Years back, when I was using Windows 2000, I had a little program called Taskbar Organizer that would let me drag and drop the buttons on the taskbar so I could keep them in the order I wanted. As a developer, I tend to have a lot of different windows open, and I like some of them to be in the same place whenever I go looking for them.

With the move to XP, Microsoft changed the code behind their taskbar and Taskbar Organizer no longer worked. I looked around for a while after upgrading, but couldn't find anything and eventually gave up... then the other day I found this: Taskbar Shuffle, which does pretty much the same thing, except it works for Vista and XP as well as for earlier versions of Windows. Handy little tool if you're obsessive compulsive about the order of your applications on the taskbar like I am.

I have a lot of email addresses. I have a couple of my own for the domain names I own, plus webmaster addresses, support addresses, and then the addresses I give out when shopping online or signing up for forums or newsletters. I'd been using Mozilla Thunderbird to manage all of it, but there were a number of limitations to this setup. First and foremost being the issue of synchronization. I could generally keep my incoming mail synchronized by setting my mail server not to delete messages right away so that both my desktop and laptop would be able to grab all my new mail, but sending mail was a bigger issue. Generally the mail I sent would only be on one or the other. And the idea of BCCing myself on all mail just doesn't appeal.

Having set up a GMail account a while ago, I found the interface nice, clean, and easy to deal with. However, I don't want to use an email address that ends in "gmail.com", so I started looking into forwarding my other addresses to my GMail account, and as I was digging found Google Apps which lets you manage email from your own domain through Google, as well as brand it a little, share calendars and documents, and it's all free for the basic setup. $50 per user per year isn't bad at all either for 25 GB of space and other features they offer with their premium edition.

One of the nice things about it is that Google supports IMAP for their email, which my hosting provider doesn't. This lets me keep everything in sync in one place since all my sent email gets placed on the server. Thunderbird has IMAP support, as well as offline support so that I can make sure all the email gets downloaded physically to my laptop before going on the road just in case I need to look up something in my email when I don't have access to the internet.

There's also a couple of Thunderbird plug-ins that let me sync my calendar and contacts through Google as well:
- Lightning is the calendar plug-in for Thunderbird
- Provider for Google Calendar allows you to edit Google calendars instead of just view them. Lightning can natively view calendars because Google makes them available in iCal format, but you need the above plug-in if you want to actually edit them through Thunderbird.
- Zindus lets you synchronize your contacts in Thunderbird with your Google contacts.

Now if I can just find a way to synchronize my contacts with my phone, I'll be happy. You can set up Google to send SMS notifications for events on your calendar. Which is nice as a stop gap, but being able to sync the calendar on my phone with my Google calendar(s) would be better.

My old Motorola RAZR just wasn't cutting it anymore, so I decided to get myself a new phone last week. I'd been kinda looking around off and on for a while since I want something that has some of the "Smart Phone" capabilities, but isn't some huge monstrosity like the Blackberries or full blown PDAs. All I really want is a calendar, todo list, email, notes, and alarms... plus of course the basic calling and SMS features. Anything that includes a full QWERTY keyboard as buttons is going to be too big.

So I looked around a bit and found the Motorola A1200 (Ming) which seemed to fit pretty much all my criteria, with a microSD expansion slot to boot... though limited to 2GB I found out today. I highly doubt I'll ever need that much though. I suppose if I used it as my MP3 player as well I might come close, but I have an iPod for that. It also has the typical camera and video, which I seldom used before and don't expect to start now, but the voice recorder might come in handy for taking notes on the fly.

I was a little miffed that a Canadian company, SelectGSM.com, neglected to mention the fact that the phone had to ship from Hong Kong, and therefore I had to pay duty on it... but it was still cheaper than the competition overall and arrived in 3 days, so I mostly forgive them.

My only major issue now is syncing the contacts in it to my GMail account. There actually are a couple services out there to do this, but until Rogers/Bell/Telus stop screwing over consumers, I'm not tempted to pay the extravagant fees they require to be able to access the internet for over the air sync or email. The Motorola software that comes with it is nice enough, but really I have no urge to keep multiple places up to date. Seems like it'd be easy to find something to sync contacts either with GMail or Thunderbird from my desktop, but it's proving much harder than I anticipated. Maybe I can convince Rogers to throw some data transfer in since I'm using them for multiple products... or maybe the auction of the wireless spectrum will actually force prices to drop to something reasonable. Canadians pay the most for the crappiest coverage of any country in North American, Europe, and Asia. Hopefully that'll change before not too long here.

As happens every couple years, especially around the time I have to renew my domain, the site got a facelift. I'm still trying to keep the place XHTML and CSS compliant, but opted to use Simple PHP Blog for this section, with just a couple of tweaks of my own. I didn't want to have to set up a database for the blog, since I'd prefer to be able to just copy the directory to transfer it if the need arises. Simple PHP Blog fits that need nicely. Plus it seems to be clean, and doesn't have a whole bunch of "features" that I'll never use.

For those keeping up, I'm currently in Toronto, the city of my youth, and working on contract for Knight Financial and New Media Learning. That takes most of my time up, but hopefully I'll be better about keeping this place up to date as well.