tech tips - Paul Fleming - Paul Fleming - Flemo: Between Sydney, Philadelphia and the World Wide Web

Working in the online world does offer its benefits, mostly that you are not necessarily tethered to a location or a time. In my former life as a teacher, this was a very welcome adjustment. What proves to be the most difficult is the ‘always on’ mentality. Clients expect it, friends expect it, hell even I expect it. So when I come home to Sydney, I rarely get an extended period of time off as I’m still logging fairly extensive hours at night. I’ve tried to force myself to simply step away from all my connections but aside from a 1 week trip to Spain last year with only minimal activity, it’s mostly been pretty tough. Having your own business certainly doesn’t help but I have a feeling it’s becoming pretty common around all industries. So I read blogs and get opinions on how to do it and most people i talk with haven’t seemed to be able to make that adjustment either. Some online articles seem to provide answers but it’s always difficult to tell how genuine they are. Still, I try and have achieved only partial success at this but a couple of positive steps I’ve learned, have had a pretty good impact.

Step away from the machine – instead of taking my lunch at the computer, I started going to the gym. Sure some weeks I have several meetings that go through the lunch hour but at least 3 days a week have helped my cause during working hours.
On vacation I still haven’t been able to leave the Bberry at home. It’s on my list of to-do’s.
Cull that information – it took me a long time to refine my list of RSS feeds as well as certain twitter and facebook activities but in doing so, I think I’ve cut a significant amount of time from my day.

Only a couple of small steps but they can have a decent impact. While it’s far from the answer, every little step seems to help.

With the crazy gift-giving season coming up and most of us short on funds, E-Verse is sharing your concerns by offering up a Top 5 Tech Gifts (that may or may not be useful or worth the money) for less than $100.

5. Logitech Portable Lapdesk – It may be called a laptop but that doesn’t mean that you have to have OK with it scalding your goodies. Prevent those sweat marks or thigh burns with this handy little table. $30

4. WikiReader – The poor persons Kindle, this $99 bad boy may look like a waste of money for yet another thing to carry around but it gives you a direct line to information contained in Wikipedia! How amazing is that? I mean it’s Wikipedia people! Browse 3 million topics! That’s awesome! Oh c’mon, fork out the extra dough for the Kindle at $259.

3. Target Remote Control Gift Card – So Target has a knack for rolling out pretty interesting Gift Certificates (anyone remember the Camera/Gift Card that flew off the shelves last year?) Well they’ve got a new gizmo so you can satisfy your friends’ gadget needs as well as giving you the added bonus of not have to decide what to actually get them. Surely a win-win. $100

2. Dream Cheeky USB Fridge – Need to keep a coldie handy at all times to help either quench the thirst or settle the nerves after tweeting all day, check out the Dream Cheeky USB fridge. Simply plug in to your USB port and within 5 minutes it’s apparently cold enough to keep that coldie, cold. $25.

1. Swissflash Army Knife – File your nails, jot down a haiku, shine a light in other people’s eyes and then illegally transfer secure data from your mates computer with this awesome all-in-one device. From $39.99

BONUS
Drum T-Shirt – Impress the ladies by banging on your chest! Off to play a gig but forgot your kit? This t-shirt is for you. Or if banging on your chest causes bruising, maybe the finger drums.

Hot air Balloon – Start your own media wild goose chase for the sake of publicity with this Experimental Hot Air Balloon. Kid with strange name not included.

Otherwise I might be tempted by this new rip-off scheme…

Hi Counsel.

My name is Shih Dunson. I am contacting your firm in regards to a divorce settlement with my ex husband (David G. Dunson) who resides in your jurisdiction. I am currently on assignment in South Korea. We had an out of court agreement (Collaborative Law Agreement) for him to pay
$ 848,900.00 plus legal fees. He has only paid me $ 64,000.

I am hereby seeking your firm to assist in collecting the balance from
him. He has agreed already to pay me the balance but it is my belief that
a Law firm like yours is needed to help me collect payment from my
ex-husband or litigate this matter if he fails to pay as promised.

Sincerely,
Shih Dunson.

I recevied an email from MacMall offering Microsoft Office for Mac the 2008 edition for $99. Actaully a pretty good deal but why would you bother? I’ve been using NeoOffice for about 6 months now and must admit to really loving it. My experience with Pages was ho-hum mainly due to compatibility issused – by defalt they save as .pages and then you have to export a separate file for a .doc which is familiar to many. NeoOffice saves it as .doc (with a couple of questions asked) and takes into account the compatibility. This means only 1 file which, in these days of information overload, really makes more sense.

I had MS for mac prior to that and it was OK but for the $150 price tag does nothing but increase the overall cost of being part of the elite. Now after experiencing the joys of NeoOffice (and to a lesser extent OpenOffice) figure that even @ $99 seems incredibly bloated (like the actual software).