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Yet another oxymoron: 'Microsoft Groove' - almost as bad as 'Microsoft Works'!

I hesitate slightly to blog about Groove because I'm not sure that anyone should pay the full price: amazon.com $179 amazon.co.uk £200(rip-off Britain again!). However if like Eddie and I, you get your Microsoft software at sensible prices through their generous charity licensing programme, then I recommend buying the top end Office Enterprise Suite which includes the wonderful OneNote and Groove.

Groove can do a number of things, but primarily it is intended to help with team collaboration. Groove enables users to create workspaces which can then be shared by a number of users. The workspace can keep track of files, discussions, calendars, meetings, pictures etc. Once users have joined the workspace the copy on everyone's machine is kept in sync and they are kept informed about what has been updated.You don't have to be online to work on files either because you automatically get local copies.

Groove is also able to keep ordinary file folders in sync across different machines. I use this a lot to synchronise OneNote on my different machines and to make sure that my sermons, presentations & other documents are available to all my machines at home and at work.It isn't good for database type files including Outlook .pst files but for most documents it works really simply. There is no need to open up paths through firewalls or struggle with changing IP addresses, Bill Gates takes care of that for you.

Nice one Microsoft - shame you have priced so many people out of grooving together.

Demo and free 60 day trial on the Microsoft site.

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I'm typing this in Apple's Safari web browser, which has recently become available for Windows. Apple of course claim that it's the fastest and the best browser. Initial impressions were favourable but now things are not looking quite so good:

• Safari wants me to use the American spelling for 'favorable' and I can't find out how to tell it I want to use a British English spellchecker. Cultural imperialism - grrr!
• I wanted this and the previous paragraphs to have bullet points and I wanted to put in a link to the Safari download page, but most of the buttons in Joomla's web based text editor seem to be non-functional (i.e. the javascript isn't working correctly even though it isn't disabled) so I suppose I'll have to re-edit this in Firefox before publishing it.

Well I suppose I'll keep Safari installed so I can check how Mac users see websites I work on, but then again, I see a lot of Mac user's running Firefox, now I know some of the reasons why.

One of the distinctive features of ICCM this year was the increased number of people using Macs. I can see some of the attractions - Mac software looks nice and apparently build quality of the hardware is quite high, but prices of hardware and software are still high too. Yes I could run Windows in a virtual machine, but I don't see myself rushing out to buy an MacBook quite yet.

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 Doh! These guys just put up the bollards and are nearly ready to drive home.

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If you are a Microsoft Outlook user you should really give Xobni a try. It's a free plug in which does a great job of bringing together related messages and contact details.

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At the end of my 22 hours awake yesterday I went to watch the new Chronicles of Narnia 'movie' with some of the other IT guys here. We had talked about watching Indiana Jones, but some who had already seen it put us off. 

Prince Caspian, as it turned out, was great. Although my long day meant that I dozed a bit near the start, once the action started, I was kept awake and entertained. It's been years since we read through the Narnia books together as a family, so I really couldn't remember the plot to tell you how faithfully Disney kept to C.S.Lewis's book. I quite enjoyed The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe especially with a knowledge of the allegory involved, but it felt a bit too much like a kid's film for me to really enjoy it. Prince Caspian is great for kids too, but Disney have definitely cranked up the special effects and made it a spectacular which allows it to better bear comparison with Lord of the Rings.

Two scenes particularly reminded me of aspects of LotR: the spectral appearance of Jadis, the White Witch reminded me a lot of the way Galadriel looked when she was tempted to take the one ring, and the fantastically spectacular intervention of Aslan near the end was of course reminiscent of the scene where five Nazgul are overwhelmed by the flood waters produced by Gandalf and Aragorn at the Ford of Bruinen.

Go and see Prince Caspian in a decent cinema whilst it is still running. It'll be a while before most of us can afford the home cinema equipment necessary to appreciate the work which has clearly gone into the production. I'll look forward to reading the Narnia Chronicles to our youngest three in a few years time, but I might just go and reread Prince Caspian to pick up the bits of the plot which I missed while dozing off at the start last night. I 'll also take a look around the web and see how allegorical C.S.Lewis intended it to be. If you know, feel free to add comments.

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Hobbits, I understand, frequently enjoy a 'second breakfast'. One of the 'perks' of crossing the Atlantic at this time of day is 'second lunch'. Sorry I haven't written much for a little while, I hope to correct that somewhat over the next few days whilst I'm in the United States.

At the moment  I am somewhere in the sky between Greenland and New York, so I'm typing this offline using Microsoft OneNote and will cut and paste into an email and the blog when this evening finally arrives.  If you haven't yet come across OneNote, let me recommend it to you. OneNote is a excellent piece of software which helps me remain marginally less disorganised than I would otherwise be. One way of getting it is as part of the three licences which come with the good value Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition.

For the past few years I have travelled with Virgin Atlantic from Heathrow, but this year the cheapest option was to take the Continental flight direct from Bristol. To be honest I would rather fly with Richard Branson - this Boeing 757 doesn't even have screens in the seat backs let alone the choice of a dozen different films on demand. Well, at least I've managed to catch up on some unfinished reading and you are hearing something from us at last.

I've just finished reading Total Church by Tim Chester & Steve Timmis. Others have already written helpful reviews so I won't attempt another one myself, but I do recommend it if you care at all about how your church can best help believers to mature in their faith and effectively communicate the good news of Jesus to a world which would rather ignore him.

I will be posting more here about what I'm doing and learning in the US over the next few days, but let me conclude this missive with some news of the rest of the family. Please pray particularly for Margo and all five children during this next week while I am away. We are currently having our boiler replaced so they'll be without hot water for a few days too.

Margo does a fantastic job looking after us all, but doesn't get much time to herself or as much appreciation as she deserves.

Hannah has just passed 12 weeks old so obviously demands quite a lot of attention, but it is great to see her beginning to smile and pay attention to what is going on around her.

People are constantly surprised to learn that Eliana won't even be three until July, she is into everything and talking about it. She recently tried redecorating our lounge as well as herself with a green ink pad, which was a bit horrifying, but it mostly seems to have washed off.

Luke just turned 5. He is still trying to get to grips with the hard task of learning to read and write. He enjoys school but still gets very tired.

Emma and Christopher are in the middle of GCSE exams at the moment. Emma is taking French & German a year early and Christopher is taking about 10 more subjects, having completed his French last year. I had fun helping him revise Maths, I now understand several things which I don't think I really did when I took my O levels about 30 years ago!

A somewhat disappointing second lunch  snack box has just arrived so that'll be it for now. Keep checking the blog for news over the next few days, I won't send everything out by email in case you get tired of hearing about techie stuff.