Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Five Minute Solutions

I know people who are "extreme backpackers" that are always looking for ways to shed weight from the gear they carry when they go backpacking. While I'm not quite as much of a zealot for measuring how many ounces everything I carry weighs, I do always look for ways to decrease the weight and bulk of the things I carry for business.

My gadget freak bias means I carry a lot of chargers, cables, and similar accessories. I've found a few that have made a big difference for lightening my travel bag and I will start sharing some of my finds with you periodically, with a series of posts that I'll call "Travel Light." Today, I'd like to introduce you to Boxwave's line of charging and synching cables for mobile devices.

I carry a Treo 650 as my PDA of choice and wanted an easy, lightweight way to charge it while I travel.

I cycled through a couple of cheap, no-name USB sync & charge cables but I had problems with them because they didn't "grip" my Treo well enough and wouldn't stay plugged in reliably. As a result, I had quite a few experiences where I plugged my Treo in to charge before bed in a hotel room, only to wake up and find that the connection hadn't been maintained through the night and my phone was not fully charged for my busy day. Not good.

Then I found Boxwave's miniSync retractable Sync and Charge cable. These folks know how to engineer a quality product. It's compact, retracts very well (some of the cheaper ones I tried often wouldn't retract fully after a few uses). Most importantly for me, it really grips the phone and stays plugged in even if the phone gets jostled. Heck, I can even make phone calls while the phone is charging with this thing. And, as the name implies, it also syncs my Treo (it's a Palm-based PDA) with my computer to keep things accessible when I'm out and about.

They make accessories for a bunch of other devices including cables, cases, and screen protectors. If you are in the market for anything like that, Boxwave is where I'd start looking.

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Travel tools for red-eyes and jet lag

Last week, I woke up in every US continental time zone (Portland, OR on Monday; Dallas on Tuesday; Philadelphia on Wednesday; Denver on Thursday; and Portland, OR again on Friday).

I also take quite a few red-eye flights and flights overseas.

This kind of time zone shifting messes with my body clock sometimes, causing me to stay up late (particularly when I travel east), typically followed by an early morning start. There are a ton of things you can do to help with jet lag and recovery from red-eye flights, but I want to share a few of my favorite 'tools' with you.

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Not that I don’t like a crappy tune now and again...

Everywhere I go, I see a common problem. Lots of people don't know how to:

  1. Silence the ringers on their mobile phones
  2. Stop them mid-ring once they begin ringing

This morning, for example, I was in line at the doctor's office and the woman in front of me got a phone call. She didn't want to answer it, didn't want to open up her flip phone to stop if for fear that opening the phone might answer the call, and didn't know what else to do.

So, we all sat and listened to her ringer for 5 cycles of the song ("Livin' la vida loca") while she squirmed and looked around uncomfortably. I offered to show her how to mute it, but she just wanted to be invisible and pretend it never happened.

Now, I happen to be lucky enough to own a Treo 650 which has the smartest thing I've ever seen on a phone: An external switch that mutes the ringer and speaker on the phone. No digging through a zillion menus, etc. -- just click it off like a light switch.

If you aren't so fortunate, please take a few minutes to learn how to turn off the ringer on your phone (warning: you may actually have to read the manual - don't worry, most phone vendors have PDF copies online).

Invoking blessed silence:

The technique will vary depending on the phone you own:

  • On some phones, you must create a "Silent" profile and switch to it when you want to be quiet
  • On some phones, there is a shortcut key you can hold (often the # key) to toggle between vibrating alerts and audible alerts
  • On others, you may have to hit a few buttons to get down into the depths of your phone's menus to turn off the audible ringer

There are other alternatives, too:

  • Some phones (some Motorola models, for example) have ring modes that begin as a vibrating alert, then transition to an audible ring if they aren't answered - best of both worlds, and another excellent feature implementation.
  • Choose a ring tone that doesn't make a lot of noise at the beginning but gets a bit louder as it goes on (Nokia's "Persuasion" comes to mind)

But I've forgotten to do that and the darn thing is ringing - what do I do?

Yes, I've forgotten to turn off my ringer from time to time and I understand you want the noise to stop, too. But there are alternatives to listening to 6 repeats of the electronic theme from Baywatch.

Most important take away of this rant - most mobile phones will immediately stop ringing mid-ring when you do one of two things:

  1. Press the volume key on the side of the phone
  2. Press the "End Call" button (usually a button with a little red handset on it)

So give it a try this weekend. Call your mobile phone from home and see how quickly you can mute it - it's a wonderful skill to have.

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Neat Tip: Keeping Your Goals In Focus

When I sit down to plan my week, there are usually several "top focus" areas or items that serve as anchors. Recently, I began adding these areas to my desktop so I'd see them each time my computer booted up, to remind me of my top goals. A friend of mine was intrigued by the technique so I thought I'd share it here, in case it's useful to others.

The concept is simple. First, I create a self-contained web page using Microsoft Word. Then I use Windows XP's active desktop functionality to display the contents of the file. The result is that I always have visibility into my focus areas or goals because they appear right there in front of me on my desktop.

I find that this serves as a gentle reminder of what I intended to get done during a given week, and has served me well.

If you'd like to find out how to do this on your own, then read on.

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Swallow big files without choking

I found out about a great new tool in an unexpected way this week. I was contacted by Martin to compare notes on our exploration of Beyond Bullet Points as a way of raising the bar on our presentations, and ended up needing to exchange some large files. Lo and behold, Martin told me about "YouSendIt.Com," which is a free service that serves as an intermediary so you can exchange large files easily without clogging up anyone's email.

It's easy - you go to the YouSendIt home page, enter the recipient's address, upload your files, and press Send. The file is stored on their servers, and your recipient receives an email-based "claim check" which contains a link where they can retrieve the file you sent. Sweet!

By the way, here are some links I've gotten from Martin, Bren, and through my own research to give some other ideas for fresh new presentation styles:

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