Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Pain!

Medieval thumbscrew.

I'm not referring to my recent surgery, from which I'm recovering nicely. Now that all the hardware has been removed from my right arm, I can do some things (walk with the arm hanging down, fold sheets, pull keys from my jeans pocket) painlessly for the first time in two years.

No, my agony is coming from a Perfect Storm of cyber woes:
  1. My 3rd PDA in as many years died just before my surgery.
  2. After 4 years, my laptop is getting so slow that the only solution is to wipe it clean and reinstall EVERYTHING. Which will happen later today under the supervision of the Boy Wonder, who was the IT guy for Obama's San Antonio and Philly offices during the primary campaign. (BW: "All those years alone in my room paid off!" Me: "Grrr...")
  3. After 12 years of using Eudora for email, I'm switching to Outlook. Its "import" feature falsely claims that it will transfer the Eudora address book, which means I have to manually copy each of the hundreds of entries--the reason why I didn't switch 4 years and many entries ago. (I know what I'll be doing during the rest of my R&R!) And backing up Outlook data files, I discovered last night, is another royal pain.
Condolences and advice gratefully accepted.

6 comments:

Jennifer Macaire said...

I feel your pain.
Ahh - the wonders of technology, and the horror of the glitch.
I lost a half a day's worth of work today when the electricity went off. For some reason, my automatic backup, which I installed just in case of power outages, didn't work.

:-(
But I'm glad to hear your arm is feeling better!
:-)

David said...

No! Not Outlook! I've used it at work for years at various jobs and hate it. It's awful.

Eudora has its limitations, but it's still far better than Outlook. For an upgrade, did you look at at Thunderbird?

I did and decided to stay with Eudora for now, but Thunderbird will keep on maturing, so in time it will probably be the Thing to Use.

Christine Fletcher said...

Ooh, I don't even want to think about leaving Eudora! You are a far braver woman than I.

Sounds like this last surgery was the ticket! I hope recovery continues to go smoothly--Congrats!

Lisa said...

I am very glad to know you're finally relieved of so much physical pain!

As for the import/export pain, manually copying all of those addresses can't be the answer! Have you tried the two step process of importing your Eudora address book into Outlook Express, so you can then import the Outlook Express address book into Outlook?

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011391911033.aspx

Obie Joe Media said...

I can't be of much use for advice on the mail program, having only used Mail for the Macintosh for the last decade. Would you consider GMail? We moved our company's e-mail to Google's cloud computing, instead of continung to use our own server, and so far, so good.

Really glad to hear of your arm's improvment! I shudder to think of having that much hardware within one's body.

Bella Stander said...

I tried importing the Eudora address books into Outlook Express. Alas, nothing doing.