The Pacific Northwest has reached it's max quota of Californians. Sorry, but we really don't want any more. Please consider reapplying after you've mounted a roof rack on your vehicle, own a kayak, mountain bike and a pair of tele skis (road bikes and snowboards are for pussies and white rappers.) Also, you'll need to complete 6 months working as a barista in order to fully appreciate the nuances of coffee. Finally, if you decide to whine about anything and/or compare it to SoCal, you'll be deported.

Find a contractor who works in the marketing field - you know, someone who specializes in things like building websites, developing CRM programs for companies, etc. Often the smaller marketing contractors have a hell of a time finding a tech person who can help support their projects. They also don't understand the nuances of how a lot of pieces of technology fit together. However, and most importantly for you, marketing budgets are fantastic if you're on the contractor end.

I am WAY too busy to surf the web while driving. Between sending email, sending txts, reading Facebook, checking the latest scores and everything else, I don't have time to open a web browser and just "surf".

Oh, and downloading podcasts. Who could forget that..

I usually travel to third world, tropical countries for about 2 months of the year. Whenever I'm traveling, I try to cut myself off as much as I can from technology and just kind of roll with the schedule of the locals. Now, most tropical countries don't have much of a need for DST - the sun comes up about 6am and it goes down about 6pm. There's not a lot of variation to that through the year.

As a result, I get really used to waking up when the sun comes up (..and the roosters crow) and going to bed a few hours after the sun goes down.

When I come back, there's a bizarre change to my internal clock that really messes me up. DST seems to normalize this a bit for me, at least in the middle of winter the sun is on it's way while I'm on my way to work and in the summer at least it's not coming up before 5am. (Yes, I live in pretty high latitudes for the US.)

So here's more detail on the work flow I need.

First, I'm subscribed to multiple open source mailing lists. Ok, awesome, I filtered those into the "Forums" tab so I don't have look at those emails, like, pretty much ever. (I read them about twice a week these days since I'm not as active with those projects any more.) That works.

I get all the usual promo emails. There's a few, like Brad's List that I actually like as well as my Skymiles emails, ok, awesome, I filter those to the Promo tab so I never have to see them.

Then, I'm on my local city council. So I have a bunch of email that spills in related to that. Those just get dumped directly into my inbox because there's no easy way to filter them since I have no idea where they're coming from. Those are tough. And I have to keep them/archive them since it's official business.

My new work related emails I've attempted to apply filters to since I mostly know the domains they originate from. But the label that's applied is gray, and my normal inbox has a gray background. I don't know how to change that color and it makes it pretty useless to have a label. Now, I can click on the Label in the left nav, however it's normally hidden because Gmail insists on showing hangout information at the bottom and it clutters the labels list.

And we haven't gotten how to manage the rest of my personal email.

What sucks is all of that shows up all in one puked up blah of a Primary mailbox. Those are three radically different areas of my life and it looks like a trainwreck to my brain because when I'm thinking of work, the past thing I was to see is an email from my mother with the subject line of, "Did you get the cookies yet?" Then I'm completely distracted thinking about a) going to the post office and b) cookies.

I think the simple paradigm here is, I want my inbox to be "Everything Else" but instead it's "Everything".

There's some good hosted Exchange systems out there. I'm probably going to move to Intermedia. Will there be spam? It won't be as good as gmail, but there will be surprisingly less than you'd think. intermedia.net has worked well for people I've known in the past.

I've been a Gmail user since about June 21, 2004 (that's when my first sent message shows). For personal use I always thought Gmail was just sufficient. The labels were a bit annoying and I have found the tabs a big improvement. The storage is great and I haven't deleted an email since I started using it. I'm primarily a searcher not a sorter, so in many ways that's a good fit for my personal use.

BUT....

A month ago I started my own consulting business. While it's getting off the ground, I've been using the Gmail account for work related reasons. Coming from the standard Outlook world (as well as Thunderbird and other clients), I find Gmail SUCKS GIANT F*CKING DONKEY BALLS to get work done. It's impossible to manage any kind of sane workflow with it. As of this morning, I think I've officially given up.

The new tabs idea would almost work for me - to manage my workflow I figure I need 8 tabs total. In their infinite wisdom, they've limited the new tabs idea to 5. Why 5? I have no idea. I do enjoy the fact that it's reasonably intelligent, so it does figure out automatically how to filter things. However, I really need the ability to add my own tab for work reasons. You know, the one that's labeled "EVERY EMAIL FROM KEVIN BECAUSE THIS IS THE GUY THAT'S PAYING ME AND I DAMN WELL BETTER NOT MISS A MESSAGE FROM HIM".

Like I mentioned, I'm primarily a searcher, however some stuff is so important that you really need to be able to sort it. When you get hundreds of messages a day, the last thing you want is something scrolling off the first page of the browser window. Oh, and why the hell can't I have that first page show 1000 different threads rather than just, say, the 100 it has?

I hate to admit it, but I see a hosted Exchange account in my future.

Studying business is short sighted. At the end you'll find it's mostly a waste of time because you could have learned it all on the job. Blah blah, yield management, blah blah cash flow, blah blah EBITDA.

If you feel strongly about studying business, what you'll find next is the obstacle you can't get around is law. As much as you might want to understand the business dynamics, you'll run into having to deal with contracts, agreements, or copyrights and patents. That's a much harder obstacle to overcome, even if you have internal counsel.

Having said that, look at your options and figure out the path. If you go into management you'll figure out the b-side and have no need for a silly MBA. You'll still be stuck dealing with legal though. With regards to marketing: you either have that skill or you don't. You already know the answer to that question. The best at marketing use analytics and statistics; and the overwhelming majority don't. If you have the opportunity to learn from the best, do it, or don't bother.

Yup, despite everyone's criticisms over the years, I do enjoy reading Slashdot's comments. Sometimes that means it's simply for entertainment sake, although I will say over the years I've learned quite a few things from others and some useful tidbits of information. I think you'd be more hardpressed to find any online nerd collection that's larger.

Seriously. That fucking sucks. I've been on this site a while ("Look Mom, he has a 4 digit user id"), and that is by far the crappiest design I've seen.

I want lots of news stories all accessible with a short blurb of text. I don't need videos, I don't need animated thingies swirling around, I just want news. News for nerds.

In contrast, most of the other redesigns and tweaks over the years I've enjoyed. This one sucks. It'll probably be the nail in the coffin that sends me over to Ars Technica, who's doing a much better job these days.

The things you need to worry about with regards to privacy is everything else in your life. Did you apply for the grocery card that gives you those special discounts? If so, your information got sold. Did you buy a season pass last year at a major ski resort? If so, your information got sold. Did you get one of those cards at the casino so you could rack up some gaming points? If so, your information got sold. All of this, and a whole lot more, are available to marketers or really anyone who wants to pay for it.

As a general rule, if you are filling out a form - regardless of whether its on the interwebs or printed on a dead tree - any information you provide is going to get sold. Actually, in many cases it's even worse, the information is just given away.

So, if your reasoning for changing your online accounts is to beat the marketers, credit agencies, etc then you've got many other things to worry about that have probably already got you householded and deduped from everyone's databases. Now, if your goal in life is to, say, build an encrypted email platform and promote it for worldwide privacy use, then yes - I think you should be careful how big your online presence is. If you're worried about receiving a piece of direct mail from a private golf course because it's known you reside within 50 miles from their clubhouse, have a net income of $X, and drive an Audi, well, in that case you're probably already screwed because they already know all that.

Thank you Microsoft. This makes implementing enterprise strategy so much easier. So let's see.. in the past year we've ditched Microsoft CRM completely. We got rid of 2 SQL Server instances. We will purchase SQL 2012, but with only half the CAL's. These price increases make it so much easier to consider other options.

Perhaps get them a TV with Netflix already built into it? Something like a Samsung?

I think the key is to set up the remote properly so they can access everything using a minimal number of remote controls, preferably just one. I think that's what confuses most people.. hell it even confuses me.

"...it tells you what you need to know even when you're not touching the screen..." And it tells the NSA everything else?