Making A Difference…

I have been using my MacBook now for about one month and I still tag my PC along when I go to the office.  I’ve found that moving my Outlook to Mac isn’t quite as easy.  I have expected this but not to the extent that I’m going through now.

Initially I thought that Entourage (part of MS Office for Mac)  will be my ticket to freedom. Since it is a replacement for Outlook that was built by Microsoft for the Mac I presume that there will be no issues once I got it installed on my Mac.

Turns out I was wrong.  The first issue was the edition of MS Office for Mac that I should be using.  I had gone to a mac store and almost got the MS Office Home and Student Edition, which was reasonably priced.  Looking at the comparison table on the back of the packaging, though, I found out that that edition did not support exchange server.

I didn’t know exactly what that means but just to be safe, I proceeded to look for the standard edition of MS Office which has the exchange server support.  Well, I found it, but it costs me three times the home and student edition.

Ok, so I got my Entourage with Exchange Server Support, so everything should be hunky dory, right ? Wrong.  For the life of me, I can’t seem to find how to synchronize my tasks and categories.  I searched and searched and searched and finally realized that Entourage does NOT synchronize tasks and categories. Well that blew a big hole in my plan to migrate completely to Mac.  I need the tasks and categories and Entourage apparently is not going to be the answer.  Isn’t it weird that Microsoft creates an exchange client that does not support tasks and categories ? Or is this part of an evil twisted plan for sabotaging the Mac platform ?

Since I can’t use Entourage, I have to find another way of getting my calendars, contacts, tasks, emails, and categories into my mac.

I have two choices now from where I sit: Find out how to synchronize exchange with the Apple applications (calendars, tasks, etc), and/or install parallels and run windows within my Mac OS.

The quest continues…

Crossing over to Mac (Courtesy of laptopmag.com)

With the release of the new MacBook, I finally decided to bite the bullet and go all mac.  I wasn’t sure that all the things that I used to be able to do can be replicated fully in the mac environment, but I got a little fed up with going back and forth using Mac and Windows. So here’s the story of me switching completely to mac, the problems I encounter, and whatever solutions I found to fix them.

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Have you noticed that attaching a .pages document created from iWork’s Pages to a web based mail account, such as gmail. or yahoo mail never works ?

Well, you can stop trying. I did

Here’s the reason:  (more…)

If you have just recently claimed your blog at technorati’s site and you’re not seeing your updates even after numerous pings, it may be that your blog is actually pending a review to ensure that your content is legit and within the good blogging guidelines that technorati expects.

Here’s the FAQ that explains this process: (more…)

If you are like me, I didn’t really know which plugins I should get once I moved over to the self-hosted version of wordpress.

I found a blog article which goes over his top recommended wordpress plugins. This article also goes over the 17 steps that you are encouraged to take to setup your self-hosted wordpress blog. It’s a good read for someone just moving over to a self-hosted wordpress blog.

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I just realized how helpful the wordpress.com community was in bringing traffic to my blog site.  I recently moved my blog from a wordpress.com site to my own self-hosted blog using wordpress, and I see that traffic to my blog has gone down to zero  .  Not that it was that high before, but I actually took it for granted that someone will always stumble upon my blog through search engines and the likes.

Not so it turns out…  I’m just starting to realize that moving out of wordpress.com mean that I’m no longer part of the wordpress.com community and thus my blog posts are no longer listed with them.

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I’ve just heard this very good comparison to get you thinking about whether your company’s productivity needs improving.

Let’s take a “tukang bakso” here in Jakarta. Lets say he charges Rp. 5000 per bowl and lets say he can sell about 200 bowls a day. At the end of the day he will have generated Rp 1 million. So one tukang bakso generates Rp. 1 million per day.

Now if you take your company’s revenue, divided by the number of employees, and divided again by 365, you will get how much each person in your company generates on average. Does this number measure up to what the tukang bakso can generate ? If your company generates Rp 1 million per day per person, then your company’s productivity is the same as the tukang bakso. However, the tukang bakso probably doesn’t even have a complete high school education, whereas your employees most likely have bachelors or masters degree. Shouldn’t the productivitybe way higher ?

To complicate matters you can also divide your equity by the number of employees, to get the equity that each person gets per year.
Lets say the tukang bakso can start his business with Rp. 10 million. This means that with Rp. 10 million he is able to generate Rp. 1 million every day.
How much equity does each person need in your company to generate how much revenue per day ?  Does it measure up to the tukang bakso’s numbers ?

Can you beat the tukang bakso’s productivty ? Or maybe you should just start your own bakso enterprise…