(this is) durkin.org

I am not an IT guy, but I understand the need for standards and security and such. I get it, I really do. But that doesn’t mean I like it, or that I won’t try to get around it if I can. Mostly, I can’t¹. Here, however, are two instances where I seem to be getting away with something.

I really do not like Lotus Notes. I tried, for about a day, to like it, but to no avail. I know there are diehard uses and folks who really dig the LN way, but I just don’t. And won’t. I am and have always been an Outlook user.

So a few years ago I went looking for a solution to my little LN problem. Thanks to Google, I found many; among them this little gem - the Outlook Connector for Domino².

I’ll spare us all my attempts at being a technical writer and give you the short story: the install instructions are very solid, and MS is not kidding about the fact that users will not have the complete LN / Domino functionality (nor the complete Outlook / Exchange functionality, for that matter). Oh, and be ready for a serious hang-up the first time you try to view your Calendar in Outlook - my PC seized up for about 40 minutes.

While we are on the whole Outlook tip - I recently read an interesting article over at Lifehacker on antifiling. Essentially that means do away with your folder structure(s) for saving email and just save all sent and received mail in date-based folders, then rely on sort and search to manage the data.

Love it. No more folder trees for projects, sub-projects and archived projects, plus personal stuff. Oye. Now I just have a folder for 2006 Mail and everything is in there. Everything. Since you can use multiple PST files in Outlook, I exported each year as a separate PST file and then added each one to OL. This way, I have almost instant access via search³ to any email I have sent or received (crashes and data loss aside) since 2001.

I’m dork enough to really like that. And to write about it, apparently.

I also really do not like ie6 (at least, not after I discovered FireFox). IE6 is, however, the default and only approved browser for my company. I figured they really didn’t care, and so installed and happily browsed with FF for about a year. Recently, they let me know they did care; I received four separate emails from three different IT folks telling me (and a ton of others in the Co) that FF is not an approved app, and that they were going to have to remove it.

Big deal, I thought, ie7 has tabbed browsing and is really pretty cool. So I complied. Only to find that our payroll software as well as our travel and expense software will not open in ie7. Will not. Only in ie6. Or FireFox.

But I couldn’t reinstall FF, and I couldn’t go back to ie6. And installing ie6 and ie7 on the same machine made me nervous⁴. Enter Portable Apps | Portable FireFox. Thank God for jump drives. And for Lifehacker, where I first read about Portable Apps⁵.

1. Or don’t even try, as I’m really a wimp when it comes to potential consequences «
2. It’s old news now, I know that, but I always meant to put something up here to outline what I did and the issues I ran into. «
3. LookOut, which is now part of Windows Desktop Search, but you can find the last version if you look hard «
4. OK, I just didn’t understand it «
5. And couldn’t for the life of me imagine needing to use them «