SharedPlan Connect, September 13, 2005
“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for
the future of the human race.”
– H. G. Wells
Hello everyone,
As I have mentioned in this space before, I am a big cycling
fan. I also am an avid rider, and have
spent many years trying to go as fast as I can for as long as I can, over the
biggest mountains I could find. I
maintain a keen interest in the latest bike hardware, the most advanced
titanium or carbon fiber frames, and cutting edge advanced components.
Last week, my wife bought me a new bike for my birthday, an
Electra
Rat Rod.
It is the antithesis of
everything that I have focused my cycling attention on. It’s a
big, heavy steel cruiser with fat
tires, springs on the seat, and an old-fashioned coaster brake.
And it is a revelation! I feel like a little kid riding around on
it. I no longer worry about maintaining
a 20 mph average speed. In fact, I have
no idea how fast I’m going, nor do I care.
Yesterday, I slowly rode down a bike path through a prairie
dog colony
*, and watched a raptor slowly circle
overhead to find his next meal. I am
exploring a completely different side of bicycling, and rediscovering what made
it such a special thing for me as a kid.
Go slow. See. Hear.
Experience and enjoy.
Hurricane Relief
After seeing the disturbing images of the devastation of
Hurricane Katrina, my friend, Heidi, was determined to help out in some
way. She decided to hold a bake sale,
and sent emails to all her friends asking them to contribute baked
goods and
time. She set up a table near the
farmer’s market in Boulder and raised almost $3000 in less than six
hours! She then found a company to match those
funds two-to-one, delivering over $8000 to the American Red
Cross. It was so successful that she was back the
following weekend and she added an additional site at a nearby grocery
store. My sons and I helped out for a
while each weekend, and I was moved to see things like the same
gentleman
purchasing a cookie each weekend, paying $100 each time. I love
that. Overall, Heidi raised about $7000 on her own, plus matching
funds.
At SharedPlan, we asked ourselves what we could do. Roger observed that there were going to be
many thousands of rebuilding projects, and suggested that we give away free
copies of SharedPlan to those involved in those projects. That’s what we did, announcing the
availability of 1000 free licenses in this
news release. If you know someone who has lost a house or
other building and could benefit from the use of our software, please forward
this newsletter to him or her. Thank
you for your help in getting the word out.
Education Program
Teachers and professors often ask us whether we offer an
educational discount for the use of SharedPlan in the classroom. Well, we are finally going to put a program
in place to provide free copies for the classroom. We’re still hammering out the details, so the first licenses
won’t be available until the beginning of the year, and will initially be
limited to US users only. If you would
like to participate in this program, please
email
me and we will provide more details to you directly as they are finalized.
SharedPlan Tip
As you probably know, SharedPlan Professional Edition 2.0
allows you to publish plans to iCalendar.
This also means that you can display project tasks on a wireless device
like a PDA. Simply publish the project
plan to iCalendar (Collaborate -> Publish to Calendar), and then import the
iCalendar file into your Palm’s desktop calendar. Now you have mobile access to your project plan!
Thanks for reading,
Tracy
* Prairie dogs
are everywhere around Boulder, although most of them were wiped out by the
plague this summer. Apparently, as
beautiful as Boulder is, it is also a natural home to the plague (yes, as in
Bubonic). Every several years the
plague decimates the local prairie dog population in less than a week. I guess their ability to breed faster than
rabbits enables the survivors to quickly replace the population. See what you can learn by reading this
newsletter?
