Cool is overrated, but no one has invented an alternative.
I say this as someone whose coolness quotient is wholly dependent on my knowledge of certain cool things. Beyond that, it sort of drags in the mud.
To boost my cool creds, I’ve been trying to move over fully from Yahoo! to Google mail. Besides better integration between Google services, Gmail is considered way cooler than Yahoo! Mail among the technorati. The problem is I’m having detachment anxiety.
It took me forever to give up Prodigy, CompuServe, Aloha.net and 56k modems, so no surprise: making the transition from Yahoo! to Google has been painful and drawn-out. I find myself flipping between the two, reducing my productivity and confusing myself about how to do one thing or another.
But I’ve got a plan that starts with moving my Yahoo! contacts to Google. Follow along if you are jumping to Gmail, too.
1. Log into your Yahoo! Mail and click on the Import/Export link in the top right of your address book page.
2. Scroll down to the Export options and click on the Yahoo! CVS: Export Now button.
3. Save the cvs file to your desktop. Go your Gmail account, and click on the Contacts link. In the upper right corner, click on Import. Hit Browse, find the cvs file on your desktop and click on Import.
Google will let you know how many of your contacts were imported. All but two of mine did and those were easily fixed for import.
The process wasn’t bad at all. Won’t be too long before I say adieu to Yahoo!
There’s a New Yorker cartoon where people are sitting around a conference table and someone says: “You say it’s a win-win, but what if you’re wrong-wrong and it all goes bad-bad?”
I’ve been to those meetings.
They drone on and on. You just want to slit your wrists so that you have an excuse to go to the bathroom.
I’m sorry to say I have no solution to interminable meetings. But you may want to check out a nifty Web solution that can help you avoid a two-hour commute for a meeting that lasts 20 minutes.
GoToMeeting.com is one of several sites offering a way to connect with people across town or around the globe and it is one of the simplest setups I’ve seen. You can sign up for a 30-day trial and test it yourself immediately.
If you’re convening a meeting, you send invitations that include a URL for the presentation, the audio phone number and an access code. Come time for the meeting, participants go to the Web address and call into the phone number. There is no elaborate pre-registration. Only those you invite get access to the URL and access code. GoToMeeting claims the online sessions are secure and encrypted.
Once you’re all in, the presenter switches the computer view to his or her screen and everyone can see the pie charts, competitors’ Web sites or whatever else can be shown on a computer screen and you can talk to each other. Presentations, demonstrations and collaborations, including the sharing of documents, are all possible with GoToMeeting.
There are different pricing plans depending on how much meeting power you need. The cheapest monthly plan is $49 and includes unlimited meetings for up to 15 attendees. Other products, including the better-known Webinar service, scales up from there. You can also avoid phone charges with GoToMeeting’s VoIP option. Not least of all, the service is now compatible with Macs as well as PCs.
We ran into one hitch when testing the service. Black boxes appeared on the computer screen of Andreas Arvman, our digital content editor and faux meeting participant. The boxes obscured some of the content that I was showing on my screen. But I suspect it’s a browser issue, so we’ll be testing it in different browsers.
Let me know your experiences with this meeting service. And, while you are at it, tell me your favorite excuse for avoiding a meeting. Here’s mine: “My dog ate my PowerPoint.”
I don’t know if your family is like mine, but we’re total sloths during summers.
We don’t get up until 6:30, maybe 7. The wash gets done on the weekends after it has built a mountain tall enough to block sunlight. Breakfast is leisurely; the paper actually gets read; the dog gets taken out more than she needs to and she knows it.
Come Aug. 25, that all changes. If your kids are younger than my college student, you’ve already come face-to-face, bleary eye-to-bleary eye, with this grim reality. School requires discipline similar to what you get force fed in boot camp.
It’s up at 5 a.m. to catch the bus or beat the school jam. All the clothes are ironed and laid out the night before. No more staying up past midnight. There’s a lot of yelling: “Into bed at 10 or you’ll be sorry, young lady!” Only thing missing is latrine duty.
The upside of the start of school is it forces certain efficiencies. Time’s running out, so you know you need to get cracking. If you have things to get done, do it now before there’s precious little free time. Get the doctor appointments over with, do the school shopping now, make sure the clothes and shoes still fit and the backpack is in good shape.
Check out your routes and the bus schedules, arrange car pools, write out daily lunch options and ingredient lists. A Real Simple trick: divide up eatables in zip-lock bags or packable containers (veggies, fruits, cheese, pretzels, etc.) and let everyone make their own lunches.
Make sure any documents, permissions, doctors’ clearances and academic approvals are ready to go with your child or sent in ahead of time. If your child is attending a new school, visit the campus ahead of time and help them understand the lay of the land. Meet the teachers, principals and counselors if you can.
Once you’re done with your checklist — and you did check it twice, right? — relax for one last time. At least until summer moseys in again, wagging its sloppy tail behind it.
Sometime soon someone will find a way to convert a thought into a digital stream that will go directly onto my to-do list.
At that point, I can happily toss my index cards and printed to-do lists, abandon my cell phone notes and luxuriate in the seamless integration of things that must get done and the actual doing of them.
Like me, you’ve probably gone through every conceivable system to organize your daily tasks: Day Runners, shopping lists, calendars, Post-It notes, writing notes on your palm with indelible ink and hiding your hand for days after. You’ve left phone messages to yourself to get the dog groomed or e-mailed yourself a reminder to buy milk.
Did any of these work for you? Probably with varying degrees of success, I’d wager, but not perfectly.
I’m not sure I have a final solution, although I’m getting fairly task-efficient using the iPhone and Evernote. But you really don’t need these technologies to reach a point where your tasks don’t overwhelm you.
You simply need to build a better to-do list — on paper, on your computer, or however you keep organized.
This idea comes from Leo Laporte and his discussion on the TWIT Network about OmniFocus, one of the new applications for the 3G iPhone. One of the guiding principles behind this software is that you can become more productive if you organize your tasks by “contexts” or where you need to be to complete a task.
Instead of simply listing things to do arbitrarily, try ordering them instead by location. So under “at computer,” list tasks like sending a happy birthday e-mail to your aunt, adding a movie to your Netflix queue and paying a bill online.
Under the listing for “in car,” your tasks could include taking in the drycleaning, filling up gas or picking up school supplies.
On the phone? List everyone you need to call and their phone numbers, unless you’ve already got their numbers nicely stored on your cell phone.
If you are super-organized, organize your list under even finer locations: downtown, Ward Centre, Ala Moana shopping center. With the iPhone application of OmniFocus, you could get suggestions on the stores you could hit to buy diapers. But again, it’s not the technology that’s necessary here, but the application of the principle that can work for you.
Try this for a week and let me know how you do. It’s a simple idea, maybe not as geeky as digital-thought conversion and the “duh” factor is rather high, but it works nonetheless.
That was my cranky response after our days-long odyssey to buy an iPhone 3G. It ended in a crowded Kahala Apple store with limited stock and the scooping up of the only type of phone available: a 16GB with a white back.
Let me say up front that there’s still no copy-and-paste functionality in the iPhone. The tiny keys remain a major frustration, so if you’ve got fat fingers consider another smart phone — or digit surgery.
The iPhone’s attraction for me is its speed, ability to push my business e-mail and the sheer coolness of its swish and tap interface.
But while the phone’s chichi index is high, it’s the applications that I was eager to try. I’m not alone in saying that the programs available in the App Store for both the iPhone and iTouch are really what Apple should be crowing about.
Here is my favorite and among the best of the breed from other tech bloggers:
• Evernote (free): See my review on this Web-based program, now with an iPhone edition. Evernote allows you to gather notes from Web pages, to-do lists, grocery lists and photos, then search for them by keywords, even within pictures. All of these notes are accessible on both your computer and phone. You can easily send camera pictures to your Evernote account, which is what I did when I visited a local bookstore and took pixs of books to check out later online.
• Remote (free): Engadget likes this application that turns the iPhone into a remote controller for your Apple TV or iTunes, perfect if you’re inclined to sit two feet from your computer choosing ABBA songs. You know who you are.
• Urbanspoon (free): New York Times writer David Pogue video blogs about several apps that use the location service (Apple does not use the term GPS), including Urbanspoon that helps you locate restaurants based on where you are. Don’t like the suggestions? Just shake the iPhone for other options.
• Facebook (free): AppleInsider lauds several social networking applications, including AOL’s instant messaging service AIM and Facebook’s iPhone app, which allows you to post pictures though not write on your Wall quite yet. There are a couple of Twitter apps as well.
• Business programs: TheStreet.com reviews several applications, including free tip calculators and Salesforce Mobile (free if you have a qualified license) and the $499 SAP Business One program, priced more than even the 16GB iPhone.
You don’t need to take our word on these applications; check out the reader reviews in the App Store. Or post your own best-worst choices here.
