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Blog – A Digital Nomad

Outlining: What Google Docs is Missing

As a user of a PC at work and a Mac at home, I am always on the lookout for applications that will allow me to get my work done using my Mac when I work at home. Eventually I would like to follow many others and switch to a Macbook Pro as my work laptop. Google Docs is on the right track, however it is missing some basic functionality that will keep most people from migrating away from their Microsoft suite.

I am performing on-line research for a vertical market conference I will be attending . This conference is attended by many organizations made up of many subsidiaries. There are also complex collaborations and joint ventures between the companies. I need to create a document for myself as well as my coworkers to help them to understand the complex relationships before going to the conference. Mind maps would be perfect for this type of information visualization, however I haven’t picked a mind map application yet so I decided to outline the information instead. Using Google Docs would give me cross platform capabilities as well as the ability to share with coworkers.

The only auto-numbering function I could find in Google […]

2017-05-25T18:09:07-08:00Tags: , |

Bookmooch: Free Books from the Airport

My wife and kids read at least twice as many books as I do per year, which makes our collective used book generation pretty significant. A few months ago I signed up for the Bookmooch service to give our used books away. I was surprised at how fast books where being mooched (requested) from my list. The first one was within an hour of putting the books into my inventory. This is cool. I can’t bring myself to toss books in the garbage, so they just stack up in my office or in boxes in the garage waiting for the next garage sale where I might get a 25 cents for each one.

Bookmooch certainly sounds like a better way. Give a book away you don’t want, get one you do. There are a ton of posts and videos on how BookMooch works on Technorati (link leads to search results). If you aren’t familiar with Bookmooch this is a good place to get all the details on how to use it.

Now that books had been requested I had to package them up and send them. […]

2017-05-25T18:09:09-08:00

Skydeck – Analytics for Mobile Conversations

I am glad I made it into the first 500 people invited to use Skydeck, analytics for mobile phone conversations. After reading the basics about it the night before I couldn’t wait to get into the Beta. I am in sales and I use my Blackberry as my primary communication device. I don’t have an office phone, I use my cell phone exclusively. 

I am always looking into new ways to get analytics on my communications with my customers to enhance my effectiveness as a Sales Professional. Relying on my memory and the notes in our not so great CRM solution really isn’t the best way to keep track of the phone communications I have with my customers. Having a program that will combine my address book with my cell phone usage giving me analytics for mobile usage can be a very useful tool for me.

Skydeck is Web application plus a plugin for Firefox, which adds a toolbar. It installed itself error free on my Mac Pro. Next I connect Skydeck to my AT&T wireless account by providing my cell phone number and password. It reported that it was downloading my […]

2017-05-25T18:09:10-08:00Tags: , , , |

X-RAID: The Borg of Network Attached Storage

by Marke Clinger

This weekend I did the unimaginable. I purposefully pulled out, one by one, every drive in my Netgear ReadyNAS RAID while it was running. I am pretty familiar with RAID technology because of the work I did in the late ’80s with several pioneering companies working on early RAID and network attached storage (NAS) implementations. Even with this knowledge I was apprehensive about removing anyone of the hard drives in my NAS RAID Array, it was outright frightening to pull all of them out and expect the data not to get lost.

The Netgear ReadyNAS  is a fantastic solution which serves several purposes for me:

1) Network Attached Storage – Connects to the Gigabit network in my house.
2) RAID Array – Disks are […]

2020-12-05T23:15:27-08:00

Now That’s Service! – Yousendit Callback in 9 minutes

At 5:35pm tonight my phone rang with the area code of 408, Silicon Valley. Hum could it be mom? I don’t have any customers in that area code. I was still in my office in Santa Cruz, CA trying to figure out if I could track who downloaded a file using Yousendit’s Outlook plug-in. I created an e-mail in Outlook and attached the file I wanted to send. When I click send, the plug-in uploads the attachment to the Yousendit site and replaces the attachment with a note that contains a link to download the file. Nice when you are sending a 10Mb file to 100 people. I could not figure out how to track the downloads of the file and make sure it was sent securely when using the plug-in. Sure, this can be done on-line for $8.99 if I wanted to type in the 100 contacts into a Web interface.

At 5:21pm I sent an e-mail with two questions, how to upload 100 contacts into the Web interface or how to do tracking from the Outlook plug-in. I figure I will hear back by e-mail in a day or two, particularly since I have a free account.

I better […]

2013-08-24T13:31:33-08:00Tags: , |
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