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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Thursday, April 14, 2005
Alternative Voice Options
For the past several months I've been experimenting with using my Treo 600 as my sole business phone. This just doesn't work - partly due to hardware problems on the Treo, and partly due to the realities of SprintPCS cellular service, I've grown increasingly dissatisfied.
I like having my cellphone, calendar, and address book in the same device and being able to sync it with Outlook. But I've had two Treos with defective headphone jacks (making the phone unusable with headsets) and the speakerphone facility sucks. SprintPCS offers no way to permanently turn off call waiting, which means that anytime a client calls me we're subject to being interrupted by a second call. And the thing rings, beeps, buzzes, or makes some kind of noise at every event and these beeps and buzzes are audible to whoever is on the other end of the line.
I need alternatives and I'm not going back to the telco.
The latest news on SkypeIn looks promising, and the $30/year price is low enough to make experimentation attractive. Reading about Steve's Skype and Treo combination started me thinking, so today I bought a SkypeIn number
- 678-608-1406 SkypeIn
VoIP looks like the best option. I have a great ISP - Speakeasy - that offers dry copper (no dial tone) DSL up to 6Mbit. I got a dedicated DSL link installed in my office some time ago. Today I ordered Speakeasy VoIP service that gives me unlimited calling in the US and Canada for $24/month. It will take a week or so to get my new number and the adapter, but I should soon be back in business - literally. And all without a single call to or bill from a telco. Now we're talking!
The cell phone experiment wasn't a total failure. I learned that running a business from a tiny, portable device isn't a strategy for heavy or long-term usage. It's great as a backup, temporary, or failover option but not reliable enough for everyday use. And I still like my Treo - I just need to get it replaced (again) under warranty.
Posted by: 
Terry Frazier at 1:07 PM
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Terry Frazier at 1:07 PM
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Friday, April 8, 2005
Adobe, Brother, Fujitsu and the Written Page
A while back I wrote about two very cool products I use - Adobe Acrobat 7 Profesional and the Fujitsu ScanSnap. (Someone wrote me shortly after those posts to ask if ScanSnap and Acrobat 7 work together. Yes, they do. Swimmingly.) Both of these products represent state-of-the-art paperless office technology. Acrobat 7's comment tracking feature and its ability to flow comments and changes back into Word for further editing are "must-have" improvements for anyone who does lots of document reviews.
But the little ScanSnap is what really amazes me. I used to work for IBM and we developed page scanning solutions for book publishers and printers. What we struggled to do for $100k can now be done, better, for $400. The ScanSnap software is extremely intelligent. It recognizes blank pages and leaves them out. It's de-skews (straightens) a page that scans in crooked. It detects whether the page has been inserted head-up or head-down and automatically rotates it if needed. In short, it does everything you can imagine, and at a rate of 15 pages (30 images) per minute! It also ships with a little PDF Thumbnail viewer that lets me see the contents of PDF files in a Windoze Explorer window.
This thing is so fast and so painless to use I've changed my note-taking strategy. I used to attempt to enter everything into some sort of computer - PC, laptop, PDA. But there were many times when that was either impractical or improper. Now I don't worry about it. I carry a notepad everywhere I go. I write stuff. I draw stuff. I scribble. When I get back to the office I tear out the pages, drop them in the scanner, punch a button and have all my notes in a nice PDF file.
Then I toss the notepaper in a shredder. If I have a critical original I file it away but usually I just shred the paper. If I need the note in paper form again I print it out. If I need to change it, I mark up the printed copy, rescan it, and throw the paper away again. Sometimes I still need to convert the notes to text and have to type them in, but not very often. I'm working on getting my voice recognition software trained well enough I can just read it in, but I have a ways to go with that.
One more device that makes this easy is my Brother HL6050DN laser printer. This 25 page-per-minute device prints on both sides of the sheet and has great software that lets me shrink pages to fit 2-up (or more but it gets really small) on a sheet, which means that a 100-page document can be printed out in about a minute on 25 sheets of paper. All of this makes the paper-to-digital-to-paper-to-digital cycle a quick and relatively pain-free exercise which, for me, is about as good as it gets.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
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Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
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Thursday, April 7, 2005
Backing Up - Finally
I have long lamented the fact that I never back up. I complain over and over and over that I will never get caught in a computer disaster again without backing up. But I do. I build redundant systems, use mirrored RAID arrays, copy my important files from the laptop to the desktop and vice versa - but I never really back up. It's just too friggin hard. I need a tape system or something.Until now.
Several weeks ago Chris Pirillo blogged the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. UBCD4Win is the product of one Benjamin Burrows, and it's a kick-ass little toolkit for those of us trapped in Windoze hell. One of the reasons I don't back up is until now there was no easy way to boot to Windoze, have all your apps and do stuff like run diags, image a disk, etc. It's just a royal pain.
But having a recent image of your system disk - and/or data drives - is absolutely critical if you hate rebuilding a computer just because a drive crashed or some simple thing broke and took your data with it. Even if you get some bad malware infection and need to reinstall everything, having a known good disk image can save you hours (maybe days) of effort.
UBCD4Win makes all that possible. It loads up, asks if you want to load network drivers, finds all your drives, and lets you run a variety of free tools that Ben was kind enough to include. As I write this I'm waiting on my IBM ThinkPad T41 to write an image of
All in all, this is a cool thing no Windoze user should be without. Ben has gone to great lengths to make it easy to build and use UBCD4Win, and has written extensive instructions. I've been looking for something like this for years. I liked it so much I donated $50. Great job, Ben!
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 6:38 PM
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Terry Frazier at 6:38 PM
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