Tuesday, September 28, 2004
I had the pleasure of meeting Jeffrey Richter of Wintellect today during his full day talk on .NET Framework internals. He talked on topics such as threading, asynchronous programming model, app domain, reflection, and key differences between C# and VB.NET. His presentation style was entertaining, and I was amazed at his depth of knowledge around the .NET Framework. I definitely learned more than a thing or two from Jeffrey.
I ended my day with the monthly ICCA meeting featuring Liz Lynch as tonight's speaker. Liz is a business management consultant and the author of 102 Secrets to Smarter Networking. She presented her approach for smarter networking, which is based on concepts of preparing, connecting, and strengthening. Her advice was invaluable and will help me improve my networking skills.
It's been a great day of learning. However, I'm exhausted and ready for bed.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
I encounter a rather strange problem today. I have a set of HTML files stored locally on my machine. I can view each of the web pages in Fire Fox but not in IE. Every time I attempted to open the HTML in IE, IE would report that the file was missing even though I knew it was on the hard drive. I tried opening the file using the menu item File|Open from IE but it reported the same error message. Finally I decided to load the HTML file into Visual Studio.NET. To my surprise the file would not load and VS.NET would not report an error message. If I attempted to load the file a second time in VS.NET, the IDE would simply lock forcing me to kill the process.
After some detective work, I discovered the source of the problem. Seems that each HTML file I attempted to open had a comment line near the top of the file that looked like this: <!-- saved from url=(0033) -->. Apparently this is special information that Microsoft products such as IE and VS.NET look for. I'm not sure how the information is used but I do know that neither tool reported meaningful messages regarding the commented line in the HTML file.
To resolve the problem, I removed the saved from url lines from each HTML file. IE and VS.NET are now happy as can be with regard to viewing these files.
Here is a list of contact management tools that provide integration with Outlook. Business Contact Manager from Microsoft is working for me but others may be interested in other options.
posted by Kirby Turner | September 23 10:31 AM | comments (0)Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Users of Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 should be careful when deleting accounts. All business contacts linked to the account will be deleted when you delete the account. And there is no warning message when deleting an account. Simply highlight the account and press the delete key and your account and linked contacts are gone.
From the menu bar, you can go to Business Tools | Others | Delete Items to see the delete account. However the deleted contacts will not appear in the list. The Delete Items feature seems like a nice idea but not really a useful. Besides, there is no "undelete" feature.
I highly recommend making a backup of your data prior to deleting any information in Business Contact Manager. To make a backup go to File | Business Database | Backup on the Outlook menu bar and follow the instructions for making a local backup.
Also, if you need to delete an account but want to keep the contacts, unlink the contacts from the account prior to deleting the account. To unlink a contact, you must go to the business contact detail screen, click the "..." button for the account name, and click the "Clear Selection" button in the pop-up window.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Welcome Brian Harp of Class IV Solutions to the blogsphere.
posted by Kirby Turner | September 21 03:55 PM | comments (0)Eric of Delta PointSolutions recently turned me on to a new add-on for Outlook 2003 called Business Contact Manager. I had recently migrated all my contact, calendar, and e-mail to software other than Outlook so I have the unfortunate joy of migrating everything back to Outlook. But Business Contact Manager makes the move back worth while.
A full fledge CRM solution is overkill for my organization White Peak Software making Business Contact Manager ideal for me. It allows you to manage business contacts, accounts, which are tied back to business contacts, and opportunities. BCM gives you the ability to link e-mail messages, appointments, phone calls, and more to contacts, accounts, and opportunities making it much easier to find information. And the auto link feature for e-mails is perfect for managing the countless e-mails that flow between me and my business contacts and accounts.
The add-on is very easy to learn and those already familiar with Outlook 2003 will be up to speed in minutes. It includes reporting capabilities, and helps small business owners manage opportunities. The opportunities management is one of my favorite features of BCM. I can track the progress, cost, sales stage and more.
If you are a small business owner using Outlook 2003 and CRM are overkill for you, I suggest you check out Business Contact Manager. It's definitely worth the pain of migrating my information back into Outlook.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
I'll be in St Louis for the next few days. Send me an e-mail or give me a ring if you are interested in meeting up for happy hour on Friday.
posted by Kirby Turner | September 15 11:02 AM | comments (0)Saturday, September 04, 2004
Attention @thecave e-mail users. The default for spam filtering is as follows:
- Messages with LOW spam probability will remain in your Inbox with the subject prefix "SPAM-LOW:".
- Messages with MEDIUM and HIGH spam probability will be moved to the Junk E-mail folder.
You can override this by going to Settings|My Spam Filtering.
This notice is for all @thecave.com e-mail users who use the web interface. SmarterMail 2.0 was installed last night. It offers dramatic changes over the previous version include:
- Completely redesigned interface
- More logical organization and structure
- Foreign language support for the interface and spell check dictionaries
- HTML creation of messages
- Improved Help documentation
- More robust spam detection (including Bayesian filtering)
- Improved Content Filtering
- Much more
Two things you will want to check after the conversion are your spam and content filters. The content filters should not be affected, but Spam options will default to the new SmarterMail 2.0 settings. If you want to utilize custom settings versus these default spam settings then you will want to go into the spam filtering configuration and make any changes you feel are necessary. When checking your spam settings, pay particular attention to the use of the Bayesian filtering option as this is what you use to "teach" the mail server what you consider to be spam.
I think you will find this laest version is far better than the previous version. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions regarding SmarterMail 2.0. posted by Kirby Turner | September 4 09:46 AM | comments (0)
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Seems that there is something in the water down in Memphis because my family has recently gone baby crazy. Congratulations to John and Lisa for the arrival of Elizabeth Marie. Congratulations to Bill and Melissa for the arrival of Matthew Cole. Congratulations to Michael and Kimberly for the arrival of Gracen Brooke, and sorry for the misspelling. I didn't receive an official announcement e-mail with the correct name spelling. I'm not even sure I know the name of Rip's offspring.
And for the really big announcement, congratulations to Tommy and Renay (my little sis). The two are expecting a new homo sapiens arrival of their own. It will be interesting to see how the baby blends in with the personal zoo they have. Will the baby sleep in the same room as the frogs, snakes, rats, bats, and giraffes? Will he or she crawl around with the 12 dogs and 18 cats? Seriously, Melanie and I are both very excited for you guys.
And congratulations to all, and to all a good night.
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
For CEOs, offshoring pays - News - ZDNet: "Chief executive officers at the companies shipping the most U.S. jobs overseas seem to be pocketing some of the savings, according to a new report."
posted by Kirby Turner | September 1 08:49 AM | comments (0)