Tangled up in Purple » Outlook

I Heard it on the Grapevine

nix — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 07:39:10 +0000

I broke my own rules. A few days ago I signed up to Plaxo in order to synchronise my Outlook calendar with my Google calendar .

My end goal was to be able to make my work calendar easy for others to see with the least amount of work on my part. OggSync was in the running as the sync app of choice but the Scot in me was balking at the subscription for something that should, in my mind, be free.

So, against my better judgement I signed up for the service. I logged on and opted for them not to look at all of my other online accounts. I said no to searching this, that and the other. I synchronised my calendar and saw my birthday in both Outlook and GCal and sighed with happiness. Naive, uninformed happiness as it happens.

If this was a simple programme I would then write ‘GOTO Line 1′. But this is not a C64 programme in the virtual world of 19-something, this is my world in ~~2007~~ 2008. I broke my own rules because I didn’t want to pay $29.95 for a year of seamless (I’ve tested it) synchronisation. My rules said that I would never use Plaxo because of their track record of playing fast and loose with other people’s data.

So, catching up with all of my blog feeds after a heavy few days of Asian super-marketing and playing with DJ sound systems I discover that the geek world have once again been stunned by Plaxo’s fast and loose attitude to other people’s data. Robert Scoble, geek extrordinaire has been suckered into trying out another of Plaxo’s new services. Scoble allowed Plaxo to scour his contact’s Facebook information for data to match up with his Outlook contacts. This effectively allowed Plaxo to look for user’s email addresses and birthdays by crawling through Scoble’s 5000+ contact’s personal data.

Wrong!

Imagine this. I’m happy if my best mate Scoble has my personal email address and birthday info, but I don’t necessarily want Mug’s Pizza to have that data because I’m not as close to them as I am to Scoble (yes, I know… ).

My data is mine and mine alone. I need to be allowed to say who has access to that information and who doesn’t. Suffice to say that I am have cancelled that Plaxo subscription and won’t be breaking those personal rules again. I’ll also be looking more closely at what information I already have out there in social networking land. And what other people could be allowing Plaxo, et al, to see of my own personal data.

For what it’s worth, I don’t have a huge amount to hide. My birthday is in 68 days, my Flickr photos are here and my New Year’s resolution is right here. It’s the principle of the thing, dammit.

Clean Up Your Inbox

nix — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 19:48:52 +0000

From 43 Folders.

For those of us who occasionally get a bit slack in the Inbox department.

Backup Goodness

nix — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 04:47:22 +0000

I use MS Outlook for my Personal Information Manager (PIM). I use the contacts and calendar function daily (as well as email of course). I’d be perfectly happy to move to a GPL or opensource alternative as long as it synced with Pocket Informant on my iPaq. It’s really handy to have all my data up to date on the Pocket PC and Pocket Informant is a brilliant interface.

I am reasonably religious about backing up my email / calendar / contacts. I usually have a recent copy of my PIM sitting on my iPAQ and back up Outlook weekly. I just looked on the Microsoft site and discovered an automated tool to backup Outlook 2003 (it works for versions 2000 – 2002 as well). I wish that I had seen this earlier.

Instead I shall spread the goodness far and wide. Until a reasonable alternative presents itself.

Download

Tutorial

EDIT: 29/01/06 It doesn’t work beyond the first time. Ourlook 2003 stays as an open process so the .pst is locked and unable to be modified / backed up, even copied to a safe location. Dang it. back to the drawing board.