Smith's Statements on Stuff

My tempestuous romance with my MacBook Pro continues, a heady mix of the joys of exploring a new windoze free world mixed with the pain of never reading the manuals and committing endless schoolboy errors.

I had the opportunity onsite to link my mbp to an external monitor during a meeting, and proudly brandished the mini-dvi to vga connector that had been sitting in the box when I unpacked the mbp. "Let's use the big screen" I cried. This nearly turned into actual tears when I took the time to look at the ports on my mbp and found it had a DVI port but not the mini one! The connector is for a macbook not a macbook pro!

fortunately the day was saved with a locally produced DVI to VGA connector.

I soon madeup with my mbp when I got a call from the office saying my 4gb memory upgrade had arrived. This was duly delivered today but the joy again turned to tears when I realised my mini screwdriver set is in my office desk, 24 miles away. Denied again!

Will this torment never end?

My lovely employers (should they be reading) recently furnished me with a MacBook Pro (oooh), after much grief with my HP XP machine.
Whilst I could have read the manual (not), I am transitioning the usual Admin way by having a go. Whilst it is a lovely machine I had two initial gripes to anyone who would listen:

1. No right click on the machine - right click works on a mouse, but only one button on the laptop - go figure.
2. No "page down" button! I was pressing the down arrow like a maniac when wading through long docs.
 
Of course, I now know that by merely placing two fingers on the touchpad and then clicking it acts as right click - very swish, and that pressing "fn" with the arrow is page down / up.
Took me quite a while to work this out.

Two very simple issues, easily resolved, which caused me to complain about an otherwise fantastic piece of kit.

What has this got to do with Notes? Well, in a number of recent conversations I've heard opinions that user training is not a high priority as part of an R8 upgrade. Tut tut.
So just remember - the simplest things that we assume users could figure out for themselves may in fact cause them grief. This will turn them from advocates to, um, non-advocates.

User education is key to getting acceptance of a new piece of software, and make them feel part of the process. Extend traditional training (handouts, sessions, cbt, floor walkers, cafe "drop-in desks", etc etc) and use some of the collab tools available - how about an upgrade project Blog, with weekly "what's new" articles? When you roll your 8 clients out set an RSS to the project blog to keep users up to date with developments and ideas. Think about a few useful widgets, create the catalog and use policies to point users to it. Go on, go, on, go on.

As part of setting up my Bleed Yellow profile I hummed and hahhed over a profile pic. I don't tend to have many pics that would be suitable, the only one I fancied was the account pic that the inbuilt camera on my mac took when I first set it up.

Coming from a windoze background I couldn't find where the picture was on the file system and repeated google attempts found frustrating accounts of iPhone picture syncs etc, but not what I wanted. Today I finally cracked it in Users\-your name-\Library\Application Support\Address Book\Images. (having said that I now can't recreate how I exported the image as a jpeg - I have soo much to learn on the Mac).

But, while it looks great small - when I import it into my profile it is sized up and distorts (a bonus some may say), so my search for a profile pic goes on....


yours in shadows (for now)

Peter