« Archives in August, 2004

How To Color-Code Your E-Mail Inbox, Calendar, Contacts And Tasks, And Hide Completed Tasks, In Outlook

August 8, 2004 / posted in Switch / 4 Comments

If you’re like me, you like to automatically have your e-mail and events and even contacts and tasks colored in Outlook. It just makes sense to have everything clear to you as soon as you glance at your inbox or your calendar; with everything colored, just a quick look lets you know what’s important, what’s trivial, and what’s urgent.
Outlook hides its color-coding ability. You might think that you apply colors through filters, but the colors are not, in fact, attributes of messages, appointments, etc; they’re merely temporary filters applied to messages. This is nice because it’s easy to re-color things, but it does mean that the controls for coloring are not where you’d expect, and that you can change your filter and accidentally lose your colors.
In Outlook, whatever task it is you’re doing, you can select “Organize” from the “Tools” menu. Click on “Using Views” (not “Using Colors”, as you might expect), then click “Customize Current View”. Click “Automatic Formatting”, “Add” a rule. You get color options here, and all the rules too. What you think of as filter rules are behind the “Advanced” tab.
To hide completed tasks, you need to click on “Filters” rather than “Automatic Formatting”, and click the “Advanced” tab. From “Frequently-used fields” choose “Complete” and set it “equal to” “No”. Easy as pie, right? Just don’t forget, the interface makes it incredibly difficult to add another filter category, so I hope you like this one!
The ability to color-code almost everything is built into a lot of applications; Microsoft Entourage, BareBones Mailsmith, Apple Mail, Apple iCal… wait, these are all Mac applications! Is it, maybe, that Mac users expect to be able to organize their items in a way that allows rapid visual perusal? My non-scientific investigation supports that assertion: my PC-loving power-user friend, who teases me incessantly about my switching stories here, looked at me like I’d just asked “who wants to drive rusty nails into their flesh?” when I mentioned to her that I was color-coding everything in Outlook; a Mac-loving roommate of a friend looked at me like I’d just asked “who likes to breathe air?” when I told him the same story. So, apparently, us Mac people like color.
So, for us Mac people, Outlook’s color-coding capabilities, to put it kindly, suck. The available colors are pre-set, and the same colors aren’t available in mail, calendar and contacts, so you can’t have categories correspond acrossthe different tasks for which you use Outlook. Also, the interface to do the coloring is obtuse and well-hidden. It’s sad, sad. But it works, and it looks like it’ll be good enough.
Oh, and that show and hide tasks thing? Yeah, that’s a menu item in Entourage. Microsoft could use to learn from itself.















Importing From Quicken Mac Into Quicken For Windows

August 5, 2004 / posted in Switch / 1 Comment

It’s harder than one thinks it might be to import your Macintosh Quicken file into your new Windows version of Quicken. Among other challenges, Quicken support uses the word “convert” rather than “import”, which makes it harder to search for the right article.
There is, however, a “right article”:http://search.intuit.com/KCS/viewdocument.do?action=6&searchMode=GuidedSearch&docID=PQ.bb310&externalID=&sliceID=&dialogID=7942372&iterationID=1&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.intuit.com%2fsupport%2fquicken%2f2005%2fmac%2f5198.html%3Fsource=2&docName=Converting+data+from+Quicken+for+Mac+to+Quicken+for+Windows&sourceKmap=&viewFrom=Main&docDate=%3CDocDate%3E%3CY%3E%3C/Y%3E%3CM%3E%3C/M%3E%3CD%3E%3C/D%3E%3C/DocDate%3E&locale=, and it gives good advice. The export process is, briefly, as follows:
# Set your Mac to use four-digit years, and restart
# Un-hide any hidden accounts
# Explort a .qif file from your Mac
# Import the .qif file into your PC, confirming a lot of transactions
# Re-enter all scheduled transactions, because they will have been lost
This will get you all your info, more-or-less whole. Step 1 is surprising; I would have expected that Quicken would have used 4-digit dates internally, at least, for additional precision. If you fail to carry out step 1, as I did the first time, all of your imported transactions from, say, 2004 will be listed as having taken place in 1904. Not convenient, and, again, surprising; a basic sanity check of dates on import would safely eliminate transactions from 100 years ago, I would think.
This list is not complete, however, at least not if you’re like me. When I went to reconcile one of my accounts — one that had always been reconciled successfully on the Mac — I ended up being off by $35,000. Nothing I could do would convince Quicken to use the right starting balance so that the reconciliation could come out correct. I ended up letting Quicken enter an adjustment; I reconciled the next month, too (I’d taken off a month, you know, vacation), and that turned out fine, so I just deleted the adjustment and the trial balance turned out fine. We’ll see if that holds up. If it doesn’t, my advice for importing from Quicken Mac into Quicken Windows will be: use Microsoft Money.















Schwarzenothing

August 3, 2004 / posted in Politics / 1 Comment

While I didn’t vote for the Governator, I was not unhappy to see him take office. A change was clearly needed in Sacramento; the state’s problems were getting larger, and no creative ideas were percolating up to solve them. It seemed the entire culture in our “cow-town” capital was broken.
Not that I approved of the strategy the Republicans pursued to “fix” things. Having passed up a perfectly good opportunity to beat Gray Davis a year earlier, by running an unelectable sleazy businessman instead of a respected big-city mayor, they chose to mount an off-cycle challenge. This gave the party the chance to run a comparative unknown, get some fresh blood — a good thing — but it also meant that, if Schwarzenegger got elected, he could not bring any new majority in on his coattails. While Schwarzenegger had a mandate, it did not replace any mandate a Tom Burton or Sheila Kuehl or even Ken Maddox had at their election. Why would a Senator or Assemblyperson, duly elected by his or her constituents and probably posessing a safe seat, think that Schwarzenegger’s off-cycle election will effect him or her in a year or in four years, so long as he or she continues to bring home the bacon?
So the Governator approached things with a false mandate. Then he behaved as if he had a real mandate, promising things to cities that he simply didn’t have the constitutional powers to provide; Schwarzenegger assumed that the Legislature would snap to, because of his massive popularity. Legislators had, only a few years ago, redistricted themselves so that their seats were safe, so with no need to fear the Governor, and challenged on their home turf, they moved to their old negotiating tricks.
So we’ve ended up where we are: “nowhere”:http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-deficit1aug01,1,7303564.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage. We haven’t cut the budget, we haven’t cut borrowing, we haven’t even raised taxes to cover our expenses. We’re behind what other states are doing to fix their deficits, and we’re behind even after the state Republicans managed to get their guy in the statehouse through skullduggery. Frankly, since Gray Davis at least knew how Sacramento worked, I have a hard time believing that we would’ve ended up with an outcome any worse than this had he stayed in office; certainly Cruz Bustamante, as a member of the Legislature, would have had an easier time building a compromise solution (rather than calling our elected officials “girly-men”).
It will be interesting to see where we get from this drama. Certainly a state with deficits, a do-nothing government, and no investment in education, health care or infrastructure is neither good for the little guy nor good for business. We can only hope that, in a few years, Meathead gives us a few useful alternatives, because the Governator appears to have lead us down the very same path everyone else had already taken us down.















I Call Bullshit On This Iran Stuff

August 1, 2004 / posted in Politics / No Comments

Apparently the administration would like us to think that “Iran was, or, perhaps, is now, behind al Queda”:http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-iran1aug01,1,5145501.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage. I’ll admit that, unlike Iraq and chemical weapons, there seems to be some actual evidence here. But, I still call bullshit. Why?
# First of all, allowing terrorists to pass doesn’t equal supporting them; there’s a real line between ignoring and aiding, as anybody who’s had a friend with a chemical dependency issue knows quite well. A lot of countries don’t exert full control over their borders and don’t pay attention to every individual who may not belong; if all countries had tight borders and watched immigrants closely, none of the gardens in Los Angeles would ever be properly maintained.
# Second of all, there’s, at best, a tenuous historical link between al Quaeda and Iran. Al Quaeda is an explicitly Sunni revolutionary group, and Iran has, historically, exported only Shi’ite revolution. The two are more contradictory than most Americans would like to think. Sunni revolution gave us Taliban Afghanistan, a 16-th century agrarian authoritarian state. Shi’ite revolution gave us the Islamic Republic of Iran, a modern state with a representative legislature, functioning judiciary, public K-12 and university system, research institutions, a literate population, and a capitalist economy. It’s not France, but it’s a far cry from Albania, too. Iran would not export a kind of authoritarianism that would undermine their own authoritarianism.
# Speaking of the Taliban, Iran and the Taliban did not get along at all. Iran supported other forces in Afghanistan (the ones we did, actually), and didn’t object in any way when we invaded. Why would Iran help their former enemies’ friends?
# The people who are telling us that Iran is helping al Queda told us:

  • That Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, none of which we’ve found
  • That Iraq helped al Quaeda, which they did not
  • That we wanted to catch Osama bin Laden, which apparently we don’t, otherwise we’d have more people in Afghanistan running around after him
  • That we invaded Iraq to liberate it from oppression, which would be nice if we’d mentioned it before the actual invading part

and so forth. So, this is not a bunch of people with a lot of credibility. Would the administration lie? Quite possibly!
# Oh, and none of this has been mentioned before. Not after 9/11, when the country could’ve been amped up to invade _anyone_. Not during the buildup to the Iraq war, when we could have lumped the two former enemies together as states supporting terrorism, posessing chemical weapons, and building nuclear weapons. Not right after the Iraq war, when we were in the Middle East, looking strong, looking like we could do *anything* (actually, everybody talked about us invading Syria then). No, this is only brought up 3-4 months before the election. That can’t be any kind of fast one they’re trying to pull, could it?
Nope, this is crap. And I hope the administration knows it, because we don’t have enough soldiers to invade Iran. Not unless we want to start a draft. Then, fortunately enough for the Bushes and Cheneys, they had daughters who wouldn’t need to dodge the draft like daddy did.















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