Archive for August, 2009
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08.23.09
a weekend of overdoing it
Having played golf, tennis and a football match yesterday, as well as attending Adem’s housewarming party last night, then playing another football match this morning, I feel a little tired.
I had a good day yesterday. It’s not often Chris is up for playing golf, or Ben is available to come out to play so I took advantage of both. We played Stonelees executive course in the morning, (where I did mostly badly) and then headed off to the tennis courts right next to Ben’s house in Westgate (technically Margate, but Ben likes to thinks he doesn’t live in Margate).
A couple of hours tennis later I was off to my football match where although I didn’t start I played most of the game because of an injury to another player, and did pretty well thank you very much.
Adem’s party was quite a late one last night, so after not a huge amount of sleep, being a little hungover, we had another match this morning for Preston, who I’ve re-signed for after around a 6 year absence. And we won and everything.
All that good fun appears to take its toll though. My legs are now all stiff and achy, and I find myself contemplating an ice bath, as per this lady’s recommendations. Harking back to a previous post, perhaps I am just a little too old for all this youthful larking about!
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08.20.09
more google apps gripes
Ok, I thought I would bite the bullet and transfer to Google Apps. It’s going to take a while, so I had planned to do little pieces at a time. Unfortunately Google don’t make it as easy as it should be.
Firstly, I’ve been trying to move my contacts over to Google Apps from Google Mail. There is a built in export/import feature which works great. However, contacts are not exported/imported with pictures. This is annoying, very annoying. Ok, just save the pictures from the Google Mail account somewhere and attach them to the contacts in Google Apps. Nope, not possible, you can only change or delete existing contact photos, no way of getting them saved. Rubbish. Google Mail has built in groups too called Friends, Family and Colleagues. These don’t get ported, despite my having assigned contacts to them. Rubbish.
Ok, I was willing to sacrifice the groups and re-apply the photos manually, that’s not too problematic, though it will take up a lot of time. Moving on to calendars…. Again there is an export/import feature which leverages the ICS format to do its magic and seems to get things done, although Google tells me 244 out of 259 events were imported. No clue as to what happened to the 15 it had a problem with, or why. Again, I thought I’d skip past that, I’m sure they weren’t important. I need to setup sharing so that Mrs Tom can see what I’m up to, so I added her account in as able to share. Boom, there it is, except, what’s that? She can only see my free/busy information. That sucks massively – when we both use separate GMail accounts this works perfectly. The long and the short of it is I think I’ll have to stick to using Google Mail for my contacts and calendar, because Google Apps is both a pain in the arse to migrate to, and doesn’t give me quite what I need.
Rubbish.
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08.16.09
fastmail v google mail
I’ve been using FastMail for the last few years to look after my personal email. I have several domains where I receive email and they all go to one fastmail account. It’s always had everything I need, with a nice snappy web interface and IMAP access which I can use to collect mail on my iPhone.
Recently however, I’ve become more and more invested in Google, using Google Calendar and Google Contacts to keep track of my diary and maintain my address book. This works great for me, as I can synchronise these things with my iPhone via push notification (meaning that if I update a contact on my phone the changes are synced to the Google “cloud”), and if I really want, to my desktop PC, albeit in a rather non-elegant way.
For example, these things recently meant that when I had to recently reset my iPhone (due to some problems I was having at the time which turned out to be hardware and didn’t actually need a reset), to get my calendar, contacts and emails all working on the phone again all I had to do was configure the accounts on the phone and magic, contacts and calendar items appear and mail starts being delivered again. No backup/restore nonsense.
I’m searching for an “all under one roof” solution I suppose. My buddy Chris used to use FastMail (that’s how come I do now, he recommended it) but now uses Google Apps, and is a real Google convert (he even has the crappy G1 Google phone, the fool).
The key features I suppose I need are mail, contacts, and calendar. Mail and contacts I really want in one place because when I write a mail, I want to be able to select the contacts from within the app I’m working from. What brought this home to me as being inconvenient recently was when I sent out an invite for a party. Because my contacts are in Google, I selected them in my Google Mail account and copied/pasted them into FastMail so I could send the mail. That is ever so slightly madness – I just shouldn’t have to do that.
So, mail. FastMail does a great job with its IMAP implementation and the web interface is pretty neat. Because it’s IMAP it lives with folders, whereas Google uses labels – I’m coming around to the idea of labels, it seems to make sense. Also, if search works properly, I shouldn’t really need to worry about “filing” emails. I think Google has search fairly well covered.
FastMail has a neat feature which I like, and to be honest, if Google had this I might not even be considering which way to go. I get spam. Everybody gets spam. To help me track where my spam is generated from (so I can call the company up and call them names, ultimately to no end of course), I assign a unique email address to every company I deal with. E.g. – all my WordPress mail goes to wordpress@mydomain.com, my Amazon emails all go to amazon@mydomain.com. This works really well, as now when I get any junk mail I look to which address it’s been sent, and then I can decide how trustworthy a company is based on that and therefore whether I’m likely to deal with them again in the future. If I need to deal with that company, I’ll email from that same address so as not to confuse matters. This is the deal breaker – Google doesn’t let me do that – easily.
In Google Mail you can sort of do this, but you have to define the email address first (no need in FastMail) and then prove that you own it via a verification process involving them sending an email to that address, and you confirming via a link. Why, Google, do I need to prove to you that I own amazon@mydomain.com when we went through a verification process for mydomain.com when I signed up for Google Apps, proving I own the whole damn domain?
Email filtering, either via filing into folders or applying labels is pretty much tit for tat. Both do it, so this is not a problem in either system.
Contacts then. FastMail sucks at contacts. It uses, as most email implementations seem to, a proprietary contacts system that you can’t sync with anything, easily export to/import from anywhere. This is annoying, and email providers the world over take note – you really suck at this. Why can’t we all use some joined up working to allow us to easily sync contacts (and calendars) across all platforms without me doing anything smart. Don’t Make Me Think.
Google, also sucks at contacts (you didn’t see that coming did you?). It is totally lacking in detail. I need more fields Google. Where they win though, is that you can at least sync with your iPhone (or Android phone, if you must).
Calendars, well FastMail doesn’t do calendaring so this is another Google win.
Oh yeah, I should mention that FastMail costs me money, and Google Apps is free. This doesn’t bother me so much, as it’s not expensive, but it is a consideration.
Reading this back, I’m leaning towards Google, if it wasn’t just for that darn outgoing “from” address thing. What I’ve also just noticed to my annoyance is that it I export my contacts from my Google Mail account and try to import them into my Google Apps account, the pictures are lost. This is stupid Google, fix it – it’s from Google to Google dammit!
Ideally someone at Google will read this, think “oh, how could we have been so stupid, this Tom chap is so correct” fix things, make me president of Google and we’ll all live happily ever after. You never know. Ok, you do.