Not too much of note to report today, just work. A busy day out and about so the only real use has been with Google Calendar. This app seems to work quite nicely and in the past I’ve found that it syncs nicely with MS Office packages. It’s definitely one of the smarter apps.
I’m miss being able to sync Tasks. As a recent GTD convert (at least in part) I’ve come to expect my task lists to be wherever I want them instantly. Gmail is more successful though and I’m using a partial workaround by using the drag and drop labels to categorise email, then filtering. It’s different to how it operates in Outlook and not quite as elegant as having numerous inbox’s but it does work.
Contacts are not yet up to date but if I can find a spare fifteen minutes I’ll get them up to date, thereby somewhat ironically saving me far more than fifteen minutes.
So how is it going – life without MS Office? Not quite as I expected to be honest.
On Sunday I reinstalled my desktop PC system and in the process removed MS Office completely to avoid cheating. That was my first mistake.
I needed to create a template letterhead and there isn’t any really satisfactory way of doing this easily and quickly with Google Docs. But I then realised that I have oodles of storage space – none of which is on my machine. So my answer was to create a letter and use an image as the header – in this case the image grabbed from this blog. It works pretty well though it isn’t what I set out to do.
It looks like this week might be one of finding workarounds, but it’s occurred to me that this might throw up some new ideas and solutions that I wouldn’t have considered before. There might just be some better ways of working that come to light.
Since moving more and more of our work onto cloud computing, in particular using the growing Google suite of applications I’m now in a position to see if it really is possible to live without MS Office.
So from Monday I’ll not to use any MS Office applications to see if it really is possible to use nothing but the free tools in the Google Suite – Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Blogger, Chrome and the various small tools that come in handy. On paper it’s certainly possible but I want to know if it is a practical proposition for us mortals.
I can already see a couple of challenges. The first one is that Google Tasks isn’t really integrated with anything apart from itself. Synchronisation is clumsy and I’m not sure if it will handle contacts properly. That might seem unimportant but I’m mobile during the day and if it won’t go in the backpack it doesn’t come with me if I’m on the pushbike around town. So reliable syncing with my mobile phone is vital.
That’s enough for now, let’s see how it goes.
Solar Century are claiming that solar electricity costs will reach parity with fossil fuels by 2013. This is an interesting development coming from one of the larger UK suppliers and it is largely in line with other predictions.
But it isn’t as clear cut as it seems. Predictions about fuel costs are notoriously difficult and unreliable but evidence points to peak oil being about now. Fuel costs are on the rise again and both OPEC and Russia seem keen to take and keep oil in the $60-$70 /barrel range over the next few months. It’s unlikely that they will stay there as the resource becomes scarcer and those nations need to raise money to see them through recession.
Energy security isn’t on the radar for many people but it will soon be an issue for us to address as energy becomes more expensive and harder to source.
A contact called earlier with a great idea brought back from an conference that he has just attended in USA. By combining the solar and LED packages there is a neat solution to an animal welfare problem that has been saving one American farmer in particular around $1.5m a year. Green energy, low consumption, low maintenance and animal welfare benefits at the same time! How about that for a winner?!
As usual though the capital costs are often a stumbling block with LED despite the huge medium to long term operational savings so I’ll be teaming up with my leasing contact next week to run some ideas about creating a packaged solution. The package can also be applied across other agri-business fields (‘scuse the pun) quite easily and there is one in mind that might be an easy sell.
It’s something that has been on the back burner for a while but with interest rates so low and funders becoming just a little more adventurous the time might be right to work up the idea.
