Note that numbers are based on number of conversations, not the exact number of emails.

Break down of my Inbox

I have 3 Tech65 email accounts and 1 SMU email account coming into my Gmail inbox. I’ve set up quite a number of filters and auto-labels in my gmail for me to quickly identify the source of the emails and which organisations. This graph shows a break down of all the emails I see in my Gmail inbox according to what they were for.

Legend:

• Tech65 related = All Tech65 emails including press releases, internal discussions and viewer/listener questions.
• Arrow related = Emails regarding serving (Interesting fact: Church staff don’t work on Saturdays and Mondays)
• SMU Filtered = SMU emails that are important to me (SIS specific emails, emails from Profs, project group mates and emails directed specifically to me).
• Others = Includes daily devotional, newsletters and social networking feeds, as well as caregroup emails and discussions and those who are not caught by filters

Lesson: I think I should start looking at the non-filtered emails (i.e. newsletters and twitter, facebook emails etc), since there are days where they take up the majority.

Break Down of my email accounts

All my email accounts come into 1 single inbox. This graph shows which email accounts take up the most emails. Note that in this graph, the SMU emails are totally not filtered. If you compare this graph with the previous one, you’ll realise that quite a portion of the emails sent to me skip the inbox. The next graph will show which are the emails that are getting filtered.

SMU Emails breakdown

This is a break down of all the SMU emails that come to my account. In case you’re wondering, only the red section gets to my inbox. The blue section consists of mostly CCA promotions. Note that these emails still get to my account, they just don’t appear in my inbox. So they do collect, and every few days I still go in there, take a quick glance to make sure I don’t miss important emails, and “Mark as read”.

Take away? My filter is working If you want to know what kind of filter I use, you’ll have to find me in person. I don’t want the CCAs to find away around my filter.

Summary

So there you have it. A summary of my email. Yes, I get tons of email and I do think I need to filter some more, such as all the social network emails that are good to know, but shouldn’t be in my inbox, as well as the newsletters I’ve been getting. I’m quite surprised the amount I get frankly.

Interesting fact: Emails I received in the time I made this graph (1 hour): 4

Okay, back to work!

This was a video our team submitted for the WOMWorld Nokia E72 Challenge. What can US$199 do for your city? The song was “New Beginning” from the latest album by Starfish Stories, a CC band.

Be sure to check out Gear65 this Thursday!

Another HD video! Just got the Samsung WB500 for review at Tech65, so I decided to do a test HD video with it. So far, the camera has proven itself to be very powerful, more than I actually know how to take advantage of! Will be testing it out for the next two weeks, so email me at daniel at tech65 dot org if you want me to find out something regarding the camera.

Watch out for it to appear on Gear65!

Got this really awesome card from Hei Man today at Tech65‘s 100th episode event at Geek Terminal. She actually made it all by herself! According to her, she learnt how to do from this website. Thanks Hei Man, I really liked it.

I had an awesome time yesterday at our event and everything went better than I expected it to be (apart from the small technical hiccup at the start of the recording).

That wasn’t the only gift I got today though…

To tell the truth, the event wasn’t supposed to be the way it was yesterdat. Originally, we were gonna be in the upper deck of Geek Terminal, and I was personally hoping we could use the screen and the sound system. The night before, NTT and I went over to Geek Terminal to discuss some final details of the event today with Michael, the operations manager there, and discovered, to our horror, that he wasn’t aware of our event, and that the place was already booked at the same time as ours. We knew the mis-communication was our fault. Michael was really awesome though (that’s why I love the guys there, they just can’t stop being a blessing to me), and offered an alternative solution, which is to turn the front of the bar into our event area. In the end, the new layout made everything cosier, and made the atmosphere a lot better than it would have been.

I realised that I still panic when stuff don’t go right, even though I know that all things will ALWAYS work together for good for me. The night before I was worried the event would get messed up, but now that it’s over, I look back and see Daddy God’s finger prints all over!

Fingerprint 1: Geek Terminal was supposed to be closed on Friday, yet when I arrived, I saw Michael there. According to him, he was supposed to leave and close up the place a lot earlier, in which then we would have missed him and result in totally chaos the next day, but because the people he was supposed to meet were late, he was still around by the time I got to Geek Terminal. In fact, he closed the place right after NTT and I left. He then came up with a solution for us, and NTT and I thought of ways to take advantage of the change in location.

Fingerprint 2: The event was obviously a lot more succesful thanks to the new layout! That’s when I realised how perfect things went for us. In Christ, even our mistakes prosper. To me, that was the best gift from Daddy God that I could recieve for our 100th episode, His presence.

I find it strange how our emotions somehow take a while to learn the lesson, despite the endless flow of testimonies and Him redeeming me everytime without fail from circumstances. The good news is that things can only get better, for my God has seen my future, and He declared to me that it is good!

In His love,

Daniel

Our new name cards are finally here! And I’m gonna take this opportunity to show them off to you, and as a reader of my blog, share with you a secret feature of our name cards too!

So don’t forget to collect them all! Get the whole crew’s cards and frame them up!!

P.S.: Thanks to Claudia, Rinaz and Ryu for recommending TommyPrint to us!

So Intel sent me their Core i7 rig to play with, and I decided to share with you guys my unpacking experience!

The specs for the rig:

• Intel Core i7 Extreme 3.2GHz (4 cores, 8 threads)
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• 3 GB RAM
• ATI Radeon HD 4800 with 512MB
• 80GB Hard drive Solid State Drive!!!
• Samsung 22″ display
• Microsoft Wireless desktop

UPDATE: Just found out that it’s not using a 80GB HDD but an 80GB Intel SSD!!!

I mean, look at the size of that box! And a 22″ Wide Screen display?? Woah… My desk is once again full of gear…

Anyway, Intel sent me this gear for me to test out the new Intel Core i7 chip, and I will be using it to render videos with Adobe CS4 to really put this machine to the test, which, frankly, I have no doubt it will perform. Stay tuned for more on Tech65.org!

In the meantime, I’m gonna crash in bed before Interesthink3 tonight, and after 5 days of awesome serving at the I Dare You and Encounter Jesus camp for DARE.

So as most of you know, I bought a new HD camera to film videos for Tech65. Today, I decided to give a hand at editting my first HD (720p) movie, so I imported the files from the camera into a folder on my iMac before importing it into a new Final Cut Express project after discovering before hand that “Log and Transfer” (quicktime link) doesn’t work with this camera. I was happy that I could just edit as usual with the HD files in the project, before discovering the following:

It looks quite normal doesn’t it? Just to explain what you’re looking at, the left window is the clip I would like to add into my sequence, while the right window is a preview of my sequence now. I edit by setting a start point and an end point (called in and out points) in the left window and drag it into the right so that it drops into my sequence.

So what do I want you to see? Well, if you notice, the left window is in HD. It’s a widescreen view and fills up the window completely. THE RIGHT IS NOT!!! IT’S A NORMAL 4:3 VIDEO WITH AN UGLY LETTERBOX!!!

What happened was that because my Sanyo camera was smart enough to make things very simple for its users by placing AVCHD files together with the photo files so that you didn’t have to dig through a series of complex folder structures just to find your video file. The thing is, Final Cut Express won’t recognise the files if they’re not in that complicated folder structure, so it’s gonna treat it as a normal video. And since Final Cut automatically sets the sequence frame size to the type of video you drag in, and since it can’t tell it’s a HD file, it’s making me edit it as a standard video!! I just wasted a lot of time!!!

And guess what, I tried iMovie 08, and boom! Immediately the “import video” window popped up, took the HD clip in my camera, and put it into iMovie to make a proper HD movie! Final Cut just tried to act smart on me…

So back to the drawing boards it was. It wasn’t so difficult this time since I already had an existing theme in mind as well as the raw photoshop file to make changes easily. Also, to save me from all that mess that was going on in the code, I decided to do this from scratch (kind of. All my designs are based on the Kubrick theme’s code) rather than editing previous versions. It was surprisingly faster than the last time I did something like this. The coding part was a lot easier too, since I was doing this from scratch. I’m quite happy with what I’ve done.

As usual, you can check it out over at our sandbox. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

Oh, and as a special treat, here’s a look at the history (just 1 year) of Tech65 design changing with the times.

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