Saturday, May 09, 2009

Vintage Bombay

Recently one of my friends had sent a photo collage of Bombay, India as it was in the yester years. Was personally fascinated by the pictures and thought of sharing it with all of you.

 

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Saturday, May 02, 2009

Change is constant

What happens if suddenly you are asked to or forced to change what you have been doing or how you are doing ? What happens if you are told that you cannot continue what you used to do the way you used to do? Change happens in all our lives at some point of time or the other. It could be related to anything like

  • your work area within your existing job like change in workplace or manager
  • change in job
  • your lifestyle like not being able to sleep after having a newborn in the house :)
  • marriage, this change does not need any corroboration :)

A change is a "shift from comfort zone". By working in a particular manner we get so accustomed to it that any deviation from it will drastically disturb the mindset. We do not know whether the new thing will be good or bad but generally we take it as bad if the current way is going good. We might not realize or willing to realize that this change might open up new opportunities. In the recent past there have been several instances when I have been asked the question of "why the change?". Change should be looked upon as a part of life. As the saying goes, the only thing that is constant is change. So do we cope up to this? Whenever there's a change, we have two options

1. We see this as a positive thing, embrace it and look forward to it
2. We resist the change and stick to the existing method and then sooner or later adopt the change with rancor.

What is going to happen is going to happen. That's destiny. That is not in our control, but what is in our control is how do we take it.

If we take it as in the first option, the doors are open for us. There is a whole new world out there waiting to be explored and there are so many things to be learnt. There's a feeling of vibrancy, of excitement, of positive energy around us. But this does not come that easy. It takes a lot of conviction, self-belief and positive outlook and then the fruits of this are much sweeter.

But it's the second option that most of us opt for as it is the most easiest to adopt to. It's also the most difficult to get out of and causes a lot of stress and anxiety within us.  The immediate reaction of the change is to dwell on how good the existing things are and why was the change required. After receiving the shock of the change, we try to resist the change for some time. Realizing that resisting is not helping, we try some work-arounds, some experiments to circumvent the change. When we realize that it’s not working, we grudgingly decide to integrate with the change and make it as an integral part of out life.

What we also constantly do post the change, is to make the “before & after” comparisons. While accepting the change we also need to firmly accept the fact that things will not be the same as before, otherwise why would the change dawn? Same is with comparisons between people. No two persons are same, neither the fingerprints, nor their skills and talents, not the way they speak, nor the way they work, nor the way they manage people, nor the way they get around with people. So expecting the same thing from two different persons is impractical.

Changes are either self triggered, as in the 1st two examples above or it can be something which is “shoved” onto us, as in the last two examples. Either ways, unless we are ready and we maintain an open mindset, change can be very unsettling initially.

Whichever option that we opt for, change will still happen but it is in OUR control to CHOOSE which option. We can make a choice to be happy with the change or make a choice to get get stressed out with the change. It is our choice and we have to REALIZE that we have the POWER TO CHOOSE and be happy!

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Saturday, April 18, 2009

MS Outlook Autocomplete

Each time that you send a new message in Outlook, the emails that you type in To/Cc fields, are automatically inserted into the AutoComplete list, so in the next time that you type an email address, Outlook automatically completes the right email address for you. This autocomplete list grows over time and will contain not only valid email addresses but also those that are no longer working and those with typos.

The AutoComplete file of Outlook is stored under [Your Profile]\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook , and it always saved as the profile name of Outlook with .NK2 extension. The Microsoft Outlook mail autocomplete manager NK2View by Nirsoft is a portable software for the Windows operating system that provides the means to view, delete and edit all email addresses that are stored in Outlook’s autocomplete database. The software program can be used to load a valid Microsoft Outlook n2k file after startup.

It displays the information in the usual table layout that is known from many other Nirsoft applications like the one that can be used to display and save email attachments in Outlook. Columns that are displayed are the display name of the user, the email, the autocomplete value, the protocol, the recipients field and the cryptic entry id and index parameters. They can be sorted for easier access to the information.

microsoft outlook mail autocomplete

The Outlook tool provides the means to backup and restore n2k files. Creating a backup before processing the file is recommended as it is the only way of ensuring that the file can be restored if something goes wrong during the editing process.

The usual options to export information into various formats such as xml, txt, html or csv are provided in the interface. Another interesting option is the ability to add entries from an Outlook address book into the autocomplete file.

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