Thanks everybody! I really enjoyed recapping my week here and look forward to many more!

I am still struggling with the GMail/ Entourage thing, it just doesn’t want to keep synchronized for me.

James you can check out Mobile Brando they have a battery backup that is kind of like Richard Solo. http://mobile.brando.com.hk/prod_detail.php?prod_id=03499

They have them for $25.00

One thing I forgot. In your Outlook folder structure, while you can search for Gmail emails, and can copy them to your local folder structure, you cannot catagorise them. you can only mark them for follow-up, but that’s about it. Many of the normal email-assigned actions cannot be performed because the emails do not reside in your local folder structure, and the only way to circumvent that would be through synchronising your email datafile and your mail Outlook datafile.

Speaking of using Gmail through a client; I always used POP access through Outlook 2003 when I owned just one laptop. However, a couple of months have went by since then and a second laptop has invaded my life (HP Pavilion tx2100ed TabletPC) and a WM Smartphone, and I noticed that POP access just didn’t do it for me anymore. So I enabled IMAP access and while it works fine, I do have one significant drawback. Gmail works with labels, and in Outlook 07 these labels are handled as folders, which has a couple of drawbacks, notables including: email dublication. New emails which are assigned to a certain label appear in my main Inbox and in the folder Outlook created which corresponds with the Gmail assigned filter, and both email are marked as unread. Second; when I receive a new email in the Gmail webinterface, it appears as a labeled email in my main inbox, which is great, but when I move that email in one of my clients to the corresponding folder and I move back to the Gmail webinterface the message has been archived (I presume?) and can only be reached by going to the corresponding label, but archived mail has a different status than email in my inbox, and the only way to see all my email is going to the All email tab. It’s a little ackward to say the least.
Plus, as you mentioned, sychronisation isn’t near-realtime, although that changes too. Plus, at times, it tends to freeze Outlook up.
All in all, it would make perfect sense for Gmail to offer you a setting to chance your preferences; a.k.a give the user an option to use either a folder based approach or a label based approach.

James your “rambles” have always been informative and open my eyes to new technologies.
Keep them going!

Great article James. I love reading those kind of “life of” articles about what is happening in peoples lives.

So as I see it you are planning on phasing out tablet PC’s from your workspace are you not? Do you still need all the “mobile tech” now that you aren’t traveling everywhere as much?

Good Luck James. This reminds me of Jerry Pournell’s Chaos Manor. You are in the elite league James.

Great news. Thanks, jk.

Warner, I received an email from Richard himself that warned me they had determined there was a problem that prevented both the iPhone and the Backup Battery from charging together. He told me that since they had advertised that fact that they were giving a new unit to everyone who had this problem. Get in touch with them and get a new charger, the part in question according to my email from Richard. It was refreshing to hear from him even before receiving my battery.

FYI: The Richard Solo battery I received yesterday works great on the iPod Touch but did not charge my iPhone overnight. I’m giving them a call today.