The last mountain

Its been an awesomely quiet week on the work front. Have done a lot of administration, organizing and promotional stuff but not much actual work. Really quite depressing. I have some bits and pieces of web dev to go on with.. and some of the same to do for ourselves and other things begin to look more organized but still. Blog hits continue to go up.. that is going much better, and the number of people looking at PerfectNotes from here is going up. Which is good. Its the only way I can justify this prodigious self serving ranting to my starving staff.

A couple of our clients are absolutely and totally flat out.. which makes me wonder why our local downturn. Its not such a complete downturn.. either, have had a dozen people or more ask for advice.. advice of the type that we cannot quite call consulting and charge for. Including one person wanting to talk about going from Thunderbird to Outlook. Can sum that bit of advice up pretty easy in one word, But it seems they were using a CRM package called ACT, Instead of ours. Sigh. And ACT cannot talk to IMAP. It needs Outlook. A reason to not use it right there I should think. Ahhh well. It turns out their is commercial software letting you turn IMAP to PST. And we have software of our own letting you go the other far more sensible way. So its all covered.

One of the things about proprietary software like MS Outlook is that it has its format for keeping data in. (PST) Athough PST supposedly subscribes to an open format no one else that I am aware uses it Getting it into another format to use with someone else's software is difficult and expensive.. Sometimes impossible. So once you have your 6 months worth of calendar stuff. email, business contacts and the like in Outlook its probably staying there. Welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft, loyal Microsoft sl... er customer.

Kathy is off to Echuca. She says to explore possible Virtual Assistant customers. But I happen to know that their is a blues festival happening there this week. I suspect a connection.

Last night was the last mountain stage of the Tour de France. A bunch of us went to Blackburn Cycling Club and watched it live. About 15 of us this time. Bundled in blankets, watching it on the big(ish) screen. eating hot snacks.. Listening to Penny being soft. It was all good.

The stage was amazing Contador. knew his real danger was Schleck and stayed glued to his back wheel. He had to stay within 8 seconds.. and Schleck had to pull out.. realistically something like 30 seconds. Each attacked savagely up the last mountain Eventually each attack ended with Contador 6 inches behind Schleck and the peleton coming apart behind them. And that's how it finished. Contador 6 inches behind and 8 seconds ahead. Schleck winning the stage. Contador almost certainly winning the tour. Desperately hurting riders coming up the hill in dribs and drabs. The remainder of the main peleton down to maybe 20 riders some 5 or 6 minutes down. Armstrong still in with them. A great evening.

Tomorrow I shall expand on my opinion of the Melbourne Bike Hire Scheme. Wonder if the Age will post my comment.