IT Management - Outlook 2007 defect causes major embarassment

Recently sent to everyone at work... hopefully helpful to the blog-o-sphere as well:

We've recently has some issues with Meetings and Reminders in Outlook 2007. Please read this carefully if you use Outlook 2007.

The problem:

The Monthly view of the calendar creates an ALL DAY event when you double click on a date to create a meeting.

The reminder for an all day event is 18 hours, and doesn't change when you un-click "all day event"

The sender of the message sets the reminder time for everyone to is in the meeting.

18 hour reminders result in reminders at VERY inappropriate times.

Imagine your client's Blackberry sounding off at 4:30 AM because of you!

Suggested fixes:

• · Don't use the montly view to plan meetings (use weekly views instead)
• · Be very careful if you ever have to un-click the "all day event" box

Photoshopping Vermeer

Just playing around with Paint Shop Pro

I M N UR SOFA

'nuff said?

The old neighborhood

We got a chance to visit the old neighborhood where I lived before we got married. I took the opportunity to do some street photography. Here's a fairly nice panorama of Broadway just south of Belmont in Chicago.



I really like the color of the sky in this one. I hope someday I can get a panorama of the skyline with that color.

Light field experiments on the very cheap and easy

Inspired by research at Stanford, I decided to do my own experiments in light-field photograph. This is very quick and dirty, and thus cool that it worked at all... here's the result of my experiment.



First I stood at the curb across the street, and took 3 frames to stitch into a panorama using Hugin. I then moved about 6 foot to the right, and did it again.

I then used Hugin to match up the images and get the sizes close... the final composite is me using layers in Paint Shop Pro and a manual mask to get the results I want.

My goal was to see if I could remove the trees from in front of the building... it works. 8)

Thanks for reading.

Mom's 64th

We celebrated Mom's 64th birthday yesterday. I took 537 photos with some help from my Sisters... here is the one that is closest to an actual Birthday photo.

I've narrowed it down to a mere 150... and I'll let you folks decide which ones are the good ones in the set.

Adding value

I've managed to take somewhere around 100,000 photos in the last 10 years. I have to guestimate it because they won't all fit on this laptop, so I've had to remove everything before the start of 2007 just to allow the current stuff to fit.

Over time people have convinced me that I take photos that are better than average. You can see some of them over at my Flickr account. I've participated in Around the Coyote, an art fair in Chicago, and actually sold some of my photos a few years ago.

So, now I've got this big pile of photos, so of which actually seem to be valuable to other people. However, the shear size of it is daunting in it's own right (more than 120 Gb when last in one place). It's so many photos that I can't even give them a cursory review without spending months of South Shore commuting time.

I want to add value to the collection.. I have a few strategies that I'm going to use to help:

• reduce the number of photos by weeding out the poor ones
• add metadata to all of the remaining photos using IPTC labeling
• put most of them up on Flickr (which will read and auto-apply tags from the IPTC labels)
• keep an archive of everything current on my work machine in sync with SyncToy
• keep backups on DVD-R
• watch my stats on Flickr to see what people like
• use the Creative-Commons license to give them away
• geotag photos so that people can find them when they look for things in a given location
• blog more photos

I signed up for a Flickr pro account a long time ago... it's a superb value. You get unlimited uploads for a mere $20/year. The statistics feature I recently signed up for helps you find out what people are viewing, and how they found the photos... it's very useful.

Blogging is always fun, even when you only get about 10 hits/day... I'd like to get it up higher, but it's not realistic to think it's going to skyrocket. Slow and steady works for me... it's a habit I'm trying to build in this and other endeavors.

Thanks for reading... comments always welcome.

Missing - $15,119,000,000

So... here's the chart: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BOGNONBR?rid=19&soid=1




On November 1, 2007 - there was about $42,268,000,000 in non-borrowed reserves in the depository institutions in the US. One month later, this amount was $27,149,000,000... which has me wondering where $15,119,000,000 went in one month.

Please correct me if I'm wrong... but doesn't this mean that the reserves held by all of our banks (which they use to give us cash, and put in to ATMs) dropped by about 36% in one month.

Seems to me this is something to worry about... but please, please, please tell me I'm wrong.

Virginia in the snow

Here's Virginia's first trip out into the snow.



Enjoy.