Commas can be useful, Her World! (Catboy feature)

Students in my department have been celebrating the appearance of our graduate student Marcus Chua in women’s lifestyle magazine Her World.

Her World ran a feature of snazzy bachelors (I think) and apparently devoted a full page to Marcus who has been studying mammal ecology for a few years now and is deep in the midst of his leopard cat project (hence “catboy”).

Well, office staff were so delighted at the news, they decided to share the good news – with faculty and grad students in my very large department at NUS Biological Sciences .

Since the email’s subject line mentioned my graduate student, I did the dutiful supervisor’s job of checking to ensure there were no fires to put out.

“What is he up to now?” ran through my mind as I saw hi nam and clicked. Then this screaming text greeted me.

It was the magazine edge I was looking at. ANd just after that, Microsoft Outlook froze on me.

Well, Marcus is not stranger to exposure of this sort. He was a poster boy for “The Next Generation” during the Biodiversity of Singapore Symposium III.

Later during our Choa Chu Kang cemetery field trip to examine small mammal habitats, Marcus told the story. He had used the opportunity to take the magazine crew on a field trip and walked the entire Tree Tops Trail with them, nice! We’ll share that full story eventually in the NUS Biodiversity Crew.

Meanwhile, we agreed commas would have helped.

To read more about Marcus Chua, see his profile in RMBR’s DNA and the Leopard Cat webpage.

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Hotmail users, login to Outlook.com for a refreshing new look!

If you have clung onto Hotmail all this while, a new portal awaits you, its called Outlook.com, riding on that familiar email programme well used in corporate environments. Just go to Outlook.com and login with your hotmail email address and password.

You will discover a much cleaner look and some keyboard navigation options which are helpful. I don’t know how extensive as I took a very quick look.

I abandoned Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail once GMail surfaced (in 2004) as these had both become a wasteland of junk mail for me. Also GMail was a whole new invention.

In hotmail there is Microsoft Smart Screen now and hopefully it prove be as effective as the GMail filters. For now, I love the mark spam option which says “my friend’s account has been hacked”! That is an option which is still sorely needed!

There are actually sections – Mail, People, Calendar and Sky Drive. The new interface is seen in Mail and People.

In “People” the clean new interface is great to manage your contacts, and keyboard shortcuts are active. I deleted a bunch of un-named contact by selecting them with a space bar and scrolling through with my arrow keys before hitting the delete key; looks promising. And you can import contacts from Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and Linkedin.

SkyDrive and Calendar will lead you back to the Windows Live interface and these will presumably be integrated into the new look later. Click the Windows Live icon at the top left to get back to Outlook.

Well, this looks promising for the many hotmail users who have not yet switched to gmail. However, many of them might not even know about this as yet, so suggest they login to Outlook.com for a pleasant surprise!

As for me? I’m heavily invested in GMail and nothing I saw here actually impressed me, so this was just a tour. Hotmail was on my name card in the late-90’s (Hotmail was introduced in 1996) and I still get people trying to reach me there. A permanent vacation reply announces that I am in GMail.

Read reviews like the one from TechRadar.