This used to be such a headache, but now it’s pretty simple, providing you take a few simple steps, you can be up and transferred in no time at all.

A good piece of advice is to always clean up your email before you do a transfer, if you only have 10 – 20Mb of data, then don’t bother – but if your like me and have a 2Gb+ mailbox, a bit of spring cleaning never foes amiss. Simple things – just remove any unwanted inbox items, get rid of those old emails that you have sent, clean the junk mail folder and lastly empty the trash (unless you really want to take it with you) – with any luck your mailbox will now be smaller (saved me about 400Mb).

Fish out your mail files on the Tiger machine, go and visit [Username]/Library/Mail/ and [Username]/Library/Mail Downloads where the [Username] is the name of your account.

Copy all of this information to a CD, HDD or a network location accessible by the new machine. Lastly, visit [Username]/Library/Preferences/and find the com.apple.mail.plist and copy this too.

Now on your new machine, copy all of the files into their respective locations, they are the same locations on a Leopard machine – run mail, and you will probably be asked for the passwords for your account. You can get around this by copying over your keychain from the old system – but that is a conversation for another time.

Here’s another great head scratcher in the office debacle – why when you are copying date fields from one sheet to another does Excel feel the need to change the date? It all about the 1904 date format you see. All new sheets created in Excel are automatically set to the 1904 date format whereas all previous versions of Excel were set to the 1900 Date format – it’s an easy fix.

In the sheet that you wish to copy the date to, open up the preferences (Excel -> Preferences). 

You then need to open up the ‘Calculations’ section of the preferences.

Then simple select and uncheck the ‘Use 1904 Date System’ – hey presto, if you copy data from your ‘old’ sheet, it will magically appear correctly in the new sheet!

Note: If you are using a Windows computer, you will need to go to Tools -> Options -> Calculation Tab.

The buzzword to define the 00’s, it’s all about the web 2.0 but what the hell does that actually mean – it really depends on who you are and how far your technological grey matter runs!  Not to mention that pretty much anybody on the web has a completely different opinion of what that term means. -As a side note, to most people I have asked it means gradients, blue and green and some funky transitions.

I think that there is a simple way to define the 3 states of the web, but I don’t want to look at it from a design point of view, rather a developer point of view. If you really think about it, it boils down to data manipulation and how we as an internet using public use that information.

The original internet (for this purpose 1990 onward) relied on static websites, made of that wonderfull old table based HTML (which served it purpose well). Pages created offline and then uploaded for the masses to enjoy. Only the largest sites on the web were using large databases, and MySQL, PHP and the whole LAMP setup was not as prevalent as it is today.

Web 2.0 (for this purpose 2002 onward) was about dynamism (is that even a word?), the abilty to read but also reply to a web page. Static information made dynamic by the masses inputting their own unique views. Think of the rise of site like digg, myspace, facebook, reddit, youtube, wikipedia – all sites that display information but additionally let users not only add their own data but manipulate the data already present on the site.

Web 3.0 (sometime around 2009/10 I would think) is about bringing the internet away from a heavy reliance of web data and localising that data on your internet device. I would hope that in a few years everyone will enjoy a permenant connection to the mobile net. I already have my iPhone, and admittedly, having the ‘whole’ internet in my pocket has had insurmountable benefits. Think of Google Gears and you’ll have a rough idea where we’re heading.

We basically gone through the 3 states of a set of file privileges - Web 1 (R), Web 2 (WR), Web 3 (WRX) or is that just me?