The Bull Og

As I imagine is the case for most developers, I often receive inquiries from technical recruiters looking to poach me for a client of theirs. I’ve long had it in my mind to start a series about the sorts of inquiries I get, partly for the comedic relief, partly to instruct tech recruiters about what they should and should be doing.

I’ll never name names nor companies but I will provide you with an occasional, true, humorous excerpt where someone is trying to get me to switch jobs. If you are a tech recruiter, learn from others’ mistakes. If you’re not a tech-recruiter, enjoy the comedy.

I don’t need to set up the following excerpt aside from saying that it’s the one that finally pushed me off the fence. Like I mentioned, I’ve long had it in my mind to do this series and this was the one that prodded me to get it going on my blog. It’s short, sweet, and to the point. It was taken directly from an email I received yesterday and has not been edited beyond having some HTML markup added to it. Enjoy.

“Please forward me your updated resume along with the best number to reach, so that both of us can help each other out with some good business……”

Recently, I switched to a Mac and started using Entourage because the two things about Outlook that were hardest to give up were #1) the ability to setup meetings via Exchange and #2) management of my contacts.

A co-worker turned me onto Thunderbird (with Lightning) in a bid to help me break my Outlook addiction. I’ve used Outlook for so long it’s hard to quit. I…

• …love the ability to drag an email onto the calendar and create an event
• …know the keyboard shortcuts for creating my most-used items (tasks, notes, emails, etc.)
• …found this great plugin for automatically scheduling tasks as a part project management
• …used the journal for all kinds of things including my job search two years ago, and …
• …had the views of my different items (most notably tasks) tweaked to work for me

Outlook makes it so easy, but I can do away with MS PIMs apps on all OSes now that I can do calendar management with Yahoo Calendar (beta) and contact management with Plaxo.

Here’s how to do it in five easy steps:

1. Before you begin, choose a color

You’re about to create three calendars which will remain in sync: one in Thunderbird, one in Calgoo, and one in Yahoo.

I recommend choosing a single color to identify your calendar across all three tools. I set forth on this exercise to make my “Work” calendar available and I chose red.

You’re likely to repeat these steps for calendars serving different purposes in the future so this is more a recommendation than a must-do but using color will help remind you which calendar you’re looking at.

2. Get yourself a Calgoo Hub account

Go to Calgoo Hub and sign up. It’s easy.

3. Publish your calendar to Calgoo

Follow these instructions provided by Calgoo to (create and) publish your calendar from “Sunbird” (the basis of the Lighning calendar which is Mozilla-based.)

At this point, you can also change the color of the calendar in both Thunderbird and Calgoo.

I recommend change settings in Calgoo on the calendar to make it private. Use that URL for the next step.

4. Subscribe to the Calgoo in Yahoo Calendar

You have to be able to use the Yahoo Calendar beta at http://beta.calendar.yahoo.com.

Subscribe to the Calgoo calendar using the URL from the previous step and choose your color for the calendar.

5. Check your Yahoo Calendar

There it is! Your Thunderbird calendar! In Yahoo!

As easy as that, I no longer need Outlook to manage my contacts and calendars.

Thanks to Arun for suggesting that I check out Lightning.

(I see a Taskline-like plugin for Lightning in the future. Taskline, get on that. Hmmm… I see a plugin for Bugzilla tasks in the future…)

2009-01-14 UPDATE: Or, instead of the multistep process, you can make it easy on yourself by just trying this, though I did have some difficulties getting it to work (Error Console was saying the calendar was either not DAV or not available.) After a couple of times of adding and deleting calendars, and of shutting down Thunderbird and restarting it, my Yahoo calendar finally appeared in Thunderbird. Cookie issue?

That’s right. My long abscence in the blogosphere has been partially due to end of the quarter madness, partially due to a recent switch to a 15″ MBP.

It’s a sweet machine and the software is even better. I’ve had it for about three weeks now and I’m still not completely migrated but with VMWare’s Fusion, I don’t ever completely need to be. Given end of the quarter deliverables, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to configure but so far I find it functional and easy to use.