Ricky Gervais does training video for Microsoft UK

This 20 minute of UK Microsoft training video with Ricky Gervais' manager character from the Office and Stephen Merchant is hilarious!

Is Jonathan Coulton the real Mr. Fancy Pants?

In another blog I posted about Jonathan Coulton. If you have not heard of him, he is a guy who wrote, performed and recorded Code Monkey and he has tons of other great songs - all released under the creative commons license. Check out Mr Fancy Pants and also a list of all his songs. Other songs that made me laugh with deep hysteria include:

• Creepy Doll
• Tom Cruise Crazy
• Re Your Brains
• Chiron Beta Prime
• Bozos Lament
• Skullcrusher Mountain (Demo)
  
• Mandelbrot Set (Demo)
  
• I'm a Mason Now
• A Laptop Like You (Demo) - if you own a PowerBook, you really need to listen to this song.
  

There are so many other songs that are fantastic. I am really happy I heard Code Monkey on the Java Posse podcast and I took the time to go look and see if the artist had done anything else. I had no idea he had done so much! I highly recommend that you go to his site and donate if you like his music.

Getting Things Done in Windows

I had been using the GTD outlook plugin and found this to be helpful in minor ways.  It's main fault in my mind is that it takes the GTD model, where the project / task is the center of things and actaully makes email the center of things.  It is really a poor system to capture "all items" and there is not an easy way to get the information out and into a trusted system.

Download Squad just pointed out an alternative to the GTD plugin and I am finding it quite interesting and useful.  It is not strictly a GTD Outlook plugin but it does seem to add tools that make Outlook a much more powerful system for dealing with and taking advantage of the mountains of email we all get.  I am looking forward to using this tool for a few weeks to see if it can help me get and stay organized in my pseudo-GTD life.