Ah! The Infamous Address Book

Today, I have to write about the Address Book. Not the little black thing that gets lost in the bottom of women's purses. Nor am I writing about the ratty five year old, spiral bound model that has so many entries crossed off and written over that it is either illegible or you can't figure out which entry is the most recent. No I'm writing bout the digital model which is built into your computer programs in one way another.

Digital address books are really what as known as a relational data base. If you use your address book to inform other programs, anything you do to the empirical record will reflect in the linked records. Let's take for example that you have your Uncle Louie's contact information in a MS Outlook contact file. If he is on your Christmas Card mailing list and that list is derived from Outlook files, than when we change his address in his contact record than the address will change on the card mailing list also. The same will be true for any information we might have to change, such as the phone number, e-mail address etc... .

The problem is that many people, myself included do not use programs that merge easily with MS Outlook. So we have many address books. I have one for each of my three e-mail address's and that alone is enough to drive you nuts, when someone adds an e-mail address or moves, let alone getting a new cell phone. I cleaned up my friend John's record when I found four e-mail address's.

As those of you who have read this know I recently went back to a Apple Mac format. Yes, I'm still loving it. Right now I'm in the stage of moving in while I live there. I still have a couple of things I haven't got set up yet, but I'm pleased with the progress and let me assure you my life is easier and more productive.

This weeks big project is transferring the contact information from my PC to my Mac. Please do not e-mail me with all of the easy ways to do this. THEY DON'T WORK. I'VE TRIED THEM. Exporting and importing comma delineated data bases is just another way of saying that it makes sense to learn how to build a garage in you back yard and than never doing it again, because the time spend learning and executing will be wasted.

The first problem will be that for some reason the file that you need to effect this trouble free transfer is hidden. Doing search will turn up files that look like the right one but it will have a three letter designation following it that no one has ever heard of, except a programmer from Microsoft who retired three years ago. He can't be found. It's rumoured that he walked into the mountains outside of Seattle with a laptop in his hands. When someone asked him what it was, he was planning on retiring there.

I'm going to overhaul my address book the old fashioned way. Entering data from one data base into a new one manually maybe time consuming, but it can have auxiliary benefits. I'm culling old contacts that I've been hauling around for years. Most of them are people I have done business with and no longer need. Plumbers from Appleton come to mind. Others are people who I've not contacted for a long time. I pause over these names, memories come back and I decide. Some I discard. If I haven't seen or heard from them in all of this time why bother. Others I put on my blast e-mail list, thinking that maybe some contact from me might inspire them to reply. Still other names I flag for immediate contact. I realize they have reached out to me and I haven't responded.

Yeah, this is tough work compared to the automatic import export moves I could be trying, but the benefits are going to be a shorter smaller address book and maybe renewing old friends.