Email is broken

I'm so close to giving up on Email all together.

I have many email accounts and they all do different things. Everything was cool till Evolution (my mail client) started being selective about what email it would download from the server. Before that I started noticing a load of email on my personal email address, so I was having to add spam control to that account.

Don't get me started on my work email. My BBC email is like the remains of a atom bomb. I blame Outlook 2003 for a start, add limited spam control and the fact my email address is everywhere online. You have a recipe for another atom bomb. Ideally I would use another mail client like Thunderbird but thats only half of the story. The out office no longer works, mail rules like automaticly forward messages are disabled and usually when I got time to reply to emails like at home while watching tv is made very difficult using a windows only VPN solution or hourly webmail option.

Yes its bloody frustrating and I can't help but think I'm much more productive when using social software. Hell even instant messenger is better for me that email.

Suw's talk from Fowa and Web2.0 Expo about the problems people have with email was only the start. I was seriously shaking my head up and down like a nodding dog when I heard Luis Suarez from IBM talk at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe. The talk was about his battle with giving up on email. People said he would be fired but 37 weeks on, he's still working for IBM.

I think theres something about this and the slow movement which fit really well. Its not simply junking your email, its about applying the right amount of effort at the right point. I looked at my stats for working in Rescue time and seriously the amount of time I spend in Outlook or Evolution is just wrong. My Efficiency is very high but its all happening within email.



Its time to sort all these things out once and for all.

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A professional camera setup using one Sanyo Xacti?

Sanyo HD1000 being used

When I first saw the Sanyo Xacti HD1 I thought wow you could film a movie on this easily. Some people totally disagree but I felt the quality was good enough to pass for most things online and even offline. But to be fair the mpeg4 codec wasn't quite good enough and the lens wasn't big enough to get lots of light down it. So when I first saw the Sanyo Xacti HD1000, I started thinking hey this is the revision which could be the break through camcorder.

Well it seems I'm not the only one, thinking this way. I met a startup company doing interviews with people all over the place using simply a Sanyo Xacti HD1000 with a radio mic and large light. It was perfect, the presenter would move the medium hand mic back and forth between himself and the person being interviewed. While the camera man would hold the camera generally quite still and check the levels on his in the ear headphones.

I grabbed a few minutes with the camera man and asked him about his setup. He said he use to walk around with a Canon DV camera but its too big and heavy plus the “downtime” of encoding footage was costly. He said the camera is great but the light makes all the difference to the footage. He also said he'd considered the HD1010 but he's waiting for the 3CCD version before upgrading.

I have more photos of course

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