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Roll your own Bill Gates workflow for free
by Victor Agreda, Jr. Apr 6th 2006
Want to work like Bill Gates? As has been widely
circulated around the interweb, the world's most technologically advanced human has walked us all through his
workflow. Unfortunately for us mortals, he's using a bunch of bloated, pricey MS-branded tools. So I took his
tools, found free alternatives, and reconfigured his workflow to be a little cheaper. There's nothing I can do about
hardware though. So if you're looking for a $100 Tablet PC, sorry folks. I couldn't find an OSS version of whiteboard
capture tools either, probably because it relies on hardware. I will admit that Bill's three screens improve
productivity. Now if I could only afford two at once... But still, his major goals are the same of most managers:
reduce paper, increase communications, and share information centrally. So let's look at these, shall we?Email & Calendars
Obviously Bill's going to use Outlook. He's fortunate enough to have assistants filter his email. Mere mortals will have to depend of their ISP and local softwares. My recommended Outlook replacement is Thunderbird, for its cross-platform goodness. Want to know how to use Thunderbird, and retrain yourself? Check out this series on using Thunderbird, a very thorough walk through from installation to spam filtering. To integrate calendars, you'll want to stick with the iCalendar format, which is supported by Sunbird, Mozilla's standalone calendar application. My preference in calendars is Calendar, also from Mozilla, because it integrates with Thunderbird and Mozilla browsers. iCalendar is also supported in OS X's iCal app, so Mac users can keep their native app if need be. If you need to sync with Palm devices, you can try using PHP iCalendar in conjunction with this Datebook to iCal exporter. If anyone knows of a more elegant solution, I'm all ears. Next up: your document creation and sharing issues solved...
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
