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This week, I will be attending my first Business Objects Partner Summit. Actually, this will be the first software conference that I have ever attended besides the Microsoft Office launch events I go to with each new release and my own company’s user conferences.

I am looking forward to seeing what Business Objects has in store for us, but I think I am most excited about spending time with the other members of my team that I haven’t seen since last July. Don’t get me wrong, I love working from home with all of the time I get to spend with my family, but there is definitely something to be said about team camaraderie. We have an outstanding group of people and it is always a fun and interesting time when we’re all in the same place at the same time.

If time permits (and confidentiality agreements allow), I will try to blog about anything cool that happens at the conference. I don’t expect that I’ll be doing any live blogging, but I’ll definitely write about anything that seems interesting.

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Google GmailFor those of you who are not familiar with Gmail, you soon will be. Gmail is Google’s free email service, and it is one of many excellent services that Google provides. Most of the people I know already use Gmail as their main email service, and I suspect that many more will soon join the ranks of devoted Gmail users.

Google has always offered a tremendous amount of free storage space with each Gmail account, and with competition from Yahoo and Microsoft, they continue to add space to each account for free. Right now, I have 6,290 MB of space. That’s over 6 GB of storage space for free!

The catalyst for this post is my wife’s less than a year old Dell laptop. Sadly, the hard drive in that machine is beginning to show the telltale signs of failure. You know the ones – the terrible scratching sounds, the no drive detected errors, etc. Needless to say, we have been scrambling to find good ways to make sure her important business files are safe and sound. The first thing we did was save the files off to a USB flash drive. This is a good short term solution, but flash drives are easily lost. We have also started to use Google Docs more so local storage is becoming less of an issue.

Then something came to me. Why not use the 6+ GB of storage I have with Gmail to store my important files on Google’s servers? Using Labels in Gmail makes organizing all of your files insanely easy, and of course, Gmail comes with the power of Google’s search if you ever need to find a specific file. Follow these easy steps to save your important files in your Gmail account.

1. From your Gmail Inbox, click the More Actions drop down box and select New Label.
2. Enter a name for your new label like “Documents” or “Files.” This will help you find your files later.
1. Compose a new message and enter your Gmail address in the To field.
2. For the message Subject, use the name of the file you are sending to Gmail.
3. In the message Body, enter keywords or phrases that will help you find the file in the future.
4. Attach the file to the message.
5. Send the message.
6. The new message will appear in your Inbox.
7. Select the message by clicking the checkbox next to the message.
8. Click the More Actions drop down box and select the Label you chose for your documents.
9. Click the Archive button to remove the message from your Inbox.

Your file is now saved on Google’s servers. In order to access your files in the future, simply select the Label you chose for your documents. Labels are usually displayed under the Chat window on the left side of the page. Clicking on a Label will show all of the messages with that label so you will be able to see all of the messages you have saved with your important files. You can also use the search feature in Gmail to find a specific file. This is why using descriptive file names and adding good keywords is very important.

I hope this helps you get more out of your Gmail account and avoid the problems of a hard drive failure.

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Happy New Year everybody! I hope the holidays were very good to all of you. My family and I had a wonderful time visiting family and friends in Chicago and Wisconsin, and now we’re back at home getting back to normal to start the new year.

I’m a little late out of the blocks with posting on Probstisms this year, but my plan is to post as often as I find interesting things to write about, and the first few days of 2008 have provided quite a few exciting things.

Stay tuned for what I hope will be an interesting year for Probstisms!

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Kyah and Noah with Santa

This photo was just too good to not share it with all of my readers. Click through to Flickr to see more Christmas related photos. I will add more to the set throughout the holidays.

I would like to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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While reviewing my Last.fm Dashboard yesterday, I found this excellent track from Christian McBride and his band. The track starts out as a jam but spontaneously evolves into James Brown’s Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose. Moments like this are the reason it is so fun to play in a band. You never quite know what’s going to happen when everyone starts stretching out. You can play the track here.

Christian McBride – Out Jam/ Give It Up Or Turint Loose

Back in the day, I played in a band called Real Jazz Quintet with my brother Jeff, my buddies Terry Brown and Rob Buckley, and a dude named Dave that played awesome piano. Well, one night at a coffee shop in Aurora, Illinois called Roasters, we had one of these moments, and luckily, we recorded it using an insanely cheap but effective boom box. Check out A-Town Drug Bust by Real Jazz Quintet.

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As many of you already know, my wife, Donnell, has been an Advisor for Lia Sophia for just under a year now. She has steadily grown her business over the last ten months or so, and I am very proud of her. She is truly an extraordinary woman.

A few months ago, Donnell wrote an article about Lia Sophia for B-Tique, Lifestyle & Fashion. In it, she explained how Lia Sophia was different and in my view, better than other direct sales companies I’ve heard or read about. It seems that not only is my wife an awesome Lia Sophia Advisor, she’s also a great writer. I am still a little confused why she referred to me as her third child, but I’m sure she’ll explain it to me some day using small, easy-to-understand words. 🙂

Anyway, check out her article when you have a chance. I think you’ll be sold on Lia Sophia as well.

If you’re interested in Lia Sophia, contact my wife through her website.

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Santa Claus

Just in time for the holiday season, Apple has released a new Get A Mac ad featuring good ol’ Saint Nick and our two favorite television personalities, Mac and PC. This time, they’re in wonderful CGI glory.

The Get A Mac ad campaign has been a huge success, and the ads are getting better and better as time goes on. Mac and PC have great timing together, and it’ll be a sad day when Apple changes to another ad campaign.

Anyway, while I was watching this latest ad, something came to me. I think PC (John Hodgman) would make a great voice over actor for a Disney/Pixar movie. He has great comedic timing, and his voice would be perfect for an animated character.

El Jobso, what do you think?

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The iMix feature in Apple’s iTunes Store is one that I have never really gotten in to. Sure, I used to mix cassette tapes when I was a kid, but for whatever reason, I’ve never really been one to build a lot of playlists in iTunes. That’s not to say that playlists and iMix aren’t really cool.

My buddy Terry Brown of Lazy Revolution fame sent an iMix to me today of some excellent jazz Christmas music. I’m not talking about the normal stuff you hear on the radio. Check out this iMix and see for yourself.

Now, to me, this is a great use of iMix. What better way to pass along some holiday cheer than to hip a friend on to some cool jazz music. If you have some favorite music you’d like to share, feel free to post a link in the comments section of this post.

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Traveling for work is always an interesting experience. A lot of questions flash through my mind before I leave. Will my kids be good for my wife while I’m gone? Will my flights leave on time? Will I run in to yet another incredible jerk on the plane that thinks he deserves something more than everyone else on the plane? Will the people at the client site be as sharp as nails or as dumb as rocks? Will I be able to get done faster than I thought so I can get home to my family? I’m sure a lot of business travelers have the same questions.

Traveling is always a crap shoot. Right now, I’m on a plane surrounded by a group with five tween or early teen kids. They all have their own gadgets, and they’ve generally been fairly well behaved. They have been watching movies with the speakers turned on which has kind of bothered me a bit, but I just cranked up the Allman Brothers on the iPod so I’m in good shape. One of the moms is directly in front of me and seems to be very unrefined and hick-ish, but I am flying to Saint Louis so I guess that’s to be expected a little. The guy next to me has clearly been on too many planes lately (he’s hunched over trying to sleep). I bet he does something similar to what I do. The guy next to him is the jerk of the flight who has treated a truly great flight attendant with complete disrespect. He doesn’t look like the typical road warrior so maybe he’s just always like that.

Anyway, like I said, traveling for work is always an interesting experience. Luckily, this is my last trip of the year. I wonder what 2008 will bring.

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I have been playing with Safari 3 on Mac OS X Tiger and Windows XP lately to see how it compares to Firefox. Safari 3 definitely launches faster than Firefox on both my Mac and PC, and it also seems to render pages faster. The RSS reader is still one of the best I have seen in any of the browsers although I have switched to Google Reader to keep track of my RSS feeds.

There are still some annoying page rendering differences between Firefox and Safari, and I’m not quite sure who to blame. Is it Apple that hasn’t built in support for the latest web standards, or is it the web designers that have built their website to look good on IE and Firefox? As a content creator, it is incredibly frustrating to me that each browser has its own quirks. My site looks perfect on Firefox and Safari, but it looks like crap in IE 6. For that, I place the blame on Microsoft for baking in a whole lot of proprietary code into IE 6. IE 7 does a much better job at rendering standards based pages, but it still has a ways to go.

I could go on and on forever about bad page rendering, but I did have a point for this post. Safari 3 has a really cool new feature that I have come to use a lot. Under the Window menu, there are two new options: Move Tab to New Window and Merge All Windows. I don’t have a whole lot of use for the first option, but I really like the Merge All Windows option. I have come to really enjoy using Tabs while browsing the Internet, and sometimes, a link will automatically open in a new window. I have to admit, it drives me nuts when this happens, and the Merge All Windows option has been a huge help.

Apple has once again introduced a great new feature to make browsing the Internet faster and easier. Now if they can get together with the major web sites to make sure the pages render properly, I’ll be a happy camper.