All posts by Armand

Work

Categorytastic

So, like most people in service industry, the vast majority of my significant correspondance is managed via an email client. Like the majority of the world, this happens on Windows platform, using Microsoft Outlook. Again, like most of the waking world, this results in a tediously large inbox.

Most days, this isn’t too much of a problem. Whatever else can be said about my work ethic, I generally clear things quite quickly, and am so able to respond to / deal with enough of the mails such that I end the day with a manageable inbox – the ‘actioned’ emails get filed neatly somewhere for Google Desktop to retrieve when I need them. Recently – and at various points in my career – the inflow far exceeds the outflow, and today my inbox swelled to 140 emails – a lot of pending actions! I’m aware that there are clever ways to tie tasks to emails, set reminders and flags, and have the whole lot integrate nicely with your Outlook calendar. I’m also aware that the vast majority of people – myself included – just click snooze to get the annoying reminder bubbles out of the way and then get on with our days. Clearly this is not ideal… but there’s another useful feature in Outlook: categories.

Have never used these before, but, especially as I have clearly defined projects (multiple clients as a basis for demarcation, if nothing else) – it was pretty swift for me to set up categories, and indeed to categorise my inbox. This now doubles as a ‘to-do’ list, sparing me the tedium of managing a separate tasks list or, indeed, writing a new one from scratch on whatever scrap of paper is at hand. So am quite liking it; if anyone has any thoughts on improving the system, let me know… but it definitely helps me juggle the multi-tasking. Now, if I can combine this with reminder flags, I may never miss a deadline again… or not. We’ll see.

One thing I don’t quite understand: having 14,000 emails in your inbox and counting. That’s fine if you’re using Google Mail, but given how mediocre the native search functions in Outlook are…

Books

Priestess of the Mediocre

So, just finished reading Trudi Canavan’s new novel, Priestess of the White. It falls under the category for me of ‘research’ – attempting to make sure that as my thoughts on my novel develop, that I copy as little as possible, and innovate as much as possible. Of course, it’s also (and ok, yes, primarily) an excuse for me to get hold of as many of the fantasy and sci-fi novels I love as I can…

Trudi’s become reasonably famous here in the UK due to a relatively high profile marketing campaign for her ‘Black Magician’ trilogy; highly stylised black and white posters are all over the Underground. Having enjoyed that, I expected to move gracefully on to the new series, the ‘Age of the Wilds’ as its called. Sadly this was not to be…

I don’t know whether its because I read the excellent ‘Night’s Dawn Trilogy’ in between, but the writing just struck me as, well, not quite developed yet. Which is odd, as its her fourth novel… Maybe my standards have just temporarily risen.

That said, once I got into it, the book proved reasonably compelling. Always interesting to see sociological debates translated into a different universe. And Trudi, whilst probably not touching too seriously on the metaphysical nature of anything interesting, does touch on the psychological nature of faith. And – which is great from my perspective – the dangers inherent in a giving a religious institution power. Never really expected to be reading (even a tacit) argument for the separation of church and state in a fantasy novel.

Perhaps this truly is a book written for (young) teenagers; which might potentially explain the copiuous amounts of sex and the simplistic style. I guess its the disparity of content from the style that made me feel something was wrong… still, will see what happens. The plot sustained itself enough for me to read the next book… we’ll see if I’m compelled to the conclusion (it is as yet unpublished).

Technology

Division6 2.0

So, in exchange for dim sum lunch at the Phoenix Palace (and despite having to tolerate a few hours conversation with me), Chris came over and helped upgrade the site with a few of the tools I’ve been itching for, including:

    A new skin theme
    Expanding side-bar components
    A proper post structure so its immediately apparent where you should comment
    Tagging!!

Hope you like the new site; the skin is based on Copperleaf Plus, and I think is here to stay. Though the masthead may change; we’ll see…

Miscellany

A spiffing day at Ascot

DSC01463 Had a great day at the races with Matt, Marion and Louise, as guest of Cisco Systems. Cisco sponsored the track, and also did a considerable amount of work building the all-pervasive unified IP network to support Ascot’s communications infrastructure, wireless and otherwise.

Had only been horse racing once before, and not to Ascot, so didn’t quite know what to expect. The venue was awesomely impressive, a lot of glass, steel and concrete; modern, yet quietly tasteful. The drinks were priced for the extraordinarily wealthy (or perhaps just those who managed to place successful bets), and the races were fully entertaining. An excellent day, in short, even if I did come up £14 down on the races… clearly there’s a knack to it I haven’t quite picked up!

More photos on Flickr, which, thanks to a new plugin from Joe Tan, is now pseudo-hosted on Division6!

Miscellany

Pie in a can

Saw ‘Fray Bentos’ tins in a large, large Asda that Marion took us to today. It’s such a good concept, if probably unhealthy, and, erm, unhealthy. Ok, maybe not *that* good a concept, but I like it… ;)

(Thinking about it, this makes me sound like a FrayBentos Noob – I’m not, of course – have sampled the delights of their cans in the past, although not, I hasten to add, their meat puddings. Those are an as yet undiscovered country).