Almost famous

This morning I had a phone call from an ABC TV journalist.

I gather he was doing a follow-up story on the Adelaide woman who has been arrested in the US allegedly trying to meet up with a 16 year old.

I'm not exactly sure how he contacted me, but I'm guessing it is related to the fact that I've done some presentations on Internet Safety for Children and that I work here at the University of South Australia.

Anyway, he rang back later and I got the impression he really wanted someone who was an 'expert in the field' - eg. had the IT experience but also direct Internet Safety experience with children too. I'm happy to be an IT expert, but internet safety isn't part of my day-to-day job, so I'm not willing to call myself an 'expert' for that.

Anyway, I'll try and watch the news tonight to see how the story ended up.

Seven Fold

The band, at various times known as Verandah and more recently Kaboodle is now known as Seven Fold.

Hoping that this name may last a bit longer than the others, I've taken the plunge and created a band blog.

I've also invited the other band members to contribute to the blog, so hopefully it starts to record a bit of the continuing history of what we're up to.

Clearing Your Inbox

I read J.D. Meier's Clearing Your Inbox post a few weeks ago, and thought I'd give it a try.

I created two new sub-folders in my inbox - 'archive' and 'indirect', and added a rule for moving indirect emails:

Apply this rule after the message arrives move it to the Indirect folder except if my name is in the To or Cc box

I then moved all the items in my Inbox into the 'archive' folder, so that my Inbox is now empty.

I've found that this does make a difference to using Outlook. Items only stay around in the Inbox for a few hours, and are either

• deleted
• replied to (in which case I can delete the original)
• moved to the 'archive' folder

I'm applying the same criteria to items in the 'indirect' folder too. One benefit is that Indirect items are almost always less of a priority, so I don't need to check these as often.

I also decided that there was no point in keeping old copies of server log emails I receive - so rather than copy them to my PST file, I just set those folders to permanently delete items older than 2 weeks.

About the only downside was when I checked my inbox on my iPAQ, and got a shock that there were no emails at all. I thought something had gone horribly wrong until I remembered that this is how it should be now!