It is almost September and I’m already getting emails trying to claim a date for a Christmas Party.  ‘Date Claiming’ has become a very common occurrence in my inbox of late, and I must admit to finding the habit a little presumptuous.  While it seems like a smart idea on the surface to get the date booked in everyone’s calendars, such an extended date claimer means that it is near impossible to actually cancel should something better/more urgent/more important come along. 

Don’t get me wrong; I have no problem with date claimers that are set for a month or so in advance for events that the marketing stuff just isn’t ready for.  But for a party in December, I think that might be pushing the envelope just a bit.

/rant

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

DIY Planner has an amazing article today on simplicity.

A number of points in this article really struck a chord with me and have given me a new resolve to clean out some of the physical and emotional ‘junk’ in my life.  I want rid of the external CDRW drive hiding in my closet, the pack of truly unattractive tarot cards I purchased a while ago and will never, ever use willingly and the pile of photographs hiding in boxes and frames that I just don’t look at.

I’m going to chuck out all the things (including clothes) that I haven’t used in a year.  I’m going to scan all those old photographs and put them into Picasa so if I do want to find them, I can.  I’m then going to delete all the old digital photographs clogging up Picasa (and my hard drive) that just aren’t any good. 

And I’m going to sit down with a piece of beautiful paper and a lovely pen and work out what is really important in my life.  I spend far too much time with things that don’t matter, and not nearly enough time with the things (and people) in my life that have great worth and bring me so much joy.

The world is really big. But regardless of how big the world is, we can’t all live in the same place. There just isn’t room.

The world is so big, in fact, that it has up to 39 different time zones. Hey, my country alone has seven. In order to organise all these time zones, there is an established method for calculating exactly where you lie in the world compared to everyone else. UTC offset (for me it is UTC+10) makes it very easy to calculate exactly what time it is somewhere else.

So why is it that we are all very protective of our own times; preferring to assume that everyone will automatically know the time you are talking about? I’m pretty sure that if I started talking about AEST and ACST (or the unusual CWST), you’d have to hit up Google for a clue as to where I was.

This leads me to two quite similar pet hates:

1. People who arrange telephone meetings but don’t mention that daylight saving has kicked in and they aren’t operating at the same time as they were the last time you spoke; and

2. Websites and emails that use named timezones (like PST or WEST) but don’t actually mention what the UTC offset for these times are, forcing you to rush off to timeanddate.com to check whether you’ll be awake for the event.

Number 1 in my list is generally very effectively handled by failing to show up for the meeting just once, and then working it out. Number 2 is a little trickier and something that I run into almost every day – not everyone understands the various different timezone names for each country, let alone what time that actually is relative to their own location.

I understand that PST stands for Pacific Standard Time and probably works in cities like LA and San Fransisco, but I don’t automatically know off the top of my head what time that would be when it is 9am in my time zone (AEST). Many websites automatically calculate the time change and adjust the time zone you see, but for static information (especially human generated), could we please include the UTC offset figure when talking about a time that matters, unless we are really, really sure that the only people that will see it will instantly understand what you are talking about?

/rant.

Just yesterday I completed a rather large powerpoint presentation.  It turned out to be quite a team effort and while I am pleased it is over, I will admit to not being that thrilled with the results.

If only we’d read Merlin’s post today about creating excellent presentations.  Solid advice there that I’ll definitely be using next time.

Lifehacker has an amazing tip today; accessing Google’s Calendar via an Outlook Calendar page. 

I’ve just tried this and found that not only can I display my gcal in a new calendar in Outlook, I can use the same trick to enable my gmail in a similar way.  This is going to save screen real-estate and also a fair bit of time waiting for windows to open so I can check if an appointment in my Outlook is also in my gcal page.  Happy happy.