Mojo...

A while ago I got one of those new FreeAgent portable drives from Seagate, hoping that the advertised ability to take your work environment with you was something more than just a rewarmed version of U3 technology, which has been applied with almost imperceptible success in the thumb drive market (at least in my limited view). While hoping for the best, I was prepared for the worst, and figured that the "worst case scenario" was my acquiring a reasonably priced drive with twice the capacity of my laptop.

What I wanted to do was offload my iTunes application (and library) from my laptop to something that would hold both without leaving any permanent footprint on my VAIO. (Basically, this means installing iTunes on the FreeAgent drive so that no residue finds its way into the VAIO's registry.)

The FreeAgent add-on software - whose name I have forgotten - was only a trial version, requiring yet another module to implement the functionality that I sought. So I installed trial versions of the add-on software and the add-on to the add-on, and attempted to install iTunes.

No joy.

Somewhere in my gyrations about the Web, I picked up the name of something called MojoPac, which I downloaded and installed as a 30-day trial. I was pleased that iTunes installed like a champ. Office 97 installed like a champ as well, onto a drive called "C" that has nothing to do with the drive installed in my VAIO (and which drive is inaccessible while Mojo is running).

With the ability to switch back and forth between Mojo and my VAIO (as "host") it's like having two environments running on one piece of iron.

It's not all fun and games, though.

Primo, if I leave the system alone for a while, Windows (on the "host") will eventually try to go into standby mode, but is prevented by the Mojo application. If the host system is trying to go into standby because of a low battery condition, the results could be unpleasant (loss of data, file corruption).

Secondo, the ability to carry your environment with you, with your music, applications, data, etc. is a double-edged sword. An external drive is much easier to forget to take with you when you go on the road (I mean, it's not a computer, see?), and for the same reason, I imagine it'd be easier to misplace or have someone misplace it for you, if you get my drift, while you are on the road. I'll post more about this issue in some other rock, later.

Terzo - and this is a big one - there is iTunes.

( ...on authorizations, or lack of them, explained in geek behind the cut! )

Ya gotta love that DRM! (And I'm sure it's only going to get "better" as time goes by... but not for us poor users, but again, I digress...)

Quarto, portability only extends as far as the administrator of any given machine allows. You can't take the Mojo drive and connect it to a machine that has a lot of restrictions on it, because despite the fact you are isolated from the machine's drives, you are still running a program on the machine and are making use of resources such as network cards. Still, this really isn't a limitation of Mojo, but of Life.

* * *The loaf I made earlier today... oops, yesterday, came out pretty well, except that the very top looks like it collapsed. I suspect there may have been too much water in the mix, this time. The product, however, is edible. I look forward to more experimentation.

So, it's just after midnight as I type this, and I have a pile of stuff that has to get done tomorrow, since today turned into one more of those "days off" that folks have from time to time. (This may be an indicator of burnout, I suspect, but I'm going to enjoy such indicators while I can!)

I plan to get up early tomorrow (around 5 am) and really hit it hard, and then try to get some sound sleep late in the afternoon, as another week of MSR night shifts starts tomorrow night.

Cheers...

Short ramble...

I've been up since about 5:45 am, and have done one hazard report since 6:30.

I took a short break a few minutes ago to read the first few pages of How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less, by Milo Frank. Its theme goes well with some of the Gitomer advice I've been reading (as in: develop a 30-second marketing message and know it cold).

The first example Frank gives (a contrasting pair of scenarios where a manager is interacting with a corporate beancounter) demonstrates the difference between knowing what you want and not knowing, and it tweaked something in my mind, in an allied area: that of asking for information.

Somewhere along the way, whenever I need to ask folks to help me understand something (e.g., a terminology issue or some technical question), I've developed the habit of posing the question in such a way as to show that I've thought about a possible answer, typically including it along with my question.

For example, instead of asking "Could you show me how to derive expression X from Y?" I'll ask, "Could you take a look at my attempt below to derive expression X from Y and show me where I went wrong?" I do this with terminology queries all the time, too.

I suppose I do that because simply asking a "naked" question seems, to me, to imply that I'm too lazy to take a crack at it myself.

At any rate, there seems to me to be a correlation between the two: Knowing what you want correlates with having taken a crack at some issue on your own.

Beyond this initial impression, I am not prepared to further ramble, as I want to do two more hazard reports and 1000 words of translation before turning to the home stretch (relatively speaking) on the paper chase.

Cheers...

A shiny new toy...

A few days ago, somewhere in my wanderings, I read something about how pivot tables are likely the #1 least-understood-yet-powerful feature of Excel, so in between things, I dropped into the Barnes & Noble (where I had spied a display book devoted to the use of pivot tables in Excel 2007) and spent time reading a bit about the subject.

As I turns out I have about 76784 words to edit and update between now and Thursday morning, where said words are distributed among 12 files, I decided to try creating a pivot table of my own, to help figure out how to even the load over four days.

I gotta tell ya, it's pretty slick. Now, I just have to make sure I don't turn into one of those people who starts to wander about looking for incompletely driven nails to hit with my new hammer!

Yea, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

Cheers...

Treading carefully...

No sooner had I opened the directory for the next document to edit/update, than I find two previous English versions, dated February 2007 and October 2006, with instructions to update the one that best conforms to whatever is in the Russian. Upon opening the Russian I am to use as a source, I find it is a revision of a version dated... October 2005!

As the doctor said when a certain someone was born... this is gonna get ugly!

Cheers...