007 available through a remote server login (Citrix client, I think). All you have to do is visit this page using IE 6.
When I first went to the site, it said that there was an 18 minute wait to get online, but I got in within 5 minutes.
First time I tried Outlook 2007, it started to load and then I got this (click to enlarge):
Okay…it’s a beta.
After that, it didn’t crash again. I really like the new calendar/task views. I also like Word’s format-on-the-fly menus and I didn’t find the ribbon difficult to navigate at all.
I can’t think of using the beta fulltime until I’m sure that it will sync with my PDA, but it’s a nice tease and a good way to learn your way around the applications before you have to worry about really using it.
Goodbye Lookout already
Posted on June 26, 2006
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Last month, I blogged that I went back to using Lookout for email search after X1 got so slow, buggy and unstable that I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I went to Lookout thinking of it as a temporary thing, until I found something I liked better. Maybe I have. It’s just as well, because a few days Lookout stopped working giving me an error message that the support forums said meant I needed to reindex everything.
Now I’m trying Copernic Desktop Search 2.0 beta…it’s free, and it pretty good.
Very fast, very pretty interface. Much, much faster than the 1.0 versions which is the main reason I didn’t like it before. It indexes everything, but it’s nice about only indexing when the system is idle so it doesn’t get in the way. And more importantly, when I want to search I don’t get annoying error messages instead of my results.
My only complaint is that it doesn’t index .PST files that aren’t loaded in Outlook the way X1 did, but I’m living without that for now.
One of these days I’ll find something I really like and will stick with it…
