I cannot believe that July is almost over.  I have pretty much been working every day this month even though at the beginning of the month I was working nights in spinning a little bit of time in the sun around the Fourth of July.  I wasn’t taking a full month of vacation like our illustrious president who is probably sulking away somewhere in a Texas bed and breakfast.

However, is a freelance writer and consultant, I do have a lot of freedom to choose where and when I will work, and I was not stuck behind a desk in a cubicle somewhere either. 

Needless to say I have a backlog of articles I’ve been meaning to publish here.  I’ve got a great big long queue of videos that I need to upload after I edit them.  I’ve also got several clients I’m working with to start new business or marketing blogs and one blog that I am working to rejuvenate after it has been languishing without an update for almost a year.  I’m going to help that client bring that blog back from the dead and take its new higher levels.

I’m working with shopping carts I have a least one system and have to implement before Wednesday.

In general, I’m basically dropping status update as to where I am here in the blog so that all my readers can catch up with me a little bit.  If you haven’t subscribed, I’m also working to push my readers to try subscription.

Subscriptions are free!  You can receive them either through a feed reader or directly to your e-mail.  This might make it easier for you to keep up with the blog as I prepare to catch up on all the content that I meant to publish in July.

You can find this subscription information in the sidebar to the right.  If you have any questions feel free to send me an e-mail and I will be happy to help.

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I’m trying a new concept out and running an article series across multiple blogs.  Typically, I would place this series on one blog, but this time I am going to experiment by leaving a bread crumb trail across several blogs in the Softduit network.  This is currently still an experiment and I do not anticipate that I will do many more immediately, but I am curious as to the effect.

The article

Someone recently asked me ” ? why do you carry both a digital camera and a “camera in the phone? ?”  

In most cases, I know my digital camera takes better quality pictures.  With the latest technology from Nokia, it is only a matter of time that photo capturing capability of the camera phone catches up with the technical capability of the digital camera.   When that time come. will only get a high-end camera phone.  

Google recently released a great web-based office tool called “Google Docs and Spreadsheets”. It is a great collaborative software tool for mobile professional.  It is only a matter of time, they will have a “Powerpoint”-clone software available for their user base.  As an old school techie, I still prefer my desktop software- Microsoft Office.  Privacy is a key priority of a mobile professional.  Any web system can be hacked.  This mobile professional prefers privacy and protection embedded to everything he does.  

Mobile Professional Tools Series

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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I am the type of person that often wakes up in the middle of the night with the idea that solves a problem that I’ve been pondering all day long.  I also come up with some very good ideas while I am taking a shower. 

Today I came up with an idea in the shower and knew that I had to copy it down somehow before lost the idea.  It was just a little too fragile.

The problem was that my computer was locked up somewhere else, of course I’m in the shower and not prepared to go running out of the house and grabbed my computer out of the car right to crank it up and then capture the idea, the neighbors would probably complain, the cops would be called, I’d go to jail, and the idea would be lost.

I’m also that same type of technological idiot that doesn’t keep a piece of paper and a pen around.  I was off for a high-tech solution.  Today that created a real problem.

It didn’t stop me for long however, I got out of the shower and I thought to myself, there’s a perfectly good mirror in front of you.

The mirror was fogged over to my shower.  I quickly turn the exhaust fan also would pull the steam out of the room and erase my potential future mind map, and I began mind mapping on the mirror and the steam.

It didn’t take me long to capture the idea on the mirror.  However, when I was done I realize I’m still the same dilemma that I was when I first stepped out of the shower.

Now I should mention that my wife doesn’t use lipstick very often, but I had the notion that if I could find some lipstick I could trace back over the finger marking diet made on the mirror.  So I quickly began hunting through the bathroom vanities in the house attempting to find some lipstick.

Hang in there and, there’s a point to this story

I eventually found some lipstick, it wasn’t my wife’s lipstick.  It was actually my four-year-old daughter’s lipstick, simply stuff that she had received somewhere. I think it might have been one of those sample type things and maybe a relatively given it to her to play with.

I taught myself it would be bad to user lipstick.  She’d be upset that I used to lipstick on something like work when she could be used in it for play.  I rapidly reasoned that I would be making up for all the times that she had used markers crams pens and pencils on our walls at home in the turnabout is fair play even with a four year old.

So I outline the mind map with the lipstick and everything was rosy, literally.

This is when I had my second idea of the day.

Wouldn’t it be useful to have an optical character recognition tool that could capture the essence of a diagram from a photograph. 

You see I was being lazy or reliant on technology again.  I wanted to take a picture of the mind map and run the image to an OCR tool, which would then convert that image directly and to a MindManager mind map.

Now your average business user isn’t going to need an opt or character recognition tool to copy images off of their bathroom mirror.  However, it could be very useful to deal with copy an image off of a white board or even a piece of paper and have it interpret into a mind map.

So if you’re a developer or programmer and want to take this idea and run, go for it you probably will make a fortune with.  I’m going to make a fortune with the other idea that I captured and don’t have time for this one.

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I ran across an article today describing a way to run the MindManager Viewer in from Firefox.  Basically, all you have to do is run a virtual session of internet explorer within a firefox window with an IE Tab plugin for Firefox.

Now that does not sound terribly secure to me, but if you are desperate to get those 2 or 3 things to run in Firefox that only run in IE maybe you want to risk the security of your machine.  That’s not for me and I am generally fairly experimental in this area.  But something about running a virtual browser within a browser seems like it would open up a number of security risks.  The last thing I would want is to have one of my readers tell me they were attempting to complete a student loan consolidation and their personal information got hacked because they were running an experimental tool, just to make MindManager work right with Firefox.

Sometimes you just have to make sacrifices and not try the work around plugin de jour. I would very much like to see MindManager provide Firefox support not only for running the MindManager Viewer from Firefox but also putting a hot button in Firefox so that I can zap a web link from firefox with the title right into MindManager.  I’ve been asking for that functionality since about this time last year back when Firefox only had about 25% of the US web market.  It now is pushing 50%.

Note to Mindjet, there is a new trend on the internet.  Its called Firefox.  Its created by the same folks that invented the first browser, Netscape.  Its better and safer than Internet Explorer 6 or 7.  Check it out sometime.

Side note, those nifty hot buttons in Internet Explorer 6 that allowed me to zap links into MindManager at the push of the icon seem to be completely missing form Internet Explorer 7.

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MIT provides a unique open source resource. Access to course material online for anyone. You can find recommended reading, assignments, syllabi and much more on many many topics.

The site is setup to help educators, students and self learners around the world. The site is available at MITOPENCourseware.

Now these courses at first glance do not entirely appear to be tailored for the web. This isn’t an automated class, but more like the type of materials you might find if you were signed up to audit a course for no credit.

You would still need to buy the text books or check them out from your local University library. But after that you are free to go it alone. Sit home, drinking a bottle of water exercising and learning quantum physics sitting on a leather couch from Bush furniture.

I have taken a number of online courses and programs throughout the years and think I will look into this program and its value for a true outsider.

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