I’ll break it down into Use Daily, Use Weekly, and Mean to Use But Forget. I almost included a “Can’t imagine a use for” or “Never use” but that just seemed mean. I’m going to include things I use for work and personally.

Daily:

1. Android Phone – I switched from Blackberry to Android the day it came out for Verizon and was in love immediately. Personally and professionally it’s changed my work flow completely. The syncing with the Googleverse made using it immediately easy and seamless on and offline. I couldn’t imagine using a different phone. Just like TechCrunch‘ commented on it’s seamless integration with Google Voice was a huge plus. The transcription of voicemails to text messages and e-mails, even when not perfect, and it rarely is, is a huge time saver. Aiming it at whatever phone number I want to aim it at is a huge plus as well.
2. Gmail – I really don’t understand how anybody would use anything other than Gmail for their mail. I use it to grab my work e-mail from the work servers and still act as if it were coming from our work domain when I send mail. My bosses don’t know I’m not using their godaddy web-interface, they just know that I can find any e-mail they’ve ever sent me in seconds. They believe I’m very organized. I just know how incredibly useful the search function is on Gmail. The huge mailbox size is also a huge help. While my work mailbox could fill up (It doesn’t due to Gmail gobbling the e-mail out of it) my Gmail box doesn’t. Co-workers get full e-mail boxes. I don’t.
3. Kindle – Technically a kindle2, but that’s splitting hairs. The e-book reader from amazon has changed the way I read in the less than a year that I’ve had it. For one thing I read a lot more often now and a bigger variety of books. Now that they’ve added PDF support to it I have an even larger selection of reading material to choose from. I can carry enough books for months of reading in my backpack on a work trip. I can get more books while I’m in my hotel room without having to get out of bed. I can bookmark, annotate, search, highlight, and mark-up a book from within the kindle and nobody accuses me of tearing up a book.
4. iPod nano (and itunes)– I know I finally sold out completely and don’t just refer to it as an mp3 player. The features of the iPod and itunes together, and it’s the magic of the two of them together that I love mind you. One of the things I like personally about the iPod is that it works with the Nike+ site and the iPod doo-dad that helps me with my running. No other mp3 player does that for me. Audiobooks, audible.com, and podcasts are what I primarily use the iPod for. I have music on it, but I’m mostly a spoken word person and itunes is excellent at grabbing my podcasts and managing them for me on the iPod.
5. Dropbox – This one is surprising to me when everybody doesn’t use it. It’s a small program that sits in my taskbar and syncs some folders I aim it at with a site on the web. I can then choose to make those folders on the site public, private, or share them with only certain people. The default is to make them private. I recently went from a Macbook Pro to a PC Laptop and it was the easiest transition I’ve ever made. I had all my work stuff in a folder in Dropbox already (called “Workrap” respectfully enough lol.) Now, imagine if you have multiple computers… you install Dropbox on all of them, log onto them with the same account and suddenly your “Workrap” folder is on all your computers and if you update a file at work it’s automatically updated on your home computer and on your laptop as soon as they get on the internet. If you update it while you’re offline, when you get online it’ll sync up just fine. Seriously changed my workflow. Using another person’s computer? Log onto dropbox online without installing anything and get the file you want to show them and you’re set.
6. Evernote – My brain. I’m not exaggerating. I store everything on Evernote. It’s similar to Dropbox in that it’s “in the cloud” and I can keep things synced across multiple computers and my phone. I store all my information in there. Online, offline, on my phone. If I need to find Mom’s Gumbo recipe and I’m in the grocery store I fire up Evernote on my phone and grab it. If I’m on my laptop and someone calls I automatically open Evernote as my capture device.
7. OpenOffice.org – I haven’t paid for Microsoft Office since the early 90s when I bought Works. I’ve used the free open source alternative for Word, Calc, and Presentations. I love OpenOffice, couldn’t be without it.
8. Laptop – I use it every day but I don’t love it. I loved my Macbook Pro but it wasn’t working out for me at work. I found myself running in parallels all the time for stuff so I’m back to Windows. Now, I prefer Windows 7 to Vista, but it’s hard to come back to a PC after being a Mac user.

Weekly:

1. Google Docs – I should use this one more than I do. I use it weekly to save work documents that I get e-mailed to me by my boss. I open them with Google Docs to make sure there’s a copy out there in the cloud as well. Since I’ve started using Dropbox I’ve used Google Docs less and less. I use it primarily when I’m on the net tracking something a lot and don’t want to wait for OpenOffice to open up. I track my fitness stuff on Google Docs but other than that and the one work document that’s about all I use it for.
2. WordPress & Blogger – I’d like to say I use these two blogging platforms more often than weekly, but I’ve been a little slow lately. I’m getting better, but I love my blogging and both platforms offer something that makes me keep them both.
3. Digital Camera – I love my Canon Powershot. It’s not the biggest, fastest, most megapixels thing out there but it fits in my pocket and allows me to get the shots some of my friends with fancier cameras can’t or don’t get because their camera takes too long to prep for the shot. I enjoy taking pictures, and while I took fewer this year than previous years it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it as much as it was because I wasn’t as happy. Work was/is affecting my quality of life and one of the measures of how happy I am is how many pictures I take. The quiet months are unhappy months. I know, more than you wanted to know, but it’s an interesting observation nonetheless.

Mean to Use But Forget:

1. Pandora – I love this music streaming service but I always forget it. Then I’ll remember it for a few days and then it falls off the radar again for another couple months.
2. Stanza – I’ve gotten so hopped up on using the kindle that I really like reading e-books now but sometimes I have my laptop and not my kindle and I sort of stare at the wall wondering what to do next. It’s only later that I remember I have Stanza on my laptop which will allow me to read many e-book formats. (It also converts between formats so I can get some things on the kindle that I couldn’t before.)
3. Windows Widgets – I keep meaning to turn them back on but I forget. Then I remember and turn them on for a while and then turn them back off. I want to like them but can’t find it in me to stick with them. I’ll try them every month or so.

So, what technology do you use to make your job/life easier.

Feel free to comment or make suggestions for other programs I should try if you see any on this list that are not as good as what you’re using. I’m always happy to try new software!

1. Nintendo Wii
2. Wii Fit
3. Pokemon Platinum

There you go. That’s what I spent my money on. Now, I had the Nintendo Wii. I got it back around Thanksgiving when they were rare and kept it back in case I needed a great Christmas present at the last minute. The Wii Fit though I just got today and have set it up, input my height and let it weigh me and figure my BMI (too high but I think it’s doing it wrong) and then set a weight loss goal.

I also got Pokemon Platinum which has nothing to do with fitness, but everything to do with a really fun game. Now, if you’ve played Diamond or Pearl Platinum’s going to look really familiar and maybe I wouldn’t buy it new unless you were addicted, but if you played neither Diamond or Pearl then Platinum‘s a great way to get back into Pokemon.

The Wii and Wii Fit can both be hard to get out in the world. We went to two Best Buy’s and three Game Stops before finally finding it in a little Mom & Pop game store in Ames today so if you want either the Wii or the Wii Fit make your life easier and order it from Amazon. Show me some love and buy it through those links and help get me some affiliate lovin’ too if you want.

This isn’t a paid ad, both are GREAT fun. (Boom Blox is my favorite Wii game so far, but a close second is Rayman Raving Rabbids).

The hard part is I work on the road a lot so some weeks I won’t have access to the wii for exercise etc. While gone I’ll do the exercises that are in Sparkpeople (free remember?) and walk but I’ll miss the wii!

PS: Weekends will tend toward more personal posts than others. I won’t say there will be no management type posts on the weekend and I won’t say there won’t be any personal types in the week, but I’m going to try and focus them that way. Work in work week, and personal on weekends. If I bore you as a person, feel free to Mark all as Read on Mondays. My feelings won’t be hurt in the least.

PPS: Very excited about the Wii Fit. About to exercise on it now. I’ll be gone for much of this next week and the following one, but I’ll get back to you all on how I keep up with it. I know you’re glued to your collective seats!

I’ve gotten very used to importing PDFs to their website that my boss sends me. (Everything he scans winds up a PDF and from there it goes to Evernote so it will be searchable later.) Between the two of us we’re really going paperless. It’s becoming very handy for tracking down open loops and is increasing both of our productivity.

I got finished entering in the information into Evernote. I tagged it with a couple tags  and closed it up. The next day the meeting time came round and I opened up Evernote, and all my first meeting’s notes were tagged so they’d all be there in one place and we banged out that meeting, with dates, times, numbers, and all the pertinent bits in no time at all without me having to shuffle papers or look things up. Between the scanned PDFs and the tagging I had all my information at my finger tips with no pausing to look things up.

Second meeting went exactly the same way and the best part for me was the lack of stress in between the meetings. I wasn’t shuffling papers into order, high-lighting, or making sure I could find whatever they might ask for at hand. I KNEW it was at hand because it was in Evernote as either a PDF or as a file I’d generated myself. And in any event I could get to it with a mouse click without waiting on some viewer to open or file to open.

Evernote really has become my one place repository for information.

This application is the first time I’ve wanted an iPhone. It’d allow me to use it all the time instead of just when I had my laptop out. But down that road lies madness! I still use my moleskine cahier for those times, and honestly, it’s probably the fastest, easiest, most streamlined method of capture while on the road and in the field.

Once upon a time I was a huge advocate of box.net as my primary source of file sharing. I have entire books of work forms and reference over there that I’ve shared with myself and a couple other supervisors in the company. It was my favorite, most suggested file sharing service. I could share with specific people or nobody or even make things public for anybody to access via a URL that didn’t expose all my files to the public. It was great.

Their upload functionality isn’t always what it should be though. I tried to upload multiple files last night and it just wouldn’t upload at all. I was kvetching about the upload problem to another box.net early adopter and he said that’s why he decided to give Dropbox a try and maybe it’d help with what I was looking for. I was trying to use the drag and drop interface to upload to box.net and it was letting me drag and drop, but it wasn’t doing the important part of the upload interface… the uploading. So, I signed up with Dropbox, installed a desktop client, drag-and-dropped my way into converting to a Dropbox fan in seconds. Talk about easy!  Dropbox just displaced box.net as my favorite client because I can upload files to it without having to do it by hand, one at a time, while watching it. Drag files into the folder and go about my business. It uploads files in the background, and if I drag and drop the folders on the desktop client it does that on the online version. (I can’t find a way to organize files on the online client and that’s irritating, but I assume they’ll fix that in a later iteration for now I just organize them on my desktop version and it syncs it all up quickly and painlessly.)

So, if you need to share large files with someone consider Dropbox as a way to share little Johnny’s first steps on video or all those TPS reports you typed up. You won’t regret it.

The shutting the lid to sleep thing… it wakes up so darned fast I don’t care. In fact, I shut it all the time just because it’s so fast to wake-up I like the added security of it locking down when I shut the lid. So that annoying quirk is not so much annoying now as useful.

Lest you think I’ve gone all fanboi on you I have found more annoying quirks with the software. iWork’s iPage is just plain annoying. I wanted to copy/paste the Little Steps: 100 Great Tips For Saving Money… from The Simple Dollar (great blog by the way, and a fellow Iowan I hope to meet one day!) into iPages, edit it up to something more visually appealing and print it out to carry around with me (yes, I’ve got a flight tomorrow and wanted reading material… no, printing the web isn’t frugal. I get it. Leave me alone! 100 is just too long a list for me to read online. I wanted paper!) and for the LIFE of me I couldn’t get it to past into iPages without being in a little 2 inch by 2 inch text box in the middle of an empty page.

I think I wound up finding a way to get it into ipages, but it involved pasting it into Openoffice.org, saving that as a .doc and then opening it into iPages. That’s too ham-handed a way to do things in the future so I need some time to figure it out. Primarily because Openoffice.org’s software runs funny on a mac. I think it’s in a terminal or someting… beats me what X11 is but it keeps being there.

(Editorial Note added later) I use NeoOffice now. It’s a port of Openoffice.org’s software written natively for mac and it has no X11 window issue. NeoOffice is perfect implementation for the Mac.)

If you’re on the fence about a Macbook Pro (I recommend it over the mac for the light up keyboard, the extra ram, the better screen size and lighting, and the better feeling keys) and it won’t hurt you financially save up and get one. You won’t regret it. I’ve enjoyed mine every moment I’ve had it. I also STRONGLY recommend going to an apple store and letting one of their people talk to you about it and the software. They’re so very patient and informative. I wish I were nearer an apple store than I am right now. I’d be attending their free classes.