oBinge

As a Systems Analysts I have an enhancement I would like to see in Microsoft Outlook. But a little background first. I am forced to use Outlook by the companies I work for, and honestly I don’t think it is a bad product. I am able to set rules that will separate emails by project into project folders based on keywords, and I got into a habit of titling all of my emails with the project numbers. So I send out a mail that is titled, “P00001 – Today’s Status”, and all of the people who reply never change the title, so the rule sees the “P00001” and puts it into the correct folder. I also heavily use the calendar and the tasks function as well.

Where I think Outlook comes up a little short is in the voting button functionality. Most companies use some sort of process for the software development process, most likely CMM. If you have done any process, you are aware that documentation is a key aspect of this, and approval of that documentation even more so. So as part of this process, no matter what phase you are in, it is typical to create and review a document (a.k.a work product) and then send out for approval by the business, requirements, development and test teams.

This is where the voting buttons come into play. Our process now is to send out the approval request using an email, embedded with the document in question. We use the Message options to check off “Use voting buttons:” and enter in the very long as specified by process button names. For example, “Approve P00001 Application X requirement document V1.1”, and the same schema for reject. We also flag it for follow up since nearly everyone will forget to open the message and reply on time.

Ok, everything so far is good. The message is sent I am now waiting for responses. They come trickling back, and based on my rules they go into the project folder. But how do I get status on everyone’s response? For a while I did not know you can actually open up the sent mail and see status. Just like if you were to open up a meeting that you sent and hit the tracking tab to see who accepted. When you do this, you will get a nice table of who responded, their disposition and when they did it. All right Microsoft! You are starting to make my life easier. As an aside, if you move the original mail from the Sent folder, it will no longer keep track of any responses that are received after. This is annoying and it would be nice if they fixed that as well, but they do actually give you an option of where to put the message, I just keep forgetting to change the location.

I mentioned documentation before didn’t I? Well the next part of the process after you have harassed everyone into sending a response is to embed those responses in a template that says everyone approved and then place that document in the project control book (what ever version you might be using for that project, it might be Visual Source Safe or ClearCase, maybe just a folder on a shared LAN) so you can say, ”Look, the document is finished, everyone approved it and here is the proof!” if something comes up later to be contrary to what the document stated.

My problem is that I have to save each approved message as a .msg and then embed it in the template. First off for some reason in their own application, Microsoft chooses to default to .htm instead of message, so I have to change that option. I need to change the file name to somehow indicate whom the message was from. Then I need to pick a folder (one I typically created just for the approvals of this document), save the message in there, then go into Word, find the place where I am supposed to put the message. I insert Object, select create from file, navigate to where the message is, find the right person, check off the display as icon option then hit OK. Simple, but very tedious, and I have to do this for usually 20 people or more. I spend a lot of time doing a repetitive task so it is a big hassle. My request to them would be for them to have a nice export function where it would automatically embed the files in a Word or Excel document.

I do not think this is unreasonable and probably not that hard for them to implement. It would certainly play well for large corporations who use exchange as their primary mail service, a nice feature to allow for approvals of really any request that a corporate user might have the need to send and keep track of. I have sent this request in twice over the years, so far no luck.

I did suggest a process change to my companies process people once where we can just take a screen shot of that mails tracking page open. That got shot down, not really sure why. It might have something to do with not be able to get all of the replies in one shot, but you can just scroll again, take another screen shot and so on until all are there. But it seems like both companies like to keep some of my job tasks inefficient.

I am disturbed by this fact that the feds can search my laptop when I travel internationally and reenter the US. I have frequently brought my laptop with me so I can send pictures to friends or live blog (my Australia trip) while on vacation. I have been asked to turn the laptop on in the past to make sure it was working, and I complied, but I never was asked to show any data. On one hand I should not be bothered by this since I have nothing to hide, on the other hand I think it is violating my personal privacy. I might have data on there that I consider very private (maybe even proprietary if work info on board) that isn’t illegal but would be subject to search and being viewed by someone I don’t want to see it.

Federal agents at the border do not need any reason to search through travelers’ laptops, cell phones or digital cameras for evidence of crimes, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, extending the government’s power to look through belongings like suitcases at the border to electronics. - sourced from Wired

Chacon warned that people carrying laptops with proprietary business information should know that a government agent has the right to search their computers at the border. - sourced from Daily Breeze

The articles don’t say what method they agents will use, if it is a random search or something else. But they said your items can be confiscated and to use encryption of some sort to protect your data. I don’t know what I will do in the future, it is not like just bringing the cameras is an option since they can look at that data as well. One option seems to be clean out the hard drive before I go, take pictures and before I return transfer them all to the laptop, FTP to my server and then delete them from the laptop. Even in this case, I wonder how hard they would look into data recovery? I mean I could trash them and then try to recover when I get back home.

Dr. John Smith on another adventure to save the world from utter destruction. I wish someone would have saved me from reading this utter contrite novel. A friend gave me a bunch of books from the series, and I am having to force myself to read them. It is either to predictable on what is going to happen, the foreshadowing is like a freight train coming at you. I really don’t believe in the character of Dr. Smith, maybe I am forgetting some of his earlier training, but it just seems a little ludicrous on how easily he went from being an ordinary research scientist to a super spy. They are starting to fill in some of the back story to make you believe - but I am well past the point of not believing already.

Even if you accept the character, there are the supporting actors and the their amazing ability to happen to show up to help the doctor or be working on a case that crosses his… well it is just to convenient for me to believe. I do read novels that have these types of defects and seem to cruise through them quickly enough no worse for wear, maybe I didn’t learn much and they are not going down as fine literature, but they do the job. This book did not do that job for me.

Not sure why I even put the link to it in Amazon, perhaps just so you know the cover to avoid.

I guess I wasn’t paying attention that much, but the site was loading very slowly. So I started to look at the status bar and saw that calls were being made to unusual places. One was an IP address (66.249.85.69) and the other a .info URL. Both of these had been inserted into several posts, hidden away so that I could not see them on the normal view. What the calls were doing I have no idea. However, I did not put them there and they were slowing things down so they were removed. Hopefully they were not doing anything malicious, but you never know. They had probably been there for a while, hopefully with the newer version of Wordpress, things like this won’t be able to occur

New season of Deadliest Catch started on Discovery last night! Looks like the fleet isn’t off to a a good start. I was thinking about one of the greenhorns and what all of these fisherman go through… I just don’t think I could do what they do and survive the entire trip. Up for 30 hours straight working a tough job, amazing.

I realize that things for the most part are more expensive in the city. I also realize I haven’t been going into the city that much so am not up on the current pricing. However, I went in yesterday for the auto show and stopped at the Houlihan’s in Penn Station and was charged $14.50 for 2 bottles of Budweiser during happy hour. That’s happy hour! I wonder what the non-happy hour prices are? Compare that to a little later when at the Javits center I got 4 16oz bottles for $23. Seems much more reasonable compared to the first purchase. At $7.25 I am sure I can buy a six pack of Budweiser at a liquour store, maybe even find some suitcase deals to get 18 cans out of the deal. I paid for them, drank them and thought they were really good especially after the hour long train ride, but were they worth the price? No.

Now I have always loved the Classic Space and Classic Castle sets of the past, and whole-heartedly embraced the Star Wars collections, but I think this set includes one of my favorites LEGO pieces ever. That would be the truck from the Raiders of the Lost Ark. When I first saw it in the movie, I always wanted that truck. Sure I was 13 and wouldn’t have been able to drive it, and lets face it, it is not exactly practical for suburbia. But why let that stand in the way of dreams? Now finally LEGO as made my dream a reality - well sort of. I now own a version of that truck, even if it is a toy. I think they did a great job on it.

I was happy to see new episodes of Chuck last night, but disappointed in that they will be the last two for a while because of the writer’s strike. As usual, these episodes entertained me, the main point of amusement being the name for one of the bugs that was found at the Buy More where Chuck works. It was called a “GLG-20″. Right off I couldn’t help but think that this was paying homage to Spies Like Us. As this was the classification that Emmett Fitz-Hume and Austin Millbarge achieve after their famous test scene. Of course, they think it is an honor when they are really being used as decoys. It is little things like these in the shows that someone (I assume the writers?) sneak in that makes thing more enjoyable. Perhaps it is an inside joke, as I am sure only a few people notice things like this, it really depends on who has seen what. Then again, perhaps it was just a coincidence.

I was really excited to see the first two episodes of the Sarah Connor Chronicles since I first saw the advertisements a few months ago. I would have to say I was not disappointed by the first two episodes. Sure I see some problems, but those are mainly with the basic premise of accepting time travel. In the first movie the time travel device was destroyed after Reese came threw. Of course we know it was rebuilt since there were two other movies. Now in this TV series they tell us that not only do Terminators on both sides of the wart come threw, but human soldiers as well to help Sarah and John out, going back even further in time to 1963 to start assembling items that could be of help for the future war. The obvious question (at least to me) is why doesn’t Skynet just send a Terminator back even further in time and kill one of John Connor’s great-great grandparents? They can’t protect all of time, and why do to they need to kill John Connor himself?

The next stupid thing I saw was having John Connor have an alias of John Reese. Come’on. After the real name, wouldn’t that be the second name any self-respecting Terminator would look for? Anyway, I will choose to ignore those and just watch the series for the fun it is.

While watching the show, I fell right into it with no thoughts about what was going because I knew the back story. I guess they set it up a little, having seen at least the first 2 movies there is no need to pay much attention to that. Sarah and John are on the run, waiting for Judgment day, with Sarah teaching John everything he should know about running an Army. Terminators are chasing them, and another Terminator is sent to assist. This time in the form of a young girl. At first she is supposed to be just another girl in the same school as John, but quickly she is exposed as a Terminator. She is played by the excellent Summer Glau who you may or may not remember as River from Firefly/Serenity. They had a nice tie in to Terminator 2 when she utters the line, “Come with me if you want to live.” Maybe that is standard programming. I am not going to summarize the episodes just make some comments on them:

• When Sarah needs to get new ID documents, why would she bring the Terminator (Cameron I think they are going to name her) with her instead of leaving it to protect John?
• The Terminator on the bad side doesn’t recognize the Cameron model, so it was sent back either before this model was made or the model was made by the human side and hidden from the bad side.
• The bad Terminators supposedly don’t know what John Connor looks like, and until they do, they could walk past each other without realizing it. Why is that? They don’t have facial recognition software built in that they can compare the one they do know to all other males they see?
• I wonder what happened in the future between the Cameron Terminator and John Connor? Seems like she knows a lot more than a normal Terminator would, almost like they were friends. Perhaps more than friends? The Terminator could have been programmed to have a relationship with John, can Terminators have sex?
• Why would a Terminator need to eat a chip? To make it seem more human?
• My favorite character so far is the Cameron Terminator – for some reason I care more about her than I do about John Connor. Not sure that is a good thing for the longevity of the show.

For some reason I watched this movie, and this movie could be one of the worst if not the worst movies I have ever seen. I am surprised Luke Wilson had any part in this let alone being the lead role. The premise is that he was a soldier who was part of a sleep suspension project and wakes up 500 years later and the entire world is very dumb, he ends up as the world’s smartest person charged with fixing all of the problems. The problems are very stupid, i.e. no crops grow because they water it with sports drinks. Oddly enough I watched the entire thing, but I highly recommend everyone else avoid it.