Apr 3 - software updates

Getting the iPhone spurred me to a lot of software updates and, in the course of all this, learning ios7 and working the settings of Sandy's iPad and our two iPhones.

One of the things that I wanted to do was have our calendar and contacts replicated among the mobile devices and MS Outlook.  Yes, I'm still married to Outlook.  I much prefer doing my email offline.  Besides, I have a huge amount of history that I have no intention of ever moving online.  We'll see how long that lasts !

Gmail is out there for both of us, used as a transfer vehicle mostly although when I'm using my laptop, I access Gmail directly.  I'm using the pobox smtp server for email everywhere, so that our sending email address is always pobox.com, reducing the confusion since people will only see one email address from us.

Syncing contacts and calendars with the iDevices proved to be relatively easy but back to Outlook, not so easy.  I finally found products that work, however, I have to manually initiate the sync.  That's because the security of Outlook stops other apps from accessing email addresses without asking permission each time.  That in turn stops trojans from grabbing your email addresses and sending out spam.

Well, to do the syncing, these programs were running into problems with Outlook 2003, which I obviously bought a "few" years ago.  Hey, I was still using Office 97 !  Since XP itself goes out of support in a few days and I needed to move forward in the MS Office world for compatibility reasons, I researched the various releases 2007, 2010 and 2013 and found that 2007 gives me a full-featured Outlook while 2010 does not -- for example, no spell check unless you purchase the entire Office Suite.  So I went ahead and purchased Outlook 2007 but then found as I was downloading that MS has loosened the purse strings on this one and I got the entire Office suite anyway for the same price.

I wasn't too concerned about the other Office products, since I only use Word and Excel and they have equivalent versions using the Open Office suite, which is free.  Open Office doesn't have an Outlook equivalent and I don't think that Thunderbird has all the features that I want.

So, as of last night, I'm using Outlook 2007.  So far so good, in fact I like the update.  That will tide me over for a few years, I hope.  I then did the Contacts and Calendar sync and that worked like a charm.

As for XP itself, I'm not changing anything until I run into problems there.  At some point I'll have to upgrade to Windows 7, no doubt, and will then find out whether I need two licenses to run W7 on two physical machines, even though I'm only running one at a time (cottage and Florida) and transporting the environment under VMWare.  Perhaps that can be a project for Fall of this year ?  We'll see.

Before heading north, I need to do the Linux upgrade.  That shouldn't be a big deal but there's always a risk that something I depend on, like VMWare, will be a problem. I'm on the latest long term support release, 12.04, but haven't applied all of the myriad updates; there are over 500 pending.  That always includes updates to the kernel, which generally requires an update to VMWare; we'll see.

There are a few other tweaks that I've made to my setup.  I've got Cobian Backup running in the background now, taking hourly differential backups of key things.  That's working nicely.  I also have that printing software running as a task on the PC and Sandy can print from her iPad.  I should check into whether there's an equivalent piece of software that I can install on my laptop to allow printing the same way.  Printing from the Mac Laptop has always been an issue.

There are probably a few other things that I've done ... I really should keep a list although just checking my Downloads folder will probably tell the tale.  

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Everytime I click on something, it seems, up pops something new.  Word, Excel and Outlook -- all new versions -- take some getting used to.  I'm pondering picking up Windows 7 so that I can play with conversion on a rainy day.

Dick and Nuala arrived mid afternoon yesterday and we sat outside and chatted.  They then ran off to pick up some  grocery items while I headed over to Fields to exchange the X1 for the X5.  Once I was back, which included some delay, we went to the SYC for dinner.

Some club was running a 5k run along Riverside, so getting back was a bit difficult.  All the cross streets were blocked off and they wanted me to get south of our place and then head north, same direction as the "runners".  I put runners in apostrophes because this was the tail end of the group and they were all walking.  It was the real tail end -- a police car was following driving down the middle of the road and I had to follow behind at idle speed.  It was a "walker zone" somewhat akin to a "manatee zone".  I don't know why they just didn't move the stragglers onto the sidewalk !  Anyway, it's good to see people get out and exercise, so I didn't really complain.

It was the second Thursday that the Tiki has been open but the food is still Taco Bar.  We had a drink outside and then moved inside for dinner.

Today Dick and I will ride, south by the looks of things, and Sandy and Nuala will take in Flagler.  That's as far as the plan goes at this point.  Actually we do have somewhat of a plan, to be confirmed -- ride today, boat tomorrow, ride Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and then head to the 600k in South Florida for Saturday.  Tuesday we'll probably do a 200k.

Onward ?