As it turns out, my next-door neighbor had an online weather station, and I, coincidentally, knew nothing about Visual Basic. I thought to myself, "How cool would it be if I could write a little VB program that would suck the temperature and wind chill data off my neighbor's web site and displayed it on my desktop?"

After a week of working in my spare time (and consuming many beers) I had it! I even included an option to copy the current temperature data to the clipboard so it could be pasted it into an email.

I must confess, my VB skills are feeble at best. Those of you reading this who are professional developers probably could have done the same thing in a fraction of the time, and without the beer. However, I firmly believe beer to be an essential part of any spare-time work I do.

The novelty of continuously pasting the temperature data into emails quickly wore off though, so I thought, "How cool would it be if I could get Outlook to automatically insert the current temperature when I replied to someone's email?" I really had no clue how to go about doing this, and quite frankly, the thought of developing some kind of COM add-in scared the crap out of me.

The solution actually turned out to be quite simple. Email signatures! Outlook 2003 allows you to define a signature for new messages, and a separate one for replies and forwards.

All I needed to do was have my temperature-sucking VB program update the documents that were created when I defined the signature in Outlook. There's one for each email format, and they're are stored as .txt, .rtf and .htm files in the C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures directory.

Now, when the temperature changes, my application updates those three files. When I reply to or forward an email, the current temperature data is automatically inserted at the bottom of my reply, like shown below.