Andrew Shuttleworth Web HQ

Spam Button Needed

I've got a internet and mail button on my laptop that I never use. Wonder if it would be possible to have a spam button that automatically adds the mail details to my blacklist and deletes the mail ???

Looking for a job

I finished working at my previous company at the end of 2003, so the first month of 2004 has flown by while I met people and did some deep introspection to decide what I really want to do next. It's great to have the opportunity to do this and take time out from the old 9-5 ... well more like 9 'til late here in Japan.

Looking at the job market (at least from my narrow perspective in IT), it feels as if all the fun has been taken out of working life these days. I'm sure there are many people who really enjoy their jobs but in general the economic downturn seems to have put everyone under pressure to achieve more in less time. Discussion are always strained by pressure to make or save more. Personal development, prospects and desires I feel are left for a priviledged and lucky few who find themselves in one of the companies not feeling the strain as much as some others. In Japan, the company was considered a safe haven for employees but few are safe from sudden redundancy.

Still I'm optimisitic that there are good opportunities out there. And to some extent the economic downturn has to be tolerated by everyone.

I'm getting closer to working out what I really want to do. Something which will benefit me both now and in the longer term. Keep tuned for more updates here as things develop :-)

Internet Communication Evolution and Social Networking

It's exciting to feel the evolution going on in the world of online communication. E-mail was good to an extent, but the limits of its scalability have been reached. More and more people are getting more and more mails that they just can't deal with. It's impossible to deal with hundreds of mails in a day. Online chat was once touted as being the next big thing, but this too has its drawbacks.

Luckily solutions are appearing which will move online communication to new areas of functionality and efficiency. Tools facilitating online discussions, collaborative document creation and review, live text and voice chat, messaging (perhaps including e-mail), content syndication, group project and task management and more are appearing more and more among mainstream users. Things are still developing and will continue to evolve and merge, but blogging, collaborative blogs and wikis are all early signs of good things to come.

In terms of packaged solutions, more and more features are being added to instant messenger services. Yahoo! Groups has had chat and calendar functions for a relatively long time. There is the open source PHProjekt which looks useful. Fully packaged open source or commercial portal packages featuring forums among many other features are becoming more widespread and easier to deploy. On the business side Microsoft is working on it's Sharepoint technologies for corporations and introducing collaborative features into Office products.

One of the tools which really stands out is Groove (www.groove.net). After trying one of the earliest versions I was very pleased to try out the latest version which has a great deal of functionality and allows people to work off-line. This is very important as you may not always have an internet connection when you want to work.

Another related phenomenon being dubbed 'social networking' is recently appearing in the media. It may sound like a bit of an oxymoron but however ironic in the internet sense it's necessry to distinguish from the infrastructure side of things. The concept refers to using information sharing technologies to allow people to link their networks of contacts together. This can be a powerful way to make use of what would otherwise only be static, unlinked information for your use only.

Of course, for the time being as these technologies develop people are remembering that the plain old phone or just talking to someone direct in many cases works much better than e-mail. It will be good to see how the new technologies continue to develop to allow us to work and collaborate more efficiently.

Newsgator RSS Reader

Here I blogged about RSS feeds and the best tool to use. I tried and then bought Newsgator. It integrates excellently with Microsoft Outlook (I recently upgraded to Office 2003 in large part for the Outlook anti-spam features). There were a few things that really made it easy to decide to invest in this tool:

• I was happening upon more and more sites eith RSS feeds that I wanted to subscribe to. I needed a tool to do this. Newsgator has a right click subscription option in IE.
  
• On visiting the Newsgator site I read about version 2 released today (19 Jan) which was a free upgrade. It had a whole list of cool sounding new features best read about on their site. It's not only the new features themselves but the fact that the tool is developing at such a pace which shows that it's worth investing in.
  
• The integration with Outlook means their is very little additional time or effort required to use the tool on a regualr basis for users of Outlook like myself.

St. Peter's Cream Stout

One of my faqvorite brands when I was in the UK. Recently had a bottle of their Stout. Delicious!

http://www.stpetersbrewery.co.uk/

Note: If you don't like bubbles, this is for you - none at all!