Life & Tech

by James A. Belasco

Success can be the worst enemy to change.

www.dictionary.hm

This is an oldie by goody site with articles on how stuff works: www.howstuffworks.com. It covers wide-ranging topics such as: automobile, science, health, computer, electronics, etc. Check out a beta of the Mobile Travel Guide section for a quick overview on travel destinations (what to see and do).

Some popular articles:

• How Lock Picking Works
• How Car Engines Work
• How Hybrid Cars Work

www.jotcloud.com

There are many on-line photo sharing sites — some set up mainly for printing your photos, but some are designed specifically to host photos for sharing (either publicly or privately), some will even allow you to sell your photo.

www.flickr.com - allow public or private sharing, pro account has unlimited storage

www.bubbleshare.com - quick and easy to create album/sharing (public)

www.smugmug.com

www.shuttlefly.com - print photo

www.dotphoto.com - print photo

Bonus tip: If you see something neat on the web, take a screen-capture and then posted it to you on-line site for reference or archive.

www.googlepages.com

Seven key fundamentals that is driving toward disruptive changes in technology:

1. Storage - The price is dropping and the size is increasing. Another trend is free on-line large storage (Google claims to give you ‘infinite’, its Gmail started out at 2GB and now it’s up to 2.7GB). Google is also planning on offering infinite drive once the bandwidth support it. Keep all your data on-line with Google.

2. Bandwidth - Again, the rate is going up and price is going down. For the first time DSL growth exceed Cable Broadband. The more broadband, the more connected we are.

3. Wireless - From EV-DO, EDGE, HSPDA, WiMax - not only ubiquitous access, but also very high speed. The price will be coming down in a few years.

Read more

Several good web sites were the product of the mass.

del.icio.us - social bookmarking - keep your bookmarks on-line (using tags) and share with others

www.digg.com - ‘people’ chooses cool articles to read and ‘digg’ it (the higher the diggs, the more readers)

www.stumbleupon.com - cool web pages submitted and voted on by members

www.textpayme.com

tracker.jot.com

www.campfirenow.com

These are the tips from expert presenters, especially the first one:

1. B - Blank/Unblank the screen with black screen (from time-to-time, you may want to do this while answering questions from the audiences)

2. W - Turn screen white/back to presentation

3. Pre-print 6 slides/page cheat sheet for yourself, then when you need to go to a specific slide, key in the slide number + <Enter> - (e.g. 12<Enter> will go to slide 12)

4. <SpaceBar> - Next Slide & Arrows - allow you to forward and backward

5. Do not look at the slide while speaking, look at the audiences.

www.3bubbles.com

www.blurb.com

This is a great web2.0 (ajax) application, www.30boxes.com on-line calendar. It’s still in beta which means still a few rough edge and missing features. But it’s clean and simple to use, and a good concept using something called “one-box-event-entry”, so you just type in “lunch with john 12:30pm wed +jon@email.com” and it will create an entry on next Wednesday at 12:30 and also email an invitation to Jon. Give it a try.

(You can also try the mobile version at: http://m.30boxes.com.)

Note: Google is working on a calendar called CL2 tied to its Gmail services Suppose to be the ultimate web calendar app. Not sure when it will be released. (3/6/06)