Sorry no Excel posts lately. I thought I’d give you a quick update on what’s happening.
The Texas trip was canceled due to Hurricane Ike. If I had flown Frontier I could change my ticket for nothing. Instead, American Airlines is going to charge me $175. I honestly don’t know how these people sleep at night.
Stackoverflow opened its public beta last week. I’ve been following the Excel and VBA tags on RSS. I’m not sold on the site, but I want to try it for a while. I’m an NNTP guy and never really found web forums to be all that productive. And now that I barely post on NNTP, I don’t know what kind of guy I am. Just another lazy blogger I guess.
The Excel User Conference started today. I’ll be looking forward to reading some blog posts about that. Speaking of training, don’t forget about Excel Dashboard and Visualization Bootcamp. There’s about a 75% chance that I’ll be there and I’ll know for sure by next week. So if you go, be sure to say “Hi”.
Here’s a tip: Get the same laptop at work that you have at home. I liked my D810 so much that when I started a new job I got a virtually identical machine. Now that my personal D810 is at Dell getting fixed, I can use my work laptop by just swapping hard drives. Oh, it’s not convenient. But it’s better than being without or even trying to get by on an old desktop I have laying around. To the extent that I’m able to, I think I’ll always use the same computer at work and home.
Dick,
As far as sharing computers / files goes, you might want to check out FolderShare. It was an independent company bought by Microsoft a year or two ago. Of course, I don’t know what kind of changes MS will make in new versions of the product.
I have 3 laptops and one desktop and my significant other has her one laptop and desktop. She is not comfortable sharing her work stuff through a Microsoft product (the company she works for competes tangentially with MS) but Foldershare is customizable enough that we share our common files through FS. I have FS set up to share a variety of my work (and some personal) folders across the different laptops and desktop. This way, no matter what machine I am using I have the latest version of the files relevant to the task at hand.
This is supposed to be a peer-to-peer system and the data are supposed to be encrypted but I have no way of knowing if MS monitors / intercepts data sent from one machine to the other. Another thing I’ve noticed — and this is observational and not verified by a data monitor or documentation — is that if the computers exchanging data are behind a firewall no data actually goes over the ‘Net.
Dick,
You want to get an extrenal HDD.
:-)
I’ve been using the D810 for a couple of years now. It does the job really well – it just doesn’t fit the available space in an airplane seat unless, like Dick, you fly first class :-).
Jump drive – 8Gb (you can probably get a larger one now).
Redirect all your default directories to that drive (named it “X” so as not to interfere with any other drives).
Fits nicely into that little pocket above the right hand pocket on your jeans.
Stays with me all the time (and I back it up daily on at least one of the 3 PC’s that I use it with).
Dick
The EUC is still going, but since I’m back home I’ve already blogged about my experience. Check it out:
http://www.codeforexcelandoutlook.com/blog/2008/09/my-excel-user-conference-experience/
Thx,
JP
I flew first class once. I got bumped with about 10 other yokels heading back to Omaha and they put us on another flight which only had first class available. This was all pre-911. I was pretty disappointed with the experience. I would guess half of the first class experience is getting to sit next to important big-shots like Tushar. I was sitting next to Joe Plumber from Omaha who was also flying first class for the first time.
Swapping hard drives is *not* about file sharing. I have two 100G external hdds and two thumb drives. I’m appropriately backed up to say the least. When you can use the same hard drive you get something more than just access to your files. You get browser history and bookmarks. You get Excel toolbars. You get recent documents. You get absolutely everything seemlessly. It’s the little things. Oh, did you save that one shortcut to your desktop? It’s still there. Did you have that add-in loaded and that other one not? Yep, that’s how it is.
The only complaint I got from swapping hard drives was that my memory changed. I only have 1GB of RAM on my home laptop. All I can say to that is WTF. It will be 2GB as soon as crucial.com can ship it, you can count on that.
Meanwhile at the office, I tried to swap a hardrive between a Latitude D505 and a Latitude D6??. BSOD and automatic reboots. It was worth a shot, but I guess there was just too much different.
John: Removable media and MSOffice are a bad combination in my experience. If you work this way, at least copy the files to HDD if you work on them and copy back when done. Saves you a corrupt file…
jk: I haven’t had any trouble with removeable media & MSOffice.
Yes it is slower because it has to craeate a temporary file on the removable media during the save but if you’re careful not to unplug it while the led is flashing you shouldn’t have any trouble with it. And if you do make a mistake?? That’s what backups are for.
I find it very convenient to have everything I need on an 8gB jump drive.
I also keep a lot of utilities on there too in the event someone needs help with their PC.
All joking a side you can get really fast enteranl HDD intfaces these days, so swapping HDD outside of the PC and interface it right into the mobo is doable – I’ve seen it in micro mart so it must be true!!!
[…] month, Dick Kusleika, at Daily Dose of Excel, said, “Get the same laptop at work that you have at home. I liked my D810 so much that when […]
[…] Eventually I got tired of jiggling the cord and sent the laptop back to Dell for repair. On September 24, 2008, I said Here’s a tip: Get the same laptop at work that you have at home. I liked my D810 so much that […]