Pete Dudchenko

Admittedly, this post is technical and niche, but then again, so am I sometimes. Really, I just wanted to share this concept with anyone out there searching for a way to avoid getting bombarded with work emails on their BlackBerry while they also sit in front of their work computer.

My cell phone is not a business phone so I have a BIS account but I still like to get work emails on it so I don’t have to power up a laptop outside of office hours just to see if anything important came through. Of course, while in the office, it meant I was hit twice with any work email notifications; one on my phone and one on my laptop. To me it was pretty annoying, I’d be sitting at work and managing my emails on my laptop, and anytime a new work email would come in, I would get a notification on Outlook and my cell phone. I had to manage both devices to clean up the Inboxes.

The alerts quickly came to a stop, I adjusted my settings on my BlackBerry to not alert me when I got a work email (since I’m right in front of my laptop, I don’t need my cell phone to tell me this). The challenge however was with managing the emails on both devices. When I did check my phone for any other personal notifications I might receive, it was easy to lose a text message or personal email in the mix of the mass amount of work emails received in one day.

The solution was relatively simple however. I set up a new folder in Outlook (I run 2007) and routed all email into this new folder. Since I have a BIS BlackBerry account, I don’t get emails that are not stored in my Inbox. By routing the emails to a new folder, I just work out of this folder during the day as a regular Inbox but my cell phone doesn’t receive any of these emails anymore.

The way I set it up, I created a folder and called it “0) Inbox”. The “0)” part is to make sure it resides right below the actual Inbox since Outlook lists all folders alphabetically. Then I created a rule to route all email into this new “0) Inbox” folder. The rule is set to the condition of “on this machine only” and this is important because what that means is when I shut down my laptop for the evening, all emails I receive will now still go to the original default Inbox and I will get them on my phone.meaning I can still check work email from my phone after hours. When I log back onto my laptop (presumably the next morning) the rule kicks in and moves all of those emails into the new “0) Inbox” folder with everything else.

Again, highly technical and niche but if you were looking for help with this I hope you found it.

My wife and I recently took a road-trip to the Grand Canyon and as you can imagine, we took lots of photos. One thing I wanted to try however was to figure out a way to create a panoramic photo using a few digital photos that I had taken of the trip.

Luckily, before we ventured out on the road, I had read that in order to do this with a regular camera, there are a few tricks to learn that you must consider while taking the digital photo. Ideally, I would snap a photo, move the camera slightly to the right, snap another photo, then repeat and when I got back home, I would splice the images together and viola, there’s the panoramic picture. This of course only works if the photos are perfectly aligned. The trick, is to overlap the subsequent photos because this will allow the splicing (that occurs later) to work best.

Here’s a sample of what I mean. Say you wanted to create a panoramic photo that looks like this:

You would need to take say, three separate digital photos in order to capture everything.

 This requires that the line where one photo ends is exactly where the next photo begins. This is impossible to do on-the-fly. Rather, try to overlap the camera’s viewpoints about 30% so it looks more like this:

In this case, I took four photos but made sure there was considerable overlap between each photo. This is important because when we splice the photos together the tool we use will require this overlap to set up the photos and align them properly.

The other trick, which I learned after my trip unfortunately, is that you want to maintain the same white balance on your camera for each photo. This basically means setting the white balance to a manual setting or turning the auto-balance feature on your camera off. The reason for this is that, especially with outdoor photos, the adjustment of white balance from one photo to the next can throw off the panoramic photo later on. The left side of the photo may look darker or lighter then the right.

Finally, splicing the photo together is actually the easiest part. I know Photoshop does this but since I didn’t have Photoshop, I needed something else, and preferably free,

It turns out, Microsoft offers just this sort of thing from their Windows Live Photo Gallery which is a free download. After installing and adding the photos into the library, I just selected the 4 images I wanted to use and then right-click to “create panoramic photo” and wait. It runs on its own and the end result is a great panoramic photo to save or print out.

I printed mine out to keep at the office using EzPrints if you want to try them.

Did you want to see the final panoramic photo from my trip to the Grand Canyon?

Went sailing on The America last Friday. It was great to be on such a large ship and to cruise along the San Diego shore line.

For all three of you that follow my RSS feed (ok, I’m kidding, three may actually be an over-exaggeration) I wanted to give a quick announcement that I’ve updated my RSS feed URL. I noticed that while my titles came through on my RSS reader (Google Reader), my post body and images were not appearing so I’ve migrated over to feedburner and if you’re interested, the new URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PeteDudchenko

You can also click on any of the RSS links I have on this page as well. The old URL will still be around but this one will be better for reading.

If you haven’t heard of Google Voice I recommend you check it out. Its still invite only I believe but if you were lucky enough to get an invite then you probably noticed that they’ve been offering free business cards with your new Google Voice Phone Number to help promote their service (and to help you promote your new number).

I noticed this myself the other day and remembered a post by Lifehacker about creating Social Calling Cards and thought that this was a perfect opportunity to create some free social cards myself.

By default, the format that Google offers is more of a traditional business card with space to add your address, name and email. It’s very easy however to transform these fields into social contact information by eliminating the address information and replacing it with any social network you want to add. I personally added my Twitter Account, along with the address to this website, and an email address (in addition to my Google Voice number).

After submitting my mailing address, I was done and in only a few days I received 25 free social cards in the mail.

So thanks Google!

Had lunch with the guys today. Grabbed a cup of gumbo and a pound of shrimp/crayfish. Good stuff!