For a couple of months now, I've been making smoothies for breakfast. I start out with either Naked Juice or Bolthouse Farms juice smoothie, add a container of yogurt, and sometimes juice or fruit, depending on what I have. My favorite is banana yogurt with mango Naked Juice. I was out of that this morning, so I had banana yogurt with strawaberry-banana juice. It was pretty good. Kind of like a fruity milkshake for breakfast!
Friday, March 02, 2012
Thursday, March 01, 2012
March Photo-a-Day: March 1
My office is in one of the older buildings in Kansas City, in the River Market area. This framed window is in the first floor area, and is actually a window into a bathroom, but it's up so high that no one could get up there to look in it. And it's inside, which begs the question of why it's there at all. But in any event, it's kind of a cool feature.
Friday, February 24, 2012
February Photo-a-Day
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Don't trick me
Here's an instance in which I think a company should have done some more market research before implementing a plan. On Friday there was a message on our answering machine at home that said, "This is Southern Star Central Gas Pipeline Company. It is imperative that we talk to you regarding pipeline safety in your neighborhood! Please call 000-000-0000 between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday."
We have gas service through Atmos Energy, and I've never heard of Southern Star, but who knows, maybe they're a parent company, or maybe they actually build the pipelines or something. But it just sounded odd, and I couldn't do anything about it until Monday anyway. When Bob got home, I asked him to listen to it and asked him what he thought, and he said it didn't make any sense to him, either, and to just ignore it. He said, "If it blows up, it blows up."
Then when we got home last night, there was another message, the same message. Bob said, well, there was an Atmos truck on the street this morning, maybe there's something going on, we should probably call them back. We had this whole discussion about it, with me saying that when someone needs us to do something, I wish they would just tell us what it is rather than making us jump through hoops, but that I would call the next day.
So I wrote down the number and called them back this morning on my way to work, and the phone was answered, "Southern Star Gas Pipeline, how may I help you?" I told the woman on the phone that, "We keep getting messages about pipeline safety in our neighborhood." She said, "Oh, yes, we contacted you regarding a survey on pipeline safety, would you have time to take the survey now?" I declined, and she said she would take us off the contact list so we wouldn't be bothered again.
I know that I'm odd in various ways, but I, like most people, I assume, dislike being tricked, particularly in a way that makes you concerned or frightened. I have a bad impression of that company now, since that's all I know about them, that they tricked me into calling them by making me fearful for our safety. Obviously, they did it because if they called and said we should call them back to take a survey, we wouldn't, so they try to make us think it's a safety issue.
Bad plan.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Evernote - it just works
I'm always on the lookout for the ideal productivity app, the one that I can use for everything, the one that deserves to reside on the homepage of my iPad. I've tried dozens of them. I've also purchased lots of note-taking apps, but haven't found one that really felt completely comfortable.
I seem to always come back to Evernote.
There are fancier, more elegant apps out there--Evernote is kind of utilitarian--there are apps where you can choose from several different kinds of paper, or even make your own. There are apps where I can create a lot of different "notebooks," and choose pretty covers for them. For awhile, I liked the note-taking apps where you write on the screen with a stylus, and those are fun to play with, and nice for temporary notes, but for keeping well organized notes, I always come back to Evernote.
The main reason why I'm sticking with Evernote is the ability to sync seamlessly between iPad, iPhone, desktop/laptop, and web. I can use the full-size keyboard at my desk and type effortlessly, instead of hunting and pecking on the iPad keyboard, type a note, and then immediately open up Evernote on the iPad, and the note is there. I can edit notes on the iPad, and the edits show up on the desktop version or web versions.
I'm all about things that I don't have to think about, things that "just work." Evernote just works. It's not perfect--for one thing, I wish that you could have folders and sub-folders, so that I could have a "work" folder and a "home" folder, and be able to sort things within those folders, rather than having them all mixed up in separate notebooks. Any topic becomes it's own notebook. You can sort using tags, of course, but that has never seemed to be logical to me.
No, it's not perfect, but it's the best thing that I've found for keeping track of virtually everything--travel itineraries, software manuals, knitting patterns, lists of books that I want to read, meeting notes, photographs of white boards. When you open your Evernote account, you can set up an email address that goes directly into Evernote, so if you have something that you want to be sure to keep a copy of, but you're not near your computer or don't want to be bothered at the moment, you just email it to Evernote. There are also a lot of apps that allow you to export into Evernote; like Dropbox, it's become one of those ubiquitous apps that everyone has.
The one other thing that it doesn't do is allow you to hand-write a note, or mark up a note, but there are other apps that do that, and you can just export them to Evernote to keep a copy. You can save photographs, PDFs, web clippings, and text notes; if you need to save really large files, or need to work with files when you don't have an internet connection, you may want to upgrade to a premium account.
The free account allows you to upload very generous 60MB per month. If you need more than that--maybe you upload a lot of PDFs or large photographs--a Premium membership is $5/month, and allows you to upload 1GB/month.
Crossposted from P3 blog