Dear Friends,
I am writing this on Thursday the 11th, Veterans Day, and I want to give a shout out to all Veterans to thank you for your sacrifice and service. We will always remember.
With the change to Standard time it has been a lot easier to wake up in the morning since it is light out, but it is a sure sign that winter is upon us (notwithstanding the snow at my house) as we move towards the shortest day of the year. Many times during the summer, Art sets his iChat status as “the days are getting shorter and I hope it snows soon”. I don’t think I can fire him for that, but I’m going to counter with a “days are getting longer” message in a few weeks.
Grace went to get some straw to cover our strawberry patch in the garden and put it to sleep. Of course, the next morning I look out my window in the bedroom and there is a very plump deer pawing at the ground and munching on our dormant plants. I let Hammerhead outside to bark at the deer but he didn’t even see/smell her, so the deer finished her breakfast and strolled into the woods. I think that I’ll have to build a fence around the garden this spring since the deer pretty much ate our garden and we seem to be on the feeding trail now.
I really tried, I really did. I did not make it the entire week with the new Outlook mail client in MS Office ’11. I think that for those who are very familiar with Outlook on other platforms, perhaps this is a great boon to have Outlook for the Mac, but I found it to be a drag on my productivity. Outlook would crash a couple times a day and while it was very quick to re-load, that was an annoyance. Perhaps the clincher was the way that Outlook handles photos. I try to write a daily report to the entire Small Dog team. I usually start out with a picture from my iPhoto library and then talk about our business. Maybe it is just me, but I could not find a way to re-size a photo in Outlook. With Apple Mail, I can just drag a photo to an email message and then choose the size from the drop down box. With Outlook, the only way that I can have a correctly-sized photo is to export it from iPhoto at the appropriate size. While I am talking about iPhoto a bit—why is it that Apple does not support mail groups in the email shortcut in iPhoto?!
There were definitely some features of Outlook that I liked, including tagging messages with categories based upon my Address Book and the big collapsible headers in the inbox that separates messages by days. However, it was also missing some commands from Apple Mail that I definitely would miss. Two of those are “redirect” and “resend”—commands that I use many times each day. I have an enormous amount of email coming into my inbox, usually amounting to hundreds of emails even after I have eliminated the junk and spam. Many times these are messages that I want someone else to handle for customers or vendors (or I would be just doing email all day) so the redirect command is my favorite. I can redirect to a sales person who, when responding to the message, can just hit “reply” and be assured that the message goes to the right person. Resend is not used as much, but I use it if I have forgotten to include someone on a thread or if I have mistakenly sent the message to the home address instead of the business address.
There is an update to MS Office ’11 that might address the crashing that I experienced in Outlook and as I say, I think that if you are an Outlook experienced emailer you may find that Outlook fits your needs, but for this Apple fanboy, Apple Mail is still my email client.
Apple announced this week that they have stopped making the Xserve. I completely understand that it is difficult to maintain a product line that does not seem to have sufficient sales, but on the other hand, the Xserve was a rack-mounted powerhouse that gave us entry into many corporate clients. I just have to walk over to our own server room to see a few racks of Xserves powering our operations. Ben has more on this below—we’ll miss ya, Xserve!