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I’ve been playing with Xobni off and on for a number of weeks (at one point it stopped loading and it was a few days before I had time to re-install, we also had some exchange server issues and I had to stop using Xobni for a while to diagnose). That being said, as beta software goes it’s very stable. Rare symptoms are CPU spiking and when it once failed to load and turned itself off. Given the quality of the product and polish I fully expect that by the time they go public beta it will be very solid. With that note…on to the review.

If you haven’t checkout the website, Xobni is an e-mail add-on for searching and managing e-mail and relationships. The primary interface is an outlook sidebar that, when minimized shows you your next meeting and some information related to the person who sent you the currently selected e-mail. When open, Xobni contains a myriad of contextual information and links.

There is a search box and two top level panels in the Xobni side bar: E-mail, which shows you information related to the currently selected e-mail and Organize, which displays upcoming appointments, to-do items (including flagged e-mails) and a stay in touch panel listing contacts with whom you have not communicated in a while.

E-mail

I used to have to pause my current “e-mail train of thought” and search for e-mails from someone. Xobni gives me another view, but that’s just the first step. In addition to finding a person and e-mail from the, Xobni shows related people, conversations with threaded e-mail chain, attachments and quick links to schedule a meeting, send an e-mail or skype. It’s extremely useful for drill-down searching. I can click on a conversation, show various levels of detail, identify an e-mail, click on another recipient and repeat. Xobni stacks the context in small bars at the top of the screen so I can quickly jump back to any point in my search.

E-mail analytics is interesting but not immediately useful as a productivity booster. I can see how much I have communicated with someone and sent vs. received quantity. Xobni also shows me when an individual tends to send me e-mail in a nice histogram.

Organize

The organized bar shows upcoming appointments (but not the current one – minor inconvenience) to do list items (including flagged e-mails, which is great) and a “Stay in touch list” of people Xobni says you haven’t communicated with in a while. For those of us who are e-mail whores, this is a great tool. If you hate talking to people this is either a gentle reminder that you should keep in touch or an annoying list of names that you don’t care about.

Props to Xobni for minimal usage of space. These are lists where I want to see as much as possible and scan with my eyes, not with my mouse.

I’ve found that when I need to get in touch with someone who sent me an e-mail a while back, Xobni is a top notch replacement for the “sort by sender, scroll till you find the last e-mail” approach. With Xobni I type in a name and I instantly get links to call (via skype), e-mail, schedule time, list of related contacts, last conversations (no matter how old) and files exchanged (both sent and received).

Conclusions

Xobni is a very nice addition to Outlook. It gives you an orthogonal view both for your current context and more interestingly to pursue a tangential train of thought. If you’d like an invite, I’ve got four left (as of 3-21-2008) so drop me a line.

Q: What do you do with leftover Chinese food takeout rice (or any leftover plain rice for that matter)?

A: Fry it!

Oil or butter

1 Cup of leftover rice (approx ½ a Chinese takeout box)

¼ cup frozen peas

2 tbps soy sauce + flavoring

1 egg, beaten

Saute the rice and peas in oil or butter. Don’t worry if the rice has gone stale, it will rehydrate. Add the soy sauce plus flavoring (Chinese fish sauce or salt or turmeric) to taste. Fry up the egg and mix it in. Serve hot!

Better yet – have leftover leftovers the next day!

In celebration of having only 380 days of bush left to go, a few links:

25 George W. Bush Facts

The Bush Countdown Blog

Six hospital staff including nurses, doctors and administrators on a smoking break outside the Nessel Cancer Services building.

Almost ended up taking the train to Salem this morning. That would have been interesting. Clearly something wrong with my coffee…

Only reason Huckabee is sticking it out is so that McCain will pick him for VP.

If you like commercials…I mean football, databases and politics and live in the greater Boston area this week is like Christmas, New Years and…well…Super Bowl Sunday back to back to back. I’m looking forward Super Bowl as is most of New England (and wherever that other team is from) though as usual more for the food and commercials. I do hear it is supposed to be a decent game as well. Monday brings the very first Database Day at MIT including talks from Dave DeWitt, and some recent database technology developments. And on Tuesday Massachusetts sees its first significant Democratic primary in over 20 years (and notably the first primary in which I feel compelled to vote). This week is shaping up to be an exciting week!

In an article by James Maguire, Robert Dewar rebuts criticism to his claim that Java is the root of all evil…I mean, is a symptom of the complacency exhibited by universities when it comes to training intelligent and skilled computer scientists (some of whom become quality programmers and software engineers). I’ll grant he may have some conceptual troubles understanding causality (note that I said symptom of where he says responsible for). Semantics aside, Dr. Dewar comes close to yet does not explicitly state the core problem. Good engineers enjoy solving systems problems (as opposed to social problems). Instead of designing courses to be generally appealing, universities should be optimizing for attracting and training problem solvers. This may mean adopting more esoteric approaches that do not readily make sense to companies looking for “java developers” and instead training problem solvers who can learn the tactical skills necessary to solve industry problems.

I’ve been looking through the features offered by Xobni which covers some of the things we were trying to capture with D.A.L.I. Software. They’ve got a neat referral program where clicking on this button:
will tell them that I’m referring people to their semi-closed beta program. If you click and I get to try the software I’ll write about it. If not, I’ll have to wait until they open it up…and then I’ll probably write about it.

The MBTA has been updating North Station over the past year and just recently installed new LED callboard for trains. I was amused this morning to see the sign transition and hear a simulated clickety clack that has log been associated with old style callboards that work by flipping cards.

For those of you a late to the game there’s still time to catch the latest “Wonder Years” like saga of a voice over narrator and his anecdotic youth. Though surprised they didn’t cast Fred Savage for the part of Ted Mosbey, our generation is comforted still by the endearing words of Bob Saget, former loving father of three (ok, four) blondes. A show that if it succeeds in its quest to work its way into the vernacular could be a contender for the “Seinfeld” of our generation, “How I Met your Mother” has gone well beyond the plateau created by shows such as “Scrubs” in integrating the burgeoning community of HMYMites. While it maintains culturally relevant music, self-referential clichés, and a facebook profile, HIMYM has a clear grasp on the fundamental experiences that defined us as the grunge generation. Far from being “a show about nothing,” while on eternal quest for that singular story identified by its namesake HIMYM continues to assemble a collection of non-sequiturs and idioms that may yet propel it to the level of “Double Dipping” and “Festivus” whose origins we in all likelyhood first caught in re-runs on TBS (sadly not in HD). The mix of characters (a “normal” guy, a “crazy” guy and two incorrigible accessories) closely mirrors the chemistry that gave Seinfeld nine long years resulting in everyone going to jail (hope I didn’t ruin that for anyone). As the normal guy, Ted Mosbey mostly has things happening to him and regularly discovers that the situation usually gets worse when he tries to actually do something. The show seems to be held back by the driving need for Ted to find his future wife. While the quest was a useful crutch to kick off the series, HIMYM is at risk of being plagued by the same matchmaking syndrome that doomed “Scrubs” to mediocrity in season four. Here’s hoping HIMYM can drop the albatross of plot devices that is relationships and continue to concoct shenanigans that are the stuffs of watercooler conversation.

I was initially taken aback by this blog’s High School rating at the Blog Readability Test. Certainly this puts me in my place compared to Concurring Opinions which clocks in at College (Undergrad). I then posited that I might better judge my level of sophistication based on the blogs I read until I saw their ratings at Middle School and Elementary School levels (links withheld to protect the innocent). Perhaps this means I read blogs that are accessible or perhaps I’m just lazy in what I choose to read.

The crack reporting team at the New York Times have broken the story on how Pet Projects Are Flourishing in Congress. Never mind that “the Democratic totals are less than half than the record set by Republicans when they controlled Congress in 2005,” because “they are far higher than the levels just 10 years ago.” Just ten years ago! The rest of the article is copy and pasted from congressional reports and the same quotations repeated by different members of congress. If you make it past the headline towards the end of the first page of dribble you might learn that thought “the volume of earmarks in spending bills has exploded in the past decade, from about 3,000 in 1996 to almost 16,000 in 2005,” in fact “critics acknowledge that the Democrats have made the system less secretive and slightly less of a free-for-all.”

Checkout my twitter profile.

Dial tone

“Standard” phone ring

Records

Cassette Tapes

CDs

Desktop computer

Live TV

Roaming

Being without a phone

Ethernet

Floppy Disk

Non-hybrid car

$1/gallon gasoline

The evening news

A regular commute

CRTs

Film

VCRs

Rewind to start

Commercial interruptions

Long Distance phone call

Manual car door locks

Turn-key ignition

Spitting watermelon seeds

“Stop wasting film”

7 digit phone numbers

There have been numerous references to the war in Iraq as Vietnam, WWII and the American Civil War. A more apt comparison (and likely eventual outcome) is the British in Palestine. The US seems to be repeating the mistakes of the British Empire and Soviet Union. Best I can tell our only hope is to elect a leader who has some common sense or has at least read some.

Very cool
Rube Goldberg machine

They say sales is all about telling a story. Some stories are too long.

A detailed analysis of Gen Y in the workplace - from one of our own.

Flags of the world by area of color. Click a flag to see which country.