Thursday, June 24, 2010

Becoming an Organized Task Monster

With this huge relocation finalized, I had to start looking for new and BORING ways to become more organized with my stuff strewn across the fruited plains. This is how I have accomplished that task. Kinda.

Last night, I implemented the final phase of the reorganization of everything. The password lists. Just so you know, I have over two hundred different user names and account passwords. How crazy is that crap? Yes, I have a vary few that I use daily and I know all of those off the top of my head. I do change them frequently however. I treat my passwords just the DOC does with dangerous criminals, I move them around a lot.

Anyhoo, the password list is a protected .txt file. And I e-mailed it to myself, so it exists on my comprooter, on my server, and in two different e-mail storage boxes. Since you cannot link .txt files over those platforms, I have to manually update those files across all the different places. I hope I do not screw up, but to make it easier not to, I name my files with the date first, then the title, so it reads like this: 10-0624 Passwords. Get it?

Plus, I made all efforts to consolidate my online presence into ONE single person, rather than allowing each one of my personalities to have their own stuff.

And then, THERE IS GOOGLE DOCS. You should climb on board, totally. Just go to "" and set your account up with your existing Teh Google password stuff, or simply add Docs to your Teh Google profile.

Here is a link to all that is new on Google Docs, but hold off on going to check 'em out, I am gonna give you a brief overview of WHY you should do this.

OCR or "Optical character recognition" has been in the works for quite some time. Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed new scanners and equipment to start producing an online library years ago and I have been searching for the same thing for years as well. Teh Google has almost gotten it perfected on Google Docs.

This is a screen shot from Google Docs of an old recipe from a danged book that I PHOTOGRAPHED and Google Docs turned it into almost a perfect vector file. Count 'em, TWO FREAKING MISTAKES!!! This is so completely BEYOND all imagination that it utterly dumbfounds me.

The old OCR technology barely even got one word correct, but danged this is so close to perfect that it is unreal.

Why is this huge to information technology? Because the data that I have in physical format that I need NOW to produce new work can simply be photographed, uploaded into Google Docs, and SHAZAM!!! New data that just needs to be formatted a little.

Here's more about OCR and Google Docs at Teh Google. Just so you know, I have taken photographs of specification manual data from 1995 that I assumed I would have to retype, loaded the PHOTO into Docs and the danged formatting is almost perfect. This has saved me untold MONTHS of data input and huge quantities of physical storage space.

So far, Google has so impressed me with the technology that they produce, that I understand what the MacApple fanboys "FEEL" like. I do understand that MacApple has yet to produce anything of value to the world, but I understand that "FEELING."

The opportunities that the OCR unlock are LIMITLESS. Seriously, this is almost like man walking on the moon to me and I was a huge fan of space exploration when I was younger.

Also, Google Spreadsheets is making huge strides to put Excel out of business as well. Since I do pretty much all of my work on my local machine, portability is not so important to me NOW, but I see that changing more and more in the future. Cloud computing is the way that I am moving. At some point, I hope to have 100% of my data online and accessible from anywhere. I am about halfway there now.

Making matters even easier is the fact that Google Apps is now supporting multi-domain sharing. This means that I do not even have to send e-mails to my consultants, they shall have access to the data they need FROM THE CLOUD. Dude.

With Google Adsense losing more and more of its marketshare, to rake in the jack, you have to be in the know. To facilitate this, Google just introduced Ad News Search.

I am currently trying learn more about the multiple income streams to be found on the web and ran across an old Google PAGE that I had. I tried to look at it, and found that Teh Google had turned it into a Google Site. And there appear to be ways to monetize those, too. I am still looking into this source, but I am also still amazed at the OCR stuff.

As long as we are hitting the intertubes stuff, I thought that I would point out the changes at Flickr, too. I have a bunch of artist friends that were early adopters to using Flickr. Here are some new updates. Mainly they have upped the size of the photos for better quality.

One more L-I-T-T-L-E thing for y'all that are trying to bust up in the traffic stuff like I am. Check out SEOmoz's Beginner's Guide to SEO. Oddly, they do not delve into the using NUDE instead of NAKED issue that is plaguing our society right now.

This has been a Two Dogs Public Service Announcement. Now, GET BACK TO WORK!

Please take the time to comment.


6Kings said...

Two key technologies I use to manage passwords and accessibility:
KeePass and DropBox

Keep Pass keeps all my passwords securely in a DB which can be hosted in Dropbox in the cloud so that every computer I have uses the same encrypted DB and as updated, available wherever I am. Even if disconnected, you can back it up locally and have it available. Great tools.

Paul Mitchell said...

6Kings, that Dropbox looks cool as all get out. The only problem that I could possibly imagine is the exact one that happened to

They folded.

6kings said...

I realize I gave the wrong description for this product. It is actually a file synchronization program which also keeps a copy up on the web. Any dropbox folders will have a local copy of the files and they will be updated across the other dropbox clients and accessible via the web client. I should have just pointed you here:

That said, it could fold but you won't lose anything. It is like a poor man's network share with offline and remote accessibility.

6Kings said...

And this one from maximumPC:

You or others might find some use for these.

Paul Mitchell said...

6Kings, what I am doing will work like gangbusters with Dropbox. I upload the file once and I have access to it all over the world and no synchronization problems at all.

Thanks for the tip.