On Saturday I won the NC Japan Center’s speech contest for my level (level 2). I am… honestly, I am extremely thrilled about this. I worked pretty hard to write my speech and then to edit it down to reasonable levels and after mangling the Japanese language in last year’s speech contest I am thrilled to have pulled it off this year. My speech was about books vs. e-books. I’m pretty pleased with myself. Mad snaps to my classmates, too, who both delivered excellent and funny speeches and to the other winners of the other levels.

Now, for the nerds: on Friday my work laptop notified me that the automatic upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 was available. I did a little reading online, found that no one was having major problems with it and then set to downloading it. This took… a long time. I got it done, though, and during our weekly staff meeting my laptop chugged away and turned itself into a 10.04 laptop instead of 9.10. When all was said and done everything seemed to work as expected only faster. Nice! Or so it seemed.

This morning I noticed that what was happening some on Friday was continuing to happen: Outlook 2007 under Crossover Linux was frequently locking up and dying on me. Great. My work is changing over to Exchange and the Outlook calendar is going to be our single calendar as of a few months from now. Some people are already using it, too, so I had no option but to figure out a way to get this working. Nothing I did – downloading and installing the latest build of Crossover Linux, etc. – seemed to make a difference and I was starting to get a little concerned.

Further reading let me in on the fact that the most recent release of the evolution-mapi plugin for Ubuntu’s native Evolution mail client was included in 10.04. I had tried an older version of evolution-mapi a few months ago and found that it choked on the calendaring side. My only hope – after hours of fiddling with Thunderbird and Lightning and all sorts of crap – was to give the newer evolution-mapi a shot.

Initial testing showed that the calendar was working fine – just great, in fact – but Evolution kept croaking when it had to refresh my rather overstuffed inbox (about 6,500 messages, yes, I know). One manual inbox clean-up via webmail later, I had my inbox down to about 1/10th its starting size and now Evolution is having no problem at all. So, I guess the latest version of evolution-mapi works. If you, like me, were finding that Evolution would hang when trying to load your mailbox, try cutting the mailbox down to size first. It doesn’t seem to like large inboxes but it does seem to handle all the Exchange stuff just fine.