Email Tyranny, HP's Q2, Outlook Tips, and more...

The LA Times talks about the tyranny of email, and how it affects the psychology of email users. (Great to see that the adjective Sisyphean hasn't gone out of style just yet.) It's based on research from USC and Pew. That story is being discussed over at Techdirt. The folks at Ferris Research point to some related academic research from Oklahoma State and from the UK, discussing how frequent interruptions damage one's ability to think and the optimum number of times per day to check email. (How about as often as I darn well choose?) Yesterday, HP issued its first set of quarterly results since Mark Hurd came on board. As guest blogger Richard "f(Richard)" Hancock points out, NYSE:HPQ looks undervalued with server and software businesses improving. Did HP let Carly go too hastily? In a comment likely to raise the ire of ex-HP employees everywhere, Hurd said that she didn't cut deeply enough! More analysis from Reuters, Bloomberg, and the Beeb. Microsoft UK's Allister Frost continues to serve up tasty tidbits of usefulness in Useful Technology Blog (crazy name, crazy blog?). Check out these two useful ideas for using the Outlook calendar. He also encourages us to upgrade to the released version of MSN Desktop Search, but another Microsoftie, self-confessed old fogey Larry Osterman, disagrees. Douglas Schweitzer's correct when he says you should use the NTFS filesystem in preference to FAT32, but that's not the whole story. NTFS isn't necessarily faster than FAT32 for certain tasks. Consider optimizing the pagefile by putting it on a dedicated FAT32 partition. Find this and other NTFS-related tweaks here. And finally... The Spamusement blog continues to raise a few chuckles here with its interpretation of spam subject lines. A recent favorite is "identify brontosaurus crockery shabby taunt" but my all time ROTFLMAO-inducer has to be "why your computer is running slow." Priceless.

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. He is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact him at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.