In Reality Check, I Am Not Part of the New Tech Savvy Generation, James R. Stoup shares his experience in getting a new Verizon cell phone. My wife and I have switched over to prepaid Tracfone phones. Other than getting lots of calls from the previous owner of my phone number, it’s been a lot less expensive than Cingular. We only call each other, it’s pretty rare to need to call someone else. But if we need to, we have that option. We went from $35/month to $120 for 6 months. Not bad at all. It has been working well for us.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This allows you to read my newer articles without having to visit the site again. Thanks for visiting! Mike

Plaxo.com, the contact management people, have an option in their privacy policy that you can opt-out of having their members send you invites or reminders. I did that back in September 2004, and haven’t received any other Plaxo garbage since then. Now Plaxo has an e-greeting card system. Which apparently Plaxo.com feels does not have to conform to the privacy policy and standards of the primary/corporate Plaxo web site. Complaints filed. SpamAssassin rules tweaked for both plaxo.com and plaxoecards.com.

Watch out! A mega-zillionaire company’s lawyers might be coming after you. Do you “Google?” details Google’s lawyers’ thoughts that we the public shouldn’t use “Google” as a verb. Give me a break, has any company ever successfully fought off John and Jane Public from using their name as a verb?

The answer is “Yes, I google.” All the time. Sometimes even in public. That sounds dirtier than it is. Except to Google’s lawyers.

Most people have a ton of PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files scattered on their hard drives. Most are downloaded from the web, some are receipts of purchases made from the web, some are actual documents created on your computer or sent to you by co-workers. How can you keep track of all of these PDF files?

How about using iTunes? It can mange your PDF files as well as your music and video. On the Mac, in the Finder, create a new “Smart Folder” [File menu, New Smart Folder]. Set the “Kind” to be “PDF” Remove the second rule by clicking the minus on the left. In the top of the window, choose where to search, by default it will search your entire computer. I hit “Others” and added my desktop to the list, then I unchecked the “Computer” option. I hit “OK.” Then hit the “Save” button” and name the search something makes sense (e.g. Desktop PDF) and choose the option to save the search in the Sidebar.

In iTunes, go to the File menu, and choose “Add to Library.” Choose the Saved Search from the sidebar. You should see your PDFs from your desktop. Click in the file list, hit Apple A (or pick and choose the ones you want) and hit the Choose button in the lower right.

In iTunes, then create a smart playlist (File, New Smart Playlist) Match the following rule: “Kind” contains PDF. Hit OK, and you’ll have a new rule that will pull all of your iTunes PDF files into the playlist. You can double click a PDF (it will have a small book icon to the right of the filename) and it will open in your standard PDF reader (Preview usually).

You can edit the Artist and other fields by simply selecting the item, and pressing Apple-I (File, Get Info) and clicking on the Info tab.

I’m not sure how well (if at all) this works under Windows.

(This posting was inspired by the article at LifeHacker: Download of the Day: Yep (Mac).)

I was just testing the new Firefox 2.0 beta, and I noticed that PlanetMike.com now has a Google PageRank of 7. (It was at 6 back in February.) Wohoo! So of course I tested my other sites. My Washington DC theatre information site has jumped from 4 to 6, above the other two DC area theatre review sites. While I don’t mind a higher page rank, it seems odd to have jumped up two points. Has anyone else noticed odd rankings in their Page Rank?

I just received a blatant pre-recorded telemarketing call to my home phone number from a mortgage company in Pennsylvania. Caller ID told me it was from the phone number 215-364-9789, identified as Morton Penni. A Google search shows their information as Morton Penni Mortgages; address as 2 Bustleton Pike; Feasterville Trevose, PA 19053-6343; and their phone number as 215-364-8380. A complain has been filed with The Federal Trade Commission, via The Do Not Call Registry; and Who Called Us.

OpenOffice 2.04 is out, and they finally have a version for OS X. The download page for OpenOffice OS X is much more nicely designed that the old international listing. I really like the question and answer process. Do you have Intel or a PowerMac, then they have a nice link to a page telling you how to tell the difference. There is still an above average level of geekiness on that page though. “I would like a legacy build for Mac OS X 10.2″. Why don’t they simply ask what OS do you have? 10.2, 10.3, 10.4? Then they would only need to give the options that are relevant. For example, if you are running 10.2, you can’t have an Intel Mac. They could have even used browser detection to guess what the OS is. Safari versions correspond pretty closely to the operating system version.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to trying out OpenOffice. I’m really looking forward to an Aqua version of OpenOffice from NeoOffice when they release a final version.

Qualcomm is releasing Eudora to become a colloration with the open source project Thunderbird. Read the press releases from Qualcomm and the press release from Mozilla.

So much for the exalted Real Soon update of Eudora. Now to figure out how to migrate tons of ancient mailboxes to Thunderbird.

Verizon is now blogging at PoliBlog. The URL is a really nice one, very easy to remember. http://poliblog.verizon.com/PoliBlog/blogs/poliblog/default.aspx. What is it with using technology or a design that requires three directories to get to the real content?

Don’t click on the blog author’s name. They are using some kind of javascript abomination to clear out your history, so you can’t hit the back button. Actually it looks like any link on the site disables the back button. Bad move Verizon. Why would you want to disable a user’s browser buttons? I really have to wonder about the tech guys at big companies. Did no one there try to explain to the bosses how things work?

I believe that Bitacle is editing posts before they are “archived” onto their web site. It looks like the Bitacle scraper is not displaying anything on their web site that is in an RSS feed after a horizontal rule. Hmmm, why would they do that? Oh yeah, the copyright feed plug in adds a HR before the copyright info. Simple enough to test, I removed the HR command from the plug in. I guess we’ll have to wait a couple days for them to scrape PlanetMike illegally again.