Looking for a scheduling solution that integrates with Google Calendar? Check out ScheduleOnce (link to Web Worker Daily). While Doodle.com helps you find the best time for a meeting, ScheduleOnce lets you actually integrate it into a calendar that you’re already using. It works a lot like Outlook’s Free/Busy calendaring, and seems to be pretty solid.

Inc Magazine has a great two-part story up on how to stop multitasking and become more productive in doing so.

Here’s the link -

http://tinyurl.com/bhzber

This weekend’s a big one for me, I’ve been cleaning out anything and everything in the home office. As I was dumping out piles and piles of CDs and DVDs containging drivers, games, videos, archived data and more, I figured I needed a better way to store all this. Rather than buy yet another binder to store them all in, I’m going a different route - archiving them all to ISO format on a big external HDD. So long as they aren’t copy protected, it’s easy enough to do -

1 - Grab a copy of LC ISO Creator (it’s free and easy). There are dozens of other freebie ISO makers, I just like this one for ease of use.

2- Get yourself a big external (or internal) HDD and create an ISO folder on it. Remember that DVD ISO’s can be up to 4GB, so prep a drive with tons of room.

3. Pop the disc into your drive, fire up ISO Creator and follow the steps (with LC, there’s only two steps!) to generate an ISO.

The ISO will be a single file that’s like a photograph of the discs contents. It contains all the data from the disc, laid out exactly like the disc was. But, to access that data later, you’ll need a program to “mount” the ISO as a virtual CD/DVD drive. I’m partial to Virtual Clone Drive from Slysoft, which is again free and easy to use. You just double click an ISO file, and your PC will treat it just like a CD/DVD drive. When you’re done, you go into My Computer, right click on the virtual drive and hit “Unmount” and you’re all set.

What do do with all those discs after you’ve copied them over? If it’s a disc I’m sure I won’t need the physical version of again (like a data backup, driver disc, etc), I just put a giant scratch on the reading surface (the opposite side the label is on) or break the disc in half, then toss it.

By creating ISO’s on a local or portable drive,  you can easily find the discs you need when you need them, rather than pore through a huge binder (or four binders, in my case) of years of CD’s.

After a weekend of scrambling to find a replacement for “I Want Sandy,” the fantastic email reminder service that’s now being closed, I think I finally hit upon a winner. It’s called “Go Ping Me” and while it doesn’t use natural language queries like Sandy does, it still gets the job done. It’s not as friendly as Sandy, but it’s the closest in functionality to her, and seems to me, at least, to be friendlier and more useful than “Remember the Milk.”

The query language is a bit odd, but you get used to it pretty quickly.

Find out more here - http://www.gopingme.com

Rumors of Microsoft making the Zune into a full-fledged phone have been floated since the day the iPhone was just a glimmer in all our eyes. Today, however, Jim Goldman over at CNBC says he’s heard from “inside sources” that Microsoft will be leveraging the technology gained by taking over smartphone maker Danger to create a Zune phone, currently codenamed “Pink.” Details are still sketchy, but it certainly makes sense that Microsoft would take that purchase of Danger and leverage it into a Zune phone. However, they are stuck with two key issues - 

1. Are they willing to completely alienate their hard-won Windows Mobile customers/partners the way they did when they side-tracked the “PlaysForSure” initiative and created their own mp3 player? Maybe they’re figuring if they sell enough units on their own, it’ll completely offset the possible licensing losses from Windows Mobile defections? 

2. Can they pull it off as elegantly as the iPhone does? Sure it was a bumpy first year, but now the iPhone seems to be the phone (well, besides the Blackberry) in every business and home-user’s hands. The Zune never seemed to gain the long-term momentum the iPod has enjoyed, so unless the phone is a complete miracle of design (which, frankly, Microsoft has never been known for) why would consumers switch from their BlackBerries or iPhones?

Looks like we might hear by this February’s CES what Microsoft’s plans are…

Looks like the makers of “I Want Sandy”, my favorite to-do tool, have been purchased by Twitter, and are now being shuttered completely on December 8. Time to hurry up and find an alternative. I just heard about another task manager, called Deadline, and guess I need to check that out ASAP. This is a real bummer for those of us who learned to maximize the use of Sandy with Twitter and other services.

I’ve been quiet lately as I’ve been on vacation (though sneaking some work in, courtesy of Google Docs, Zoho and Gmail), but I wanted to make a quick note about the 2.2 firmware update being available for both the iPhone and iPod Touch today. The 200+ MB update is available now (and downloading to my Touch as we “speak”). From The Unofficial Apple Weblog, here are some of the new features -

“The update contains enhancements to Mail, fixes connection issues with WPA-secured wireless networks, improves Safari stability, and includes a new preference to turn off auto-correction for typing.

Also, podcasts are now available for download from within the iTunes app, and pressing the Home button from any home screen will now take you to the first home screen.”

With just three days to go before I’m across the US on vacation in the hinterlands of Northern New York (with limited-to-no Internet), I was getting worried about how clients would get ahold of me should an emergency pop up. Alas, today over at Lifehacker, they posted a bit about AwayFind, the perfect app for just such a contingency. 

Simply put, you head over to AwayFind and set up a an account, which allows you to create a custom “Away” page and link. Embed this link into your Out of Office auto-reply, so when someone absolutely must contact you, they can hit this link. The link takes them to your custom page, which lets them enter an “Oh my God, save us!” message that gets sent to your mobile phone. 

I really like this idea, and if it all works out this vacation, I think I’l be paying for a full account. We’ll see!

A short time ago, I ran through the routine for quickly creating tasks via I Want Sandy and Twitter. Well, after doing some searching on the Remember the Milk site, I discovered you can do the same thing there. While I tend to prefer I Want Sandy, Remember the Milk is certainly a good to do manager, and can easily manage your task list via Twitter.

It’s a simple process - first make sure you have an account on both services. Then on Twitter, add rtm as a friend. Jump over to the RTM site (here) and follow the directions on the upper right to complete the setup.

When you’re sitting in Twitter and come up with a task that needs done, you can simply enter “d rtm <task>”, without the quotes or the brackets. For example:

d rtm remember to check voicemail at 10am today

Send the message, and you’re done. Since it’s a direct message, nobody else will see it.

An exhaustive list of commands you can send RTM is here.

If you’re using Gmail’s new Quick Shortcuts that let you put any site in the taskbar, head over to Downloadsquad for a quick way to show your tasks in Gmail.

Lastly, don’t forget that if you’ve set up Twitter to receive incoming “tweets” via SMS, you can send those tasks directly to Twitter (SMS # is 40404) the same way you send them via the web interface.

Today as I was reading a new post about OpenOffice 3.0 over at Chief Home Officer, I remembered my very short-lived love affair with OO3, and its predecessors. For some reason, I just can’t seem to stick with OO, no matter how much they update it. I find myself trying it for a week or so, then finding the following problems

1. Slow to load. Sorry, the Quickstarter helps, but when I need to fire off a quick document, I find I wait 2-3 times as long for OO Writer to load versus Word 07, or I can jump into Google Docs. I found some tips, such as disabling Java, but then that disables some of the plugins, so it’s a catch-22.

2. Compatibility - Everyone says that OO’s perfectly compatible with Office, but I find that if I do any sort of document layouts within my Writer document, then export/save as a Word doc, the image is always moved around in some wonky way. Likewise, if I bring a Word doc into OO, the image always seems to be moved around. That’s problematic when you send a client a document, and they ask why the images have all been moved around. So I end up editing in OO, then still having to open it in Word to check before send. Not exactly efficient (note  - this sometimes happens in Google Docs, too)

3. It’s not online. I’m already dealing with the hassle of flinging Word docs around via email, why do I want to have a different client app, with the same issue? If I have to collaborate on a document, then I’m just going to use Google Docs or Zoho.

4. No mail merge function, or rather, no easy mail merge function for creating directories or catalogs (you can easily do envelopes, letters and labels, however.)  Sure, OO has it, but it’s very limited, for example, you cannot easily create a directory report from a spreadsheet of data. You can do it, it’s just that it’s far from easy or intuitive, and I create a lot of reports, so I rely on this function.

Now, I should be fair, and highlight some of the really good features of Open Office 3.0. So here goes -

1. It’s free.  If you need a robust office suite, but can’t pay $99 (or more, depends on the retailer) for Microsoft Office, then here you go.

2. A familiar interface - I truly hate the Ribbon Interface in Word 2007. Just yesterday, I spent about 20 minutes trying to find where they hid a function I desperately needed at the time.  Was it really necessary to gut the UI we’ve known for over a decade just to have something trendy? Thankfully, OO sticks to the tried-and-true interface of office apps, so you won’t feel lost in any way.

3. No new formats every year - Want to confuse a client? Send them a .docx or .xlsx file. That’ll fill your inbox with “What’s this?” messages. Contrary to common belief, IT departments and consumers no longer upgrade software for whatever is new any more. Many folks hold onto what’s working for them for as long as they can, which means you shouldn’t just assume everyone’s using what you are. With OpenOffice, they don’t keep changing the format (though don’t send your clients the default format files, they’ll never know what these are, instead, save as Word 97-2000).  You can do this with Office 2007 also (down-save), but you are constantly nagged to not do it every time you open or save a doc.

4. No licensing - This of course goes along with the free thing, but is there anything worse than travelling and suddenly having MS Office think it’s an unregistered copy? That’s happened to me twice with 2007, and one time, when I tried to activate, it refused, telling me I had a fraudulent copy, even though I had multiple legitimate licenses.

5. Fully licensed PDF support - There are plenty of plugins and freeware apps to let you create PDFs from MS Office, but it’s nice that PDF support is directly integrated into OO 3. Along with that, there’s a new plugin that lets you edit PDF’s, which is really nice to have when someone sends you a big PDF that they need text extracted from.

There you have it, some reasons against, and some for, OpenOffice 3.0. While I don’t think it’ll keep me from using Office or Google Docs, it’s certainly nice to have a solid option out there.