mortals wear shoes
I’ve decided to start an Open Coffee Club in Saskatoon. You can read more about Open Coffee on their Ning site. We’ll be meeting at Broadway Roastery on Tuesday Feb 9th at 8pm. If you’re interested in chatting about startups, maybe as an entrepreneur, a developer, or just someone with an interest in the topic, feel free to come along and bring anyone else.
I shaved on November 2nd, so I’m a day behind 
It’s only somewhat mo-like at the moment, primarily because I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do with it.
I’ve been using iCal on Snow Leopard for about three months or so (I was on the pre-release program) as a replacement for Entourage. My company uses Microsoft Exchange for mail and calendar, and I thought it would be valuable to record my experiences with using Mail and iCal. I’d been using Entourage for both mail and calendar for over a year and had become somewhat frustrated by the unintuitive interface, so I was excited to be replacing it.
Setting up mail to work on Mail.app is very simple, assuming your Exchange server is correctly set up. Put in your e-mail address and password, and poof! it’s done. Calendaring on iCal set up must happen automatically as I don’t recall ever having to do anything there.
Mail has a somewhat frustrating keyboard shortcut for send (Cmd-Shift-D) compared to the Cmd-Enter of Entourage. That was my only real gripe, although I’ve been using Mail for long enough that this is really just a matter of retraining the fingers. Mail crashed and froze a couple of times importing all my e-mail from Exchange (I had about 20,000 messages, plus attachments) but eventually it got there. I can use the same security certificate to sign and encrypt e-mail as I did with Entourage, with no extra set up required, which was awesome. Typical mail use throughout the day is generally better, as the Mail app is more responsive and intuitive than Entourage, and integrates properly with all my other apps.
iCal however falls short in a lot of ways. Historically, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with iCal, primarily due to the months I spent writing SyncBridge, a failed app that was designed to fix a lot of the shortcomings of iCal. (Why did it fail? A buggy Apple API in Tiger (Sync Services, deprecated in Leopard) combined with Apple announcing their Calendar Server and me burning out trying to write the app while holding down a day job – I feel this historical context is important as I have no doubt it biases me). However, I was keen to give iCal the benefit of the doubt and I thought that surely anything would be better than Entourage.
The verdict? Well, it’s better in some ways and worse in others. Here’s the gripe list:
I cannot subscribe to any calendar other than my own. In organizations running Exchange, there are typically shared calendars that many users can read and write from – this is useful in things like event planning, team rota and so forth. I can’t access these at all from iCal.
iCal receives the click to highlight the window, and creates an event for me from that click, which I never intend – thus I waste time deleting the event.
All my events are the same colour. Yes, I can have multiple calendars and thus multiple colours, but as I said above I can only subscribe to my own calendar. Previously I would make things different colours so I could easily tell which meetings were regular recurrences that I’d booked versus stuff that my manager invited me to, versus stuff that someone not on my team invited me to, etc.
I can’t send any kind of message when I decline an event. This means I need to fire off an additional e-mail to say “Sorry, could you move this event forward an hour” or whatever. I also can’t accept or decline an event with sending a notification to the organizer (or the attendees when I’m the organizer). Not a big pain, until you discover that you also cannot cancel an edit. Yes, that’s right, if you edit an event and then decide that you don’t want to keep your changes – TOUGH LUCK! If you press Escape to close the editing window it asks you whether you want to send or go back to editing – no option to just throw away the edits! This was especially annoying when I made a change to meeting with 60 invitees that I didn’t need to send.
Also, I cannot update the meeting without also updating every attendee. This is annoying when I want to invite people to book the slot in their calendar, and then build up an agenda over time – I now need to keep the agenda separately, and fire an update just at the last minute.
Finally, forwarding an iCal invite requires a right-click. There is no menu option or context menu button or keyboard shortcut – you must right-click on the event and select “Mail Event”.
In summary then: Mail is an improvement on Entourage, iCal still needs a lot of work to come close to Entourage and Entourage is still short of Outlook. I know, I just said that a Microsoft app is a better than an Apple one. It’s true.
I’ve decided to grow some sideburns, and dress up as Wolverine at Hallowe’en. I figure it’ll probably take three months to get them full-on enough. And I get to buy a cool leather jacket
Update: I discovered after three days that I no longer like having facial hair. After shaving pretty much every day for the last 9 or 10 months I’ve become accustomed to it. Whodathunkit?
After a year of working at my current job, I have received 15,000 emails. This doesn’t include any automated ones (which I delete), spam, etc. I don’t feel like I get a lot of email, so I worked it out:
365 - (2*52) - 10 = 251 working days per annum
15000 mails / 251 days =~ 60 per day
(8 * 60) minutes per day / 60 emails = 1 every 8 minutes
I wonder if that’s a lot? That doesn’t count personal e-mail, which is in a separate system. Anyone else get lots more? I remember getting a lot more in previous jobs, but it might have been a perception thing.
Note: accidentally published this as a page instead of a post on my site. This is from December of last year.
I re-read Zapp again tonight. I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with that book over the years. I love the observations made in it, but I hate the mirror it holds up to my own faults as a manager.
If you’ve never read it, Zapp tells the story of supervisor Joe Mode and his employee Ralph Rosco, both of whom work for Normal Inc. making parts for normalators. Ralph invents a device which allows him and Joe to see into the 12th dimension, and thus able to see the feelings and energy in their department and the departments in the company.
Behind this somewhat cringeworthy fable are a bunch of lessons for empowering employees. Each time I read it, it is easy to see situations where I’ve Zapped (empowered) or Sapped (disempowered) a colleague or a team.
I gave away my last copy of that book in 2005. It’s nice to be in a situation where it’s beneficial again. I’ve come to the (maybe obvious) conclusion that it’s impossible to have a truly Agile organisation without empowerment. Maybe this is the real reason so many Agile projects fail.
Our kids woke up to find that the Easter Bunny had left a big maze of wool around the house that they had to follow in order to find their Easter treats. Once that had been unwound (one color for each kid), we sat down to breakfast (boiled eggs, omelet), then painted some hard-boiled eggs (still in their shells).
When those were dry we drove to Diefenbaker Park to roll them down the hill. Apparently, this is not a common practice in Canada as we were the only ones there. Still, we had fun Some even made it all the way to the bottom without smashing.
A few weeks ago, I ordered a side of beef. It came with many kilos of pork, chicken, sausage, fish, pasta, sauces, soup and various other bits and bobs. Half of this veritable mountain of food arrived today and has now completely filled our deep freeze (chest freezer) and our food storage in the basement. However, I now have the ability to feed 10 people at the drop of a hat and no more buying meat in any grocery store ever.
The quality of the meat _looks_ great, so I’m excited to try some over the weekend. I think we’ve got enough to last every day for at least the next 6-8 months.
Mmmm. Meat. *Homer-esque drooling*
Took me forever (well, five months) to do it, but I finally signed up for an iTunes account today. Now I’ll be able to put some apps on my iPhone (apart from ones that I wrote myself).
