A project I had the pleasure of working on back in 2015 has won the Alberta Transportation Minister’s 2018 Award of Excellence for Safety Innovation.
Road Condition Warning System
Category: Work
Much Work. Many Grumble.
Outlook 2013 Search Folders – How to filter by folder
Just a short note to hopefully help others:
If you are creating a “Search Folder” in Outlook, and are using custom criteria, and one of them is “In Folder” with the condition “Does not Contain”, you must list all your keywords in a single criterion.
For example, I have a Search Folder called “Weekly Threads” to help me review the email activity from the week when writing my weekly report.
On the advanced tab, you can add the filter expressions you want. I don’t want to see anything from my Junk or Deleted Items folders, and I was struggling to get my Search Folder to work.
I stumbled across this article, which describes how to use Search Folders, within which was a description on how the author of that article filtered out mail from multiple folders.
Until now, I hadn’t been able to get it to work, and resorted to filtering out by sender. Now, I have the answer! You must put all the folder search terms into one, single search criterion for the filter to work.
Like this:
I find it strange, or at best non-intuitive that you while you can use multiple criteria for things like “From”, you must use only one criterion for the “In Folder” field. But, it works, so on to the next thing!
Today in IT-Fail: half of my email went missing for a week
We won a big tender this week, which is very exciting! But then people started congratulating me in the corridor which surprised me because we hadn’t issued a press release or anything. So I asked around, and there was an email sent to the whole company that I didn’t get.
A little but of sleuthing discovered that the email hadn’t made across the Lotus Notes – Outlook chasm. And lo and behold, neither had any of the email sent directly to the LN email address. For a whole week. Including stuff from customers, my boss and corporate training.
Yay.
You see, I have three corporate email addresses, and only one of them is directly delivered to Outlook. The other two I have had forwarded by using LN Mail Rules, which mysteriously stopped working sometime this week.
I created the highest possible priority ticket in the helpdesk system, because I’m travelling all next week. No response yet.
Hat Tracker
Boss: “What are your near-term objectives?”
Me: “Have you heard the expression ‘wearing many hats’?”
Here is my current Hat Tracker:
| Activity | End Date | Hat Worn | |||
| Dev Manager | SME | Product Owner | Scrum Master | ||
| Product Launch | ongoing | √ | |||
| Major Revision to product | March | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Major customer migration | March | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Major Revision to product | not scheduled | √ | |||
| Product Launch | Feb | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Technical Design | End of Q2 | √ | |||
That’s a total of 15 hats.
Site Trip with Co-worker Summarised in One Image
I was driving, and therefore sitting on the left. He was the passenger, sitting on the right. The dual climate controls were maxed in opposite positions.
Pretty much describes our working relationship as well. We rarely found common ground on anything.
Thoughts on Box
I was recently asked to comment on Box. Here is what I said:
Sync is not being available for our enterprise configuration, due to it not being incremental (which I understand is due for release next year!! Q4-2014)Its here now, and works great, with basic collision detection.- There is no easy way to group my collaborations. So I end up with a very long list of folders in the root, a common complaint.
There is no tree navigation.I got over this.Preview view is the default for all files even though the preview viewer doesn’t correctly render them.File handling once in the right directory is admittedly not bad. In this regard I only think it lacks a file compare/merge feature, and the ability to insert into a document’s history. Mostly made redundant now that Sync is working. I manage everything on my local PC.Email notifications for me have never worked.ResolvedWhen I want to share something with a colleague by using the “@” prefix, I seem to get a list of the entire company, not my previously chosen collaborators.This is much better now. Your top collabs will also sort to the top, and that depends to be on a per-shared-folder basis, which means, relevant to the subject at hand. I’s still like to be able to do this like how Facebook does it. Start typing “@Fred B” and it presents a list, select the person you mean, and then be able to delete the last name. Make’s it less formal when having conversations in the comments.- Apparently to get access to Box from my iPhone I need to install a VPN. What the hell is a web app behind a VPN? Doesn’t that negate the entire purpose of it being web based?
- This one is still dumb.
More Buzzword Bingo
I continue to keep myself awake in those long drawn-out business meetings by been keeping track of buzzwords. Here are the results from a recent one, which was a real snoozer.
| Buzzword | Count | Context |
| Solution | 30 | as in “integrate our solution to align with key strategies” |
| Synergy | 27 | as in “leveraging key synergies” |
| Strategy | 15 | as in “leveraging key strategies” |
| Growth | 15 | as in “this is a real value add, and will assist our growth” |
| Key | 14 | as in “leveraging key strategies” |
| Integrate | 12 | as in “a key transformation will be to integrate our key synergies” |
| Smart | 8 | as in “Smart City, Smart Grid, Smart Phones, Smart Hamsters” |
| Transform | 8 | as in “a key transformation will be to integrate our key synergies” |
| Role | 7 | as in “identify our key role in the market to differentiate our strategy” |
| Focus | 5 | as in “our key focus area in the marketplace” |
| Footprint | 4 | as in “reduce our eco footprint” |
| Differentiate | 4 | as in “identify our key role in the market to differentiate our strategy” |
| Digitization | 4 | as in “digitize our work practises” |
| Dimension | 3 | as in “explore the other dimensions of our market” |
| Efficiency | 3 | as in “increase the effeciency of our key processes” |
| Profitability | 3 | as in “monitor our processes to increase our profitability” |
| Align | 3 | as in “align our key synergies” |
| Cyclicality | 2 | as in “the cyclicality of our business” |
| Sustainability | 2 | as in “energy sustainability” |
| Objective | 2 | as in “our objective is to integrate key markets” |
| Space | 2 | as in “leverage our key strengths in the utilies space” |
| Emerging | 1 | as in “emerging trends” |
| Initiative | 1 | as in “we must take the initiative to leverage our key synagies” |
| Leverage | 0 | as in “leveraging key strategies” |
Maybe one day I’ll post an update on how these change over time.
The case of the never-closing support ticket
Usually, they are too quick to close issues that have not been solved.
This time, for fun, they will not close an issue that was successfully resolved in July last year.
Hilarity ensues.
I posted this not too long ago. Huh. I should probably find something else to whinge about.
In case you’re wondering, the attachment referred to in the entry for July 22 is here.
The Never Closing Support Ticket
Usually, support tickets are closed before you’ve had a chance to tell them that the “fix” they’ve applied hasn’t worked.
Currently, I have ticket open that they wont close, or more accurately, don’t realise it is still open. Every once in a while I will add another comment to the ticket, to see if that will jiggle something loose. so far it hasn’t and it is six months and counting.
Your place of encounter
No mean intentions [1], but these are funny Spanglish artefacts seen around here….
My place of encounter? Great! Do I need my boots of escaping?
And when it’s done, it rubs the lotion on it’s skin.
[1] I have high respect for anyone who can speak multiple languages. Having lived in multiple places where English was a second language, that respect only grows. But c’mon, we can still have a giggle at the funny things we see, right?