In the 70’s and 80’s we heard a lot about how technology built for NASA worked its way into our everyday lives. Now that model has changed – technology built for cutting edge games is working its way into our lives.  I thought it was kind of cool when ESPN set up cameras across the football field so they could give us views almost as though we were in the action – just like many of the video games my kids play.

But late last year Microsoft rolled out a new technology called Kinect that lets you be the game controller. That is pretty cool. Whether you’re driving, dancing or a variety of other activities, your movement is what controls what happens on screen. Seems pretty cool for game technology.

Now pause and think how that could affect your computing experience. If you’re creating a new design, instead of drawing with a mouse, wouldn’t it be cool to draw with your finger – not on the screen but on your desktop? If you’re an architect, wouldn’t it be cool to build a house or building with your hands and have it show up on screen? Med students could perform surgery, rocket scientists could build spacecraft, and the list of possible uses just goes on and on.

Some of the cool things that Tony Stark does in the Iron Man movie as he builds himself a new iron man suit might not be that far off. Add some Kinect-type technology to hologram technology, and you’ll be able to build your own Iron Man suit – well maybe we’re not quite there yet but these technologies are developing.

How does that affect you? You might be done with school but the technology will affect us all. Wouldn’t it be cool to flick your finger through your emails without holding on to a mouse or touching a keyboard? Kiss double-clicking goodbye and greet the finger tap? Be able to dictate (did I mention it also incorporates voice recognition?) a lengthy letter (or chapter of your book) and then edit with your hands instead of having to scroll and click with your mouse and type with your keyboard? The potential impact, on our everyday computing experience, is immense.

And surfing the internet? No more clicking links – just point at them. Marrying Kinect to the Internet could open up some amazing possibilities. Have you heard the stories about people in remote outposts getting sick? Now instead of needing a full time doctor, you could take the right tools and the doctor could operate in Antarctica while sitting in her office in Houston. And being able to operate a robot from afar? Well maybe the movie “Real Steel” is not that far off either but there are all kinds of potential uses.

Learn more about Kinect at the Microsoft Kinect website.

Office 2010 uses the same kind of ribbons that Office 2007 users have grown accustomed to. The new “ribbon” that you’ll find in Word 2010 is the one that 2007 should have had. It’s called file. The file ribbon gives you all the options and information about the particular file that you’re working on that you could possibly want to know.

For example, as I type this blog entry in Word 2010, when I click the file tab, I have lots of nifty choices like Open, Save, Save as, and Print but the option that is highlighted is Info. Under Info I can Set Permissions (protect the document so that only those who should see it can), Prepare for Sharing (basically let’s me easily strip hidden information that other’s shouldn’t see but that is useful to have for an in house document) and work with different Versions of the document.

I can also see useful information such as how long I’ve been editing this document, add or view the Title and any Tags, see who the creator is, and lots of other information. It is also from the file tab that I can open recent or other documents and do many of the tasks from the old File menu.

As is usually the case, the biggest change comes with Outlook. As the way people communicate continues to change, Microsoft tries to make Outlook the tool to help you do this. Outlook now has its own ribbons (for some reason Outlook 2007 didn’t get the ribbon makeover).

The newest feature here is the Quick Steps box. Basically what this box does is let you create macros or rules on what do with certain messages. Once that rule is created, you can run it by clicking the appropriate button in the Quick Steps box. I’m still experimenting with this but this feature holds potential in helping to tame the email beast.

Access has some nice new features, one that we’re taking a very close look at right now is the Project template. What is nice is that Access is now really designed from the get go to be interactive. I opened the Project template and the first thing I had to do was create a user (myself) and then log in. Then I was off to the races creating and entering information on the project.

The downside is I wanted to watch the video which required SilverLight which I had already installed which Access didn’t recognize as being installed. Still a few issues, it would appear but all in all I like this latest version and could see moving some of our folks to it even before the first service pack.

Other tools that come with the complete version of Office 2010 include OneNote (great for taking quick notes or for having a notebook on a particular task or subject) and InfoPath – the tool for forms – now comes with a Designer part and a Filler part. For business users (those with lots of computers and users), there’s also a new program called SharePoint Workspace. I’m still investigating these but they look to be pretty nifty tools for improved work flow.

The full version “Professional” retails for around $500 but as a productivity tool is well worth it.

The thing that stunned me was how quickly it was ready to go. Even my faster computers will take 45 seconds or longer to boot up. This one was ready in less than 10. But of course it was Windows 3.11 so there wasn’t alot that could be done on it – although I did notice that it had an AOL icon so theoretically they could have gone online.

Why write about this now? Well our friends at Google are trying to take us back to the days of instant on with their new Google Chrome-OS.  They have had Google Chrome – the browser – out for awhile and it works pretty well (though I still prefer Firefox). Their next step is to have an entire operating system that boots quickly and basically just connects to the web from which you can access everything you need. Afterall, with Google Docs and all the other Google apps, what else do you need?

I have to admit it would be nice to have an instant on system that meets 21st Centry expectations of performance and usability because it was nifty to see how quicky that old computer fired up.

Right now my inbox is bloated up to 38 messages. 15 of those will be removed as soon as I take care of the small tasks associated with them. Now don’t get me wrong. Other than spam, I don’t throw anything away. I’ve got emails dating back to 1999. But instead of letting them fill up my inbox, I regularly file the messages away to where they belong.

Even if there is a “to do” associated with an email, I can flag it or categorize it and then file it. With Outlook 2007′s powerful search tools, the flag or category let’s me know I need to follow up with it. And it feels so good to turn off a due flag on an email and watch the “For Follow Up” search category go down by one.

So if you are sinking in your inbox, set aside the time to clean it out. Once its clean, be ruthless. Make sure you come back to it each day or each week and whittle it down. Do I need this email? Does this email represent a to-do for me? Where can I file this email? Does it belong to a specific category? All of these questions can help you figure out where to put the email.

One final confession: I have learned to delete messages as well.  Yes, I had to face it – some emails, like a single word “yes” in reply to a question I asked, might not be worth keeping.ikoni

Outlook 2007 is a powerful tool whether in a business environment with Exchange server or as a standalone program. The search component in particular is powerful. I have on my Outlook Favorites the search folders Unread Mail and For Followup. You can also add particular category searches that help you to stay connected and keep moving forward. The To-Do bar on the right side of the screen is a handy tool that you can expand or hide to meet your needs but when expanded shows your upcoming schedule and flagged emails.

Another productivity tool that I use in conjunction with Outlook is Jott. I’ve written about Jott previously but it is a great time saver if you’re out and about a lot. I can call Jott to send myself emails, ask for reminders that will come to my phone and email, or send an email to anyone in my address book. Yes, from my phone. So when I’m driving down the road and remember that I need to confirm an appointment via email, I can call (using my hands free bluetooth device of course) and tell Jott to send an email to Ted, letting him know that I’ll be at the breakfast meeting on Friday and Ted will get the email.

Between Outlook, Exchange and Jott, I manage to stay organized and on top of my schedule and keep my productivity high.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Until now. What is the secret to taming your email? you may ask. The answer is so simple (once you know the answer it always seems simple): Right now, as I write, I have 13 emails in my inbox. Each of them is something that will be dealt with within the next business day and then filed away.

When there were 300+ emails in there, it was so easy to let it balloon up to 400 or 600 or more. With 0 to 20 in there, its very easy to identify what needs to be done, do it and then file it. The biggest thing that worked for me was opening a Word document so that when I started through the laborious process of whittling down 1100 emails to 5, I could jot a note about something that needed to be done.

So, it worked like this: file, file, file, delete, file, delete, delete, oh, I need to call Frank about this one. Hmm should I quit working on filing which isn’t fun or should I call Frank? This time I mastered the urge to bail and made a note to call Frank in the Word Document. Then back to file, delete, file, file, delete, delete, delete.

It took six to eight hours to do this but I finished over the weekend and this has been one of the most productive weeks I’ve ever had and its only Thursday!

So if you are stuck in email purgatory, set aside the time, ignore every distraction, and file, categorize and make notes until you’re down to 0. Right now I’ve got 9 items in my inbox, the oldest of which dates back to 5:20 PM on Tuesday. Ohh, that feels good

In our experience there are three main methods a computer gets infected:

1. Anti-Virus Program expires. If your virus subscription has expired, your computer is not protected. Yes, it is that simple. If you tell your doctor you don’t need a flu shot because you got one last year, he’ll tell you that was for last year’s flu, not this years’. The same applies to antivirus programs. If it has expired, you are protected for last week’s or last month’s viruses but not today’s.
2. Willfully downloading a virus. This may happen unwittingly but it still happens all the time. Kids are the main victims of this method. They want to download a “cool” program from a web site but the cool program includes a virus that lets hackers take over your computer. This can circumvent the best antivirus program in much the same way all the vitamins in the world can’t protect you from colds if you’ve got kids.
3. Too much protection. We are seeing more of this kind of problem. You start off with, for example, Norton Antivirus. Then when you go to renew online they’ve got a super-duper new program that  has a firewall and  anti-phishing, and all the bells and whistles you can imagine for just a few more dollars than the anti-virus program. Then as soon as you have it installed it starts asking you questions you don’t know the answer to. You restart your computer and suddenly it is going so slow you can hardly do anything. In frustration you turn off the antivirus program and suddenly everything speeds up so you leave it off and get infected.

We recommend just running an antivirus program without any extra bells or whistles. Most folks with high speed internet (commercial or residential) have some kind of firewall with their modem or router nowadays so you can separate the functions and let your computer just have the antivirus component.

Keep your antivirus UP TO DATE. If it is more than one month out of date, you could be in trouble.

And finally, run complete scans on your computer on a regular basis.

It’s not clear whether Microsoft really intended this video for internal use or whether they “leaked” the video to YouTube to create a buzz about . . . well I guess about Microsoft. Its funny and its cheezy but it also gets the word out to people that Vista Service Pack 1 is out. If it is Microsoft poking fun at themselves, its very well done.

According to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, the service pack will (amongst other things):

• Increase Vista’s stability
• Make zipping and unzipping faster
• Make Remote Desktop work faster and better

I’ve been running Vista on my Vista-ready Gateway laptop (duo-core processor) for many months and the thing that has bothered me the most has been how slow it responds. I’m looking forward to seeing if it will be more responsive with the service pack

Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 was released a while back. It includes several security upgrades, the most important of which makes it much more difficult for Office files with malicious coding embedded in them to do any harm when you open them. Instead the software essentially converts the file to the latest version (2007) of the document which strips out the malicious code.

As with any service pack there are lots of other fixes and updates and the Service Pack also consolidates several other security updates that have been released separately. There are also several tweaks intended to improve performance and stability.

If you’re still using Office XP or earlier or Windows 2000 or earlier, shame on you. Those programs are so outdated you’re losing functionality and productivity. You should upgrade immediately to a newer version.

Which brings us to Office 2007. No service pack has been released yet. I think 2007 is worth upgrading to already but it is a memory hog. Make sure you have plenty of CPU and RAM. And speaking of needing a lot of CPU and RAM, what about Vista? Still no service pack on it either, though Microsoft says it will be out in the first quarter of ’08. They have released the beta version to testers so that’s a good sign. I do NOT recommend upgrading to Vista until the SP is ready. If you’re buying a new computer though, give it some serious thought.