I just signed up for Google’s latest acquisition, GrandCentral. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, but after the process, I have to say that I was impressed by the features and the technology.

What is GrandCentral? The short answer is: You get a new GrandCentral phone number, input all (or some) of your other telephone numbers, so that you have one consolidated number for people to reach you, wherever you are. It also has several more online features that make it attractive for those whose telephone is as important or more important than email. You can import your contact list, view call logs, record calls, screen and block calls, etc.

Some of the technology has been around in VOIP phone systems, but they’ve managed to bring it to the masses here. Note that as of this writing, it’s still in beta. Also, Google just made some of the advanced features free, but note that the terms of service states that it can change and charge for these again at some point in the future.

The first thing to do is sign up for a free account at the GrandCentral home page. Look for the “Reserve” button. They’ve done a nice job with the website. It guided me through the process and I easily made my way through the setup.

continue reading "Using GrandCentral - a how to on Google’s newest productivity app (Part 1)"

I don’t have an iPhone, but I’ve got a Blackberry 8100, aka Blackberry Pearl. Since I’m unable to perform product comparison, I’ll review my experience with the Pearl and details on how I sync it with the Mac.

I’m using a MacBook Pro (15″ running OS X 10.4.10) and I use Apple Mail, not Microsoft Entourage. I use POP3 internet email, not an enterprise or exchange server. I also purchased a 2GB MicroSD card, with a full-size adapter for using in a standard SD card reader. This is important to know, because it makes a difference when syncing Music and Photos.

For the synchronization software, I had been using PocketMac’s product, which is now the free software that RIM provides for Mac users, but I have been using the MissingSync for Blackberry, by the people at Mark-Space.

The product install requires a restart, because it adds a startup item and other system tie-ins. Note that if you had PocketMac software on your Mac, you should do three things:

1. do a last sync to make sure your up to date
2. backup your Address Book and iCal data (super easy, open those apps and its a selection under the File menu)
3. uninstall the PocketMac software.

Also, when the install asks to allow syncing with Contacts and Address Book, etc., click Allow. It will talk to Mac OSX’s syncing services. It’s detailed here.

continue reading "Using the Blackberry Pearl (8100) with Mac OS X (part 1)"

So far, my experience with Wordpress has been great. I installed it myself on an Apple PowerMac G4, running Apache, PHP and MySQL. Installing required unzipping it into my webserver’s root directory. I had to modify some of the directory permissions (chmod, etc…).

There are numerous Wordpress themes and Wordpress plugins available. I have installed a few of them so far, including:

• All in one SEO Pack
• Google Sitemaps
• wp-cache

Here’s a link to the WordPress plugin directory

For my theme, I chose fourWPTP, by Moses Francis (he has some great resources too). UPDATE: I had to switch themes. After a playing with it for a week, or so, I found that it was laying out differently across, IE7, Safari and Firefox, browsers. Also, I thought I would need a 4-column layout, but a 3-column layout works fine for me. So now I’m using ‘xtn57′. Which like fourWPTP, installed easily. There is a great deal of info out on the web already on how to do this step at a time and I’m sure most people aren’t using MacOS X, like I am.

you can get in touch with me using my email address:

Call me…

Click on the image above, then enter your name and number, then click “CALL ME” This feature is power by Google’s Grand Central.

I’ve decided to give give it a shot. A good friend and collegue of mine, thinks that the whole idea of blogging (both reading them and writing them) is ridiculous.

I’m sure she’ll be singing a different tune after she reads this!
Her opinion is “Why would anyone trust what some nobody is writing?” I think she has a good point. There are plenty of people with no qualifications on a given topic, generating lots of misinformation on the web. So “educated web-surfers” should take that into consideration when reading anything.

There are a few reasons for this site:

• After using Typepad and some other blogging platforms for work use, I wanted to check out Wordpress. What the heck, I thought I’d give it a real world trial.
• To test drive some of the plug-ins and enhancements are available for Wordpress, blogs and plain-old web sites as well.
• I want to see how I could promote/market what I expect to be a very modest blog. How can I get on the front page of Google.
• As a place to share my thoughts about technology and more. My hope is that having to write it down will force me to think more clearly the topics.

That said, I hope that those who happen to find there way to this page can get something useful out of it. Please share your thoughts as well.