Bery bery nejse masheen

I finally got my TabletPC back!  The service guys finished with it last week, but it took serveral days to get down to Skopje.  In fact, my colleague Carolyn, who happens to live in Skopje, picked it up from the service guys.  She said that they were a little reluctant to part with it.  In fact, when she came they were patting in gently saying, “It’s a bery bery nejse masheen.”  I agree!  In the end they put in a new battery, new motherboard and gave me a new power supply.  They told me that the power up here is terrible (ya, thanks) and that a more powerful power supply would help safeguard the thing.  Who knows.

Using synctoy I synced back all my data from my wife’s laptop, including all my Outlook information.  In just a few minutes I was up and ready to go.  Of course, I immediately made things interesting by installing the “technical refresh” of Office 2007 beta and Onelook 2007 beta.   I can’t tell you how much I missed Outlook 2007.  Going back to OL2003, which is what my wife uses, really cramped my organizational style.  As good as 2003 is, and it’s great, it just doesn’t compare to what 2007 has going for it. 

All that aside, here’s what I missed most about my own computer:

Newsgator – Newsgator is a wonderful thing that tracks all the stuff I want to track, blogs, websites, etc.  Newsgator gathers all that information for me and allows me to read it either on their website, or in Outlook.   While I was able to track my news and blogs on the Newsgator website, there’s no beating having it all delivered straight to Outlook.  This week Newsgator released several upgrades and new products.  If you’re interested in reading blogs at all you have to try Newsgator.

ActiveWords – I’ve written about this program before, but it’s like a macro progam on steroids.  Nuf said.

Outlook 2007 – The features in OL2007 just rock.  I’ll have to write more later on this.

Onenote 2007 – Another must have program.  Onenote is my one-stop place for all my notes, doodles, projects and place to save neat website clippings.  It now syncronizes with Outlook.

GetRight – GetRight is my ubiqitous download manager.  When your internet connect is spotty you need a reliable program that can seamlessly resume and schedule downloads.  I have 24/7 Internet, but I don’t have much speed.  GetRight is also great for downloading podcasts for the same reason.  It has a built in podcast downloader that checks my feeds automatically.  I can then download or schedule the download when it suits me.

Okay.  That’s it.   Forunately I got it back in time for our organizational meetings in Slovenia next week.