January 2008 Archives

RecordNations offers a document scanning service as well as storage for your important documents. Their records storage lets you free up space on your servers and keep them in a secure off-site location.

Not keeping proper records cost business millions of dollars every year and sometimes entire companies go down because of lack of proper planning. Look at the woman just arrested in Florida last week. Her employer was looking to replace her and she found out and then erased 15 years of architectural records, costing the company something like $8.4 million. Had they used proper storage management and had their important records stored in a secure off-site location it never would have happened.

I used to do a bit of maintenance on a local attorney's network but he was too cheap to buy proper storage and ended up losing his server and quite a few records in the process. I was able to recover most of them for him as added cost to his office, but had he kept his records secure somewhere else, losing a server would not have been such a big deal. He did have to reproduce most of his payroll records by hand since that was one of the things I was not able to recover.

There are plenty of document scanning services out there, so make sure that you are using one such as RecordNations. Dependable and extensive data backup experience is what you need, in addition to through security procedures.

I started my browser up the other morning and realized that Flock had been updated again. I think I am currently running version 1.07. I am really starting to like Flock. I don't really use the Media bar but it does support all of the Firefox plugins, or the ones I use anyway. It also seems to use less memory than Firefox and while I realize that the memory leaks in Firefox are mostly caused by 3rd party plugins, Flock doesn't seem to have as many problems with it. It does use more and more memory than FF but I seem to be able to use it at least two or three times longer than Firefox. Pretty big difference, particularly when I am blogging.

I probably use about 10-15 different plugins on a regular basis including toolbars and a popup blocker, as well as a few others that just make it easier for me when I am surfing the web.

As a web site, Cellware is still in it's beta version but from what I have seen at the site, you couldn't tell. It seems to be in full release to me unless they are going to be adding more features.

Cellware is a free portal for mobile downloads such as ringtones, wallpapers, video, games and applications.

In addition to being a download site you can also set up a profile and it starts looking more like a mobile social networking sort of place. Pretty cool actually. When you first sign up for a free account through Cellware it lets you invite your friends from several different services to come check it out, including MySpace, Friendster and Facebook. You can also import contacts from your webmail services as well.

Aside from the content that they have (and lots of other web sites have as well) there are several things that seem unique to Cellware. You can create your own ringtones right on the sight by uploading a file. Any music or sound file that's on your hard drive can be uploaded and turned into a ringtone. Once it's uploaded you use their ringtone editor to select the 20 second portion of the file that you want to keep, enter some information so that you can identify it and then save it. Then you just download it to your phone or even share it with your friends.

I have used several different sound editors to create ringtones from mp3's in the past and it can be a pain. You have to get it the right bitrate and length and then use a program like Bitpim (which voids your warranty) to copy it over to the correct place in your phone's file system. Cellware makes it pretty easy.

You can also use their mashup editor to mashup two different ringtones. You can put them end to end to make one long ringtone, or you can actually overlay the two. Very cool, particularly if you have an instrumental and a bit of cool spoken text or verse you want to combine. Another pretty neat option is to use their text-to-speech editor to turn text into a ringtone. They also have ringtones that contain your name or that of your friends. Nametones. Personalize your friends ringtone to the max.

One thing I did notice while browsing the Name Tones is that there are quite a few of them on the site. It would be nice if they would add links to each letter. It does let you jump five or six pages at a time, but that's not exact. It also doesn't let you change the view to alphabetical. It seems to be listed in order of upload rather than anything else. Of course I may just be slow on the uptake too. Their IS a search function. Once I searched for my name I managed to find four ringtones that contained it. Vain, aren't I? Once I located the one I wanted and previewed it right there in my browser I then navigated to their WAP page from my cell phone browser, entered the download ID number and got it right on the phone.

Cellware has a pretty cool image editor as well to create and share your mobile wallpapers as well. It lets you add special effects, rotate and crop your images and then send it to your phone.

One thing you may want to check out is the fact that Cellware bases their business model on sharing their site revenue as well. As you create and upload content they share it with the content creators.

You can set up in your profile to view (or not view) certain content as well. Initially when you first sign up it only lets you see "G" rated content, which is a great thing if you have kids or teenagers that might access your account. You can choose from "G, PG,R and X" for your content viewing pleasure if you want to get a little racy with your downloads.

As more and more web sites are created as or convert to mobile sites for cell phone and smart phone use, the mobile content available will continue to improve as they have over the last couple of years. Go check out Cellware and see what I mean.

Updated - I stopped at the hated Wal-Mart and picked up a Dell widescreen 19". This is sweet. It actually has a much smaller footprint than the five year old LCD I was using. Now I can close the rolltop desk it sits on. Resolution on it is 1440x900. I feel the need for a bit of gaming. Maybe after I nap for a while. It was a long day and day number seven at work for me. I only have two more to go (if I don't kill someone in the meantime) until I get two off in a row. That will be the first two days off I have had together since December 8th and 9th. I have actually only had two off since then, not including a half-day that I took, but still had seven hours of meetings. No wonder I have been such a bastard lately.

Damned if my monitor hasn't crapped out on me this morning. I have known for a while that it was dying but I was hoping that it would last a little while longer. Back before Christmas I gave everyone instructions not to turn it off because I wouldn't be able to get it back on again and they have done pretty well.

I woke up this morning and have been messing with it for a while but it is completely dead. So much for that. I suppose a trip to the Wal Mart is called for this morning before I go to work. I keep a $0 balance on one card but had planned to keep it that way, so much for that.