Earned Value Management (EVM) Revisited on YouTube

I must confess, I have never liked the concept of the Earned Value as such. How can you realistically estimate the Planned Value, that is the amount of work (not only costs or time), to which you compare the actual performance? Is it not blue sky thinking? I prefer to estimate the Earned Schedule, Costs, Quality (!) plus the human factor instead.

Here I found a nice, albeit long, YouTube video explaining the idea behind the EVM concept, as expounded by the PMI.

Here's is the key slide:

EVM as explained by Simon Hoare

You may also find this explanation useful.

Flytouch 8, Superpad VIII, Allwinner A10 manual & instructions

I bought Superpad 8 aka "Flytouch" from an Ebay seller, the full (counterfeit) name is:

10.2 Flytouch 8 superpad VIII 24GB Allwinner A10 cortex A

The actual model code is:  BC1003

The hardware problems aside (a topic worth another blog post), I have been looking for a full manual for this Superpad. In the end, I found it on a password protected producer's site. I am copying it here for your enjoyment:
Download 10.2 "Flytouch 8" Superpad VIII manual
Chinese source of the Superpad 8 manual

Synchronizing Outlook contacts with Google account: Go Contacts Sync is the solution

Master data

After migrating my semi-public contact list (an address book with official company contact details, already available on the Net) to Google Contacts, for ease of access on my mobile, now I had to tackle the thorny issue of synching some of such lists with Outlook, which I still use, mostly for privacy's sake.

After trial and error, I settled on this GNU product:  Go Contacts Sync Mod, a fork of the previous equally useful Go Contacts Sync daemon.

Go and try it. If you like it, there is the donate page... Feed the hungry programmer! ;)

Here is a more extensive review.

Tips

• Before you sync anything, create a backup of your data, both in Outlook and in Google
• Apart from a lump complete backup of your PST Outlook file, create folder with a copy of your contacts that you want to sync.
• Test syncing on an empty Google account

Alternatively, you may use Microsoft Contacts, aka Hotmail, to synchronize the semipublic part of your contact list. Here's the MS article with the procedure.