Crash And Burn In Vegas

Oh, boy, am I angry.

I was in Vegas last week­end speak­ing at Carl Galletti’s Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Super­con­fer­ence — click here to see the pic­tures. We had a blast! Sylvie and I went to see Le Rève (“The Dream,” by the Cirque du Soleil) at the Wynn. Absolutely a fab­u­lous show!

We also had time to tour the “strip” and even checked out a live band and danced on the rooftop (52nd floor) at the Rio hotel, over­look­ing Las Vegas’ skyline.

And I danced so much that my clothes were com­pletely drenched! There were Sylvie and I, Mike Fil­saime and his wife, Mark Braun­stein, Stir­ling Valen­tine, Mike’s assis­tant Michelle, Donna Fox and a few others.

Now, you’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing why I’m angry…

I do all my email and work on my PC at home using Goto­MyPC, from my lap­top at the hotel. (It’s a great pro­gram, by the way. It allows you to remotely access your desk­top from any Inter­net con­nec­tion in the world.)

And just when I needed my lap­top the most, my com­puter died. I mean, it fried! Both the main drive and the slave (ghost image) drive were com­pletely cor­rupted and inaccessible.

I had a tech from Nerd​sOn​Site​.com visit my office in Ottawa and try to fix it. No suc­cess. So I have no com­puter right now (it has been sent to a foren­sic data recov­ery lab, with the hope of get­ting some­thing out of it), so I’m typ­ing this from my laptop.

Thank­fully, I have a third drive as a nightly backup, but only my doc­u­ments. And my email is on the main drive and backed up every other week. So I lost over a few weeks of email. (I’m rein­stalling Win­dows on a new drive, but now it’s going to take me over an entire week to restore back­ups and resin­stall pro­grams. Eek!)

And wanna know what the cul­prit was? Nor­ton. Yup. Norton’s Secu­rity Cen­ter, which includes Nor­ton Ghost and GoB­ack (which repar­ti­tions your drive to cre­ate “restore files” and back­ups), was buggy. I removed it a week ago, and things were fine. For a while. That is, until last Friday.

Ugh. Dou­ble ugh.

But the pos­i­tive in this, is that I’m now try­ing out Thun­der­bird (the email pro­gram from the folks at Mozilla, the mak­ers of Fire­fox), and I’m blown away. I am (and maybe soon “used to be”) an Out­look user. (Other than Eudora, which I used prior to con­vert­ing to Out­look many years ago.)

Out­look is good, but I’m start­ing to fall in love with Thun­der­bird. There are count­less exten­sions (i.e., plu­g­ins) to have it do what­ever you want. Unlike Out­look, which uses “macros” instead that crash from time to time because some macros are incom­pat­i­ble with one another, Thun­der­bird is totally scalable.

One of those plu­g­ins is RSS feeds within your email pro­gram… another is the abil­ity to “redi­rect” emails… another is anti-​​spam fil­ter­ing (for free!)… and hun­dreds more. All great stuff!

Any­how, thanks for let­ting me rant. Time to go back to work.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

• How to Capture and Captivate Attention
• The Real Problem With The Flaw of Attraction
• Two Shining Stars in an Age of Darkness
• Changes, Relaunches, and Extreme Makeovers
• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales

Other Related Posts

• Put Your Copy To The Test
• Gone to California
• What A Pithy! Salesletter, That Is...
• Wedding Plans On Hold For Teleseminar
• Web 2.0 Copywriting Workshop Pre-Announcement