Quote about Faith & Fear

What’s the difference between fear & faith? Both are made up. Fear is imagination undirected & faith is your power to direct imagination – Got from Tony Robbins tweet

A fantastic video about the “Failure: The Secret to Success” By Honda

Love this short video. Since I’ve been facing some obstacles lately, its a good dose of motivation and inspiration for me.

The official launch of Internet Explorer 8

Been trying out IE8, Chrome and Firefox for a while. But Microsoft just launched IE8 officially. So for folks who do not like to use beta software, here’s a chance for you to try it out

Something about IE8

• Safer.  Built-in phishing and malware protection along with click-jacking and cross-site scripting prevention protects you from threats on the Internet. InPrivate browsing & filters let you maintain confidentiality when needed. See the whitepaper here.
• Easier. With Web Slices, content updates from your favorite sites are now accessible right from your favorites bar no matter where you are on the web. See the gallery here.
• Faster. With IE 8, it takes much fewer steps to complete key tasks than in FF. E.g. Mapping an address in IE8 takes 3 steps, while in FF, it takes 7.  In side-by-side measures of speed in opening the top 25 websites worldwide, IE8 was as fast or faster than Firefox and Chrome. IE8 is faster than IE7 by 80% in common micro-benchmarks. See the video here.

Download Internet Explorer 8 here

Gmail’s new feature – Undo Send

This got to be a life saver for me. I don’t know bout you folks, but I’m one of the few who manage to “jump the gun” by sending emails out without attachments. I always think how nice if i could “stop” the mail from being sent out. This folks from the Gmail team added a new feature that would be useful. This is especially true for folks who often write angry emails and sent it out.

Check out what they are saying in Gmails blog. To use this new feature, go to Settings –> Labs and look for undo send

Recently I am playing around with a free outlook add in to help me organize my inbox better. It’s call ClearContext Personal

Here are some things that it can help you with

• suggesting the right folders to instantly file messages and entire conversations with a single click
• highlights the most important messages in your Inbox from your most important contacts.
• Easily follow the conversation with a threaded conversation view as part of each email message
• Explore and preview attachments within Outlook just like folders on your desktop

So far i haven’t got use to the add in. I believe it takes some effort to adapt to it. But i guess once you got used to it, your productivity and efficiency in Outlook will increase.

But overall the best feature for me is the email thread function it provides. One of the things i like about Gmail is that it groups all similar emails. I find it easier for me to search for all my emails. It offers something similar, so far i like this feature the most.

In every mail, it will show you the email threads as highlighted in the picture below

Check out ClearContext’s short video demo

My friend post a question to me about importing Gmail contacts to Outlook. It is actually quite simple to do it, here are some steps to do it.

1) In Gmail, click on contacts. Then select that contacts that you want to import.

2) Click Export

3) In the next screen, select Outlook CSV contacts

4) Next go to Outlook 2007. Click on File –> Import and Export

5) Select “Import from another file”

6) Select “Comma Separated Value (DOS)”

7) Follow the instructions and you should see your Gmail contacts in Outlook

I read a lot and i read a lot of various topics from politics, technologies, sports to any interesting reads. And like most techies, a big chunk of my reading is done online. With me doing my Masters, i need to read even more. So i always wish that there is a tool that i can use to summarize a long document to a few key points (Being a techie, naturally i rely on technology). My wish sort of come true, when i stumble upon this website call GreatSummary.

It provides a tool with some algorithm to summary an article to a few key points.

Some info from the site on how it works

How GreatSummary Works
GreatSummary uses a patent pending algorithm to identify the major topics in a document.

This is a summary how the highlights look like

So I’ve tested it out, some sites it does works well. On some sites the outputs are not satisfactory. I guess i can’t be too demanding since it’s still on the beta stage. But give it a try, I find it useful to give me a preview of the document without dwelling too long into it.

Thanks to James Yeang who posted this tool in his blog.

I don’t know about you guys. But sometimes i find it very troublesome when i need to send files to someone with an older version of office. I need to frequently remind myself to save it in an older version.

But recently i found 2 ways to overcome this.

Tip #1

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Word Options.
2. Click Save.
3. Under Save documents, next to Save files in this format, select Word 2003-97 Document (*.doc).

Tip #2

Ask your friend to install Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. Then Office 2003 version will be compatible with Office 2007 files.

Hope this helps. Cheers