About 4 years ago I started using Gmail extensively. I kept using up until about 6 months ago. I moved everything to Outlook. It took hours and hours to move that many years of e-mail to Outlook. What I got was slower searching, slower response, bad system performance and other such notable catastrophes.
The main reason I did this was to move to a Windows Mobile Phone. I did that, and now I feel as though I have even less of a reason to be using Outlook. The Outlook client on the phone isn't all that great, and synchronizes just fine with pop3.
So I've decided, instead of continuing to spend the money on the plan that I needed to really utilize Outlook and the Windows Mobile Phone I'm going to turn all of it back in. It just is not efficient. Gmail is faster, synchronizes just fine with Outlook clients that I have to interact with, and is much easier to get to. On top of that I don't have to have the Office Outlook monster installed on my machine.
So with that, I bid farewell to Outlook, probably for the last time ever. There just really is not reason.
Vista, Ubuntu
I'm also starting to lean toward dropping heavy Vista usage and moving to Ubuntu and Linux in general. It has always been a more stable OS than Windows in many ways. With the heavy usage in the Portland area, I'm never short of fellow cohorts that use Ubuntu.
So with that, I'm preparing to bid farewell to Vista and XP as my host OSs over the next few weeks.
Technology Stacks
Next, I'm going to start checking out some of the other technology stacks besides just .NET. I've been focused for the last 6-7 years and I know it is a good idea to branch out a bit in this arena, especially as I head toward some of the more high level business intelligence, architectural, and enterprise level projects. Microsoft also, for some reason or another, seems to be waning under the pressure of Google and other entities nipping at the edges. For instance Microsoft still has not garnered even a small percentage of the Internet market in search engine usage, social sites, or anything along those lines.
Microsoft is lining up to be another company, probably a good one, but no longer the behemoth on the block in the next 5-10 years. Google is however lining up to be just that.
So unless Silverlight really takes off, and Microsoft really lights the fire of interest, I'm spreading my wings and may just fly away.
bad day at the office?
Actually, the day in the office was great. I often count my time in minutes, and when an application wastes many minutes over comparable applications I tend to want rid of those slower, less capable applications.
Outlook is officially gone, it’s a time killer. Especially if you have to search through more than a few months of e-mail. 90% of my review of old e-mails is done through search, which gmail does in about 1-3 seconds vs. Outlooks 1 second to 10 minutes. 10 minutes is not an acceptable search time for finding e-mails in a 3+ year archive. I prefer the 3 seconds or so. 🙂
As for the other switches, only time will tell with those. I’m not sure if I’ll like Ubuntu over Vista long term, or if it will be more reliable or faster. So far though, Ubuntu on my slower machine is tons faster than Vista on a faster machine. This doesn’t bode well, but I’ll be running in parallel for a while.
Technology stacks I’m not 100% sure about. If for any other reason because Java, Ruby on Rails, and all that other mess have about a zillion technology stack paths. I’m not really sure I want to deal with that level of maintenance. So I might stick to .NET after all.
…time will tell.