Keyboard Face

You may have seen GrandCentral or YouMail mentioned recently on other blogs. I know Mashable did a post or two on both of those in the last week or so. It’s a pretty nifty concept if you delve into it. Depending on who’s calling, you can set the service to ring to a different number, send them directly to voicemail, “ditch the call” or simply let it ring.

I did a little research into these services and I thought it would be useful to summarize the existing services out there.

Voicemail by Caller ID Apps

GrandCentral - Free
You are assigned a new phone number in your area - you get to pick which city the area code is, etc. This phone number can then be redirected to ring different phones depending on where you’re located or how your feeling. For instance, if you’re out of town for a little while, you could have it ring your cell phone instead of your home phone.

In addition to this, you can direct it to ring different phones depending on the Caller ID, or even send them to voicemail.

YouMail - Free
This service uses your existing cell phone number and redirects your voicemail to go through their service. You can log on their website and set it so certain callers are sent directly to voicemail, given a different message, or even hung up on - “ditched” as they say.

Voice to Text

GotVoice - $9.95/Month
“Converts your cell, home and work voicemail to text messages and sends them to your phone and email.”

SimulScribe - $9.95-$29.95/Month
“Utilizes cutting edge voice recognition technology to convert your voicemail
messages into text. We deliver your transcribed voicemail, along with the original audio, to your mobile phone,
PDA, and/or email account. “

SpinVox - No details on pricing - could be free.
“SpinVox is a service that can be accessed from any phone. Speak Freely and SpinVox will convert your words into text and send them wherever you decide: mobile, inbox, TV screen, blog and more.”
It appears you can blog with it as well. My guess is that you call a number and dictate to your blog and it posts it on the spot.

Jott - Beta, Free
“Blogging no longer requires being at computer. Use Jott Links, to blog
from your cell phone wherever you are. Call 866-JOTT-123, say the name
of your Jott Link, and start blogging with your voice.”
Create To Do Lists and Reminders, Send E-mail and Text Messages, Blog your thoughts from anywhere

CallWave - Different Pricing
Has VoiceMail to Text, Internet Answering Machine, Virtual Fax and more.

This is a little off topic, but I got this in my email today and had to pass it on. Apparently, there’s a bird in Scotland who figured out that he can just walk into the local store and snatch a bag of chips.

Folks think he’s a nice bird, though. It seems that when he tears open the bag, he lets all the gulls partake of his booty. (I, however, think he’s just not very skilled at keeping the chips to himself)

One of the first and hardest part of starting to design a site is to get the color scheme. The scheme can come from a number of places. For example:

• A site you want to imitate
• A photo you want to include in the site - for instance in the header
  You can then pull colors from the photo
• A holiday - certain holidays have color associated with them. Halloween has black and orange, Christmas has red and green, etc.
• A profession - for instance the medical profession tends to favor blues

No matter where you get your inspiration, it is good to have a few tools to help you. I recently ran across a page that lists a number of these tools:

http://www.kelieresources.com/color.htm

I’ve included the most valuable tools, from my perspective, here:

• Original Color Mixer
• Color Scheme Generators
• Cool Flickr Photo Picker
  This isn’t technically a color scheme picker, but it’s cool
• Visibone Color Lab
• I Like Your Colors Grabs colors from the web page you specify

That’s it - if you have any others you think should be on this list, let me know and I’ll add them.

My God!
This took hours to figure out. Here is the solution to using ODBC and ASP to connect
to a MySQL database.

1. Install the latest MySQL engine. I believe it is currently 4.1.9

2. Install the MySQL Admin and MySQL Query Browsers - these are just helpful - not essential.

3. Install MyODBC-Standard-3.51.9-win.msi (or exe) Note this is NOT the latest version. The latest version doesn’t work.

4. In MySQL Admin, connect to your database and make sure that “Use Old Passwords is checked.”

5. Follow the instructions here:

Open the MySQL commandline utility (located in MySQL Admin and elsewhere) and type:

mysql> USE mysql
mysql> UPDATE user SET Password = OLD_PASSWORD(’mypass’)
-> WHERE Host = ‘localhost’ AND User = ‘root’;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

SOURCE: http://mysqld.active-venture.com/Old_client.html

That’s it. It should work.

I had to match a font from a letterhead today and I came across a couple of great tools for the task.

First I found FontMatcher, a VB6 program that takes a BMP image and matches it to your TTF files. The catch is that you have to have the font already for it to find it. I didn’t so it didn’t match my font.

I finally found a great tool that searches their own online font database: What the Font. It even allows you to purchase the font after it finds it for you . Saved me a lot of time though - it’s worth it.

Wow! This is a great site: RegExLib (Regular Expression Library)

Excuse my exuberance, but I’ve been creating a lot of long regular expressions from scratch lately and it’s time consuming! This is a great resource for anyone wanting to use regular expressions in their code.

Dotster is having another Happy Hour and is offering $1/Month hosting for a year. The normal package rate is $8.95/Month. The linux package includes several scripts including WordPress.

Here’s the info straight from Dotster:

March 22, from 1pm - 2pm PST, Dotster will offer 1000 coupons for $1 per month hosting. This isn’t just a little hosting package, this is our $8.95 per month package that holds up to 50 domains, with 2GB’s of storage and unlimited databases. That’s a savings of $95!

Download Mozilla with Google Toolbar. It is by far the best browser when it comes to extensions. IE7 is nice, but the don’t have good free extensions. I use the Web Developer Tool Bar all the time:

Is it possible? Try it out:

http://www.wymsey.co.uk/wymchron/cooking.htm

Check this out: http://www.dice.com/beingit/

I particularly like the Pinata Gun on the Sales Manager.