On Thursday, I’ll be co-hosting a CSS Tips ‘n Tricks presentation with Jeremy Flint at the March IPSA meeting. As I’ve been preparing for my first speaking event (that isn’t for a school assignment at least), I’ve been reading up on presentation tips almost as much as I’ve been working on the actual content itself.

Fortunately, Dave Shea, along with some great commenters, offer some fantastic advice in a recent post entitled Speaking? Tips.

Jeremy and I will be featuring some of the benefits of CSS by showing off some real examples. Besides a few nervous jitters, I’m excited to be presenting on something I generally like talking about, and happen to know a little bit about as well. And I still think it’s pretty cool that Birmingham has an organized platform for web professionals and enthusiasts to meet regularly and share ideas. Not very many cities probably do.

I’ve just recently converted from being a long-time Outlook user to a Thunderbird man. The main reason was that I finally switched from using POP email to IMAP, and Outlook is terrible for IMAP mail.

While Thunderbird isn’t nearly as robust as Outlook, it handles IMAP mail much, much better. And since I’ve been using it, I’ve decided that not having all the Outlook features, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The simplicity is quite nice.

I’ve also installed RoundCube and now use it for web-based email access. It’s pretty slick already, and is in heavy development, so check it out if you’re looking for something to replace the likes of SquirrelMail .

For Outlook users, the main thing missing from Thunderbird is integrated calendering. Fortunately, the Mozilla team has a calendar project in development. Unfortunately though, it’s in the very early stages of development and isn’t quite as sophisticated.

Personally, I’ve been using Sunbird, which is the standalone version of the calendar application. What I like the most is being able to store a calendar file on my webhost server, and manage it from within Sunbird in multiple locations. Lightning, a working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird, also looks very promising.

Who do you like in this year’s Super Bowl? Me, I’m taking the Steelers, who are 4 point favorites, for a couple of different reasons.

1. The Steelers are on fire. They playing near perfect football in every aspect of the game.
2. Two words: Jerome Bettis. It could possibly be his last game ever, and he’s playing in his hometown in front of everyone he knows. Look for him to go off in this one.
3. The NFC is a much weaker conference, and the NFC West, the Seahawks’ division, is by far the worst. I’m not saying they don’t deserve to be in the Super Bowl, but I don’t think they’ve played the same caliber teams as the Steelers.