Recently at work I added all the conference room calendars, for the building I work in, to my “Other Calendar” list in Outlook. This way I can click on the checkbox for a conference room and see its availability quickly; something useful when trying to schedule a meeting.
Today I wanted to add all the conference rooms for our other building (and the one I am moving to in three weeks) to the same list. I’ll be heading up a project team whose members all live in the other building, so it only makes sense to schedule meetings there. Easier for one of me to walk five blocks that it would be for eight of them.
Try as I might I could not remember how to added calendars to the list. The only hit on Google that was even halfway close was one of those “you must be a member and signed in to read the rest of the article” sites that I refuse to use. I even tried Microsoft’s support site and learned all the neat things I could do with a calendar once it was in my other list, but not how to actually put it there.
Finally I stumbled across the solution, which had been staring me in the face the whole time. Below the “Other Calendars” portion of the navigation panel in the Calendar view in Outlook, there is a link titled, “Open a Shared Calendar.” Turns out by “shared” they mean “other.”
Now I’ll go bang my head against the desk so I’ll remember this trick in the future.
The uptime command, in the UNIX world, displays how long a particular machine has been “up” or running. Recently I have been applying that term to my daily lower back exercises. After reading a getting things done article that talked about Jerry Seinfeld, I have been working on better uptime for my exercises.
I’ll explain.
Jerry said he gets things done by getting a large year-at-a-glance calendar, and by putting a mark on each consecutive day he works on new material. He said that seeing a continuous string of marks is a powerful motivator for not breaking the chain. When I first read this I thought to myself, “it is so simple it would probably work.”
I weigh myself every day, and record the weight on a chart on our bureau in the bedroom. At night I do my exercises in that room, and I’ve started putting a little plus sign next to the date on my chart, to indicate a successful completion of my exercises for the day. A chain of one or two pluses is easy to break. Longer chains are much harder to ignore.
Presently I’m at 16 days in a row. Knowing that a miss now would mean starting all over again at 1 is a surprisingly powerful motivator. To use the UNIX term, I’ve got a 16 day uptime.
In the previous two Presidential Election cycles I made good use of the resources found at Project Vote Smart, especially the “political courage test.” Over the weekend I took some time to poke around the biographies of the major candidates for 2008 and was dismayed to discover that none of them have completed the test. C’mon candidates, be grown-up and provide us some answers already. Otherwise I’ll be forced to cast my vote based on your favorite food.
And since there is one candidate whom I like, who lists chili as his/her favorite food, I guess I’m all set for November.
Recently I have made good use of the Apache .htaccess file to redirect and rewrite URL’s to keep visitors from getting page not found errors. Moving three domains, creating a subdomain or two, and then moving things around again, has created ample opportunity for lost visitors.
There are lots and lots of pages in the Google search results for “.htaccess,” so here are my notes, all in one place, for your reading pleasure.
Redirect visitors from an old site to a new site
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !www.newsite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]Redirect visitors using .html links to .php links
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ http://newdomain.com/$1\.php [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.php$ http://newdomain.com/$1\.php [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/ [L,R=301]