U.S. Loses An Hour, Gains 2 Days For Taxes

If you're located in the U.S. in one of the states that observes Daylight Savings, you lost an hour on Sunday a few weeks earlier than normal, thanks to new legislation by Congress. And if you're a U.S. taxpayer, you have two extra days to file your Federal tax return, thanks to recent legislation in the District of Columbia.

When Tax Day, April 15th, falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, the next business day is the deadline for filing one's taxes. Normally, this would be Monday, 16 April '07, but this year that's a legal holiday in Washington, D.C. It's Emancipation Day, a holiday that the IRS wasn't aware of when their IRS forms for 2007 went to print. Even though your tax forms state that the tax filing deadline is April 16th, you have until April 17th to file your Federal return.

Use the extra 47 hours wisely.

And don't forget that some of the tax software suites offer free tax preparation and free E-filing of your Federal tax returns, including TurboTax and TaxAct, and several others. And all taxpayers who earned less than $52,000 (adjusted gross income) in 2006 may E-file their Federal tax returns for free.

Free Traffic Camera On Your Mobile Phone

How many times have you been stuck in New York traffic thinking that if you'd only known traffic was going to be this bad, you would have taken another route? Never let this happen to you again! (If you live in the New York metro tri-state area and have the right mobile device, that is.) Download the WCBS Video Cellmate service's traffic camera to your cell phone, Blackberry, or Palm Treo, and you can check traffic conditions while you're on the road. You'll see live, real-time video images, not just maps of the highways with warnings that traffic is "slow as molasses in winter."

BMW is sponsoring WCBS Video Cellmate as a free service of WCBS 880. This free service is powered by 3rd Dimension Technology, and it's available to "cell phone subscribers with data plans on Sprint, Cingular and T-Mobile, as well as Blackberry and Palm Treo users on any network, including Verizon," according to the Free Traffic Cam Web site. Check the list of mobile devices that can support the service to see if yours is on it.

No word yet on when they'll expand the free service to other metro areas.

One-Click Subscription To Bloglines

If you're visiting a Web page or blog that is RSS-capable, you can subscribe to the RSS feed with your free Bloglines account with just one easy click of the big orange RSS button in your browser.

* If you have Firefox 2.0, this feature is already built in. (Sorry. Earlier versions of Firefox aren't capable of using this technology.)

* If you have Internet Explorer 7, you need the free Bloglines plug-in. (Sorry. Earlier versions of IE aren't capable of using this technology.)

Other free services available with your Bloglines account

1. If you're tracking a package that's been shipped via UPS, FedEx, the U.S. Postal Service, or DHL, add the package tracking number on this Web page (log in required), then subscribe to it to easily track it.

2. If you need disposable E-mail addresses to apply for free offers (or when you just don't want to give out your real E-mail address), "subscribe" to a disposable E-mail address inside your Bloglines account. Any mail sent to that E-mail address will show up as a new item under that subscription on your list of feeds. "Unsubscribe" to that subscription when you no longer need it, and the disposable E-mail address will no longer receive any messages.

3. Create your own Bloglines blog, where you can write on any topic you wish, any time you wish.

Get Things Done With GTDGmail

Finding it hard to get organized? If you have a Gmail account and use the Firefox Web browser, download the free GTDGmail extension to help you get things done through Gmail. With GTDGmail, you can:

• See at a glance which tasks are unfinished.
• Quickly and easily organize tasks with labels to categorize items into Contexts, Status, Projects and References.
• Save specialized searches to query your GTD tasks.
• Compose tasks and references, then send them to your Inbox.
• Print tasks on 3 x 5 cards and take them with you (suitable for a Hipster PDA).
• Use plenty of keyboard shortcuts to quickly organize the tasks.

For more information, see the GTDGmail Web page.

12 Quick Productivity Improvements

Does your IT organization need additional "visibility" to show its value? IT may not contribute to the bottom line, but it saves costs by improving workers' productivity. It's true value is often overlooked, because it's hard to put a dollar sign on the additional revenues earned due to IT's productivity gains.

But it doesn't have to take a lot of effort or Olympic Committee planning to show IT's value to the organization's productivity. Dan Tynan has excellent suggestions for quickly improving the organization's productivity in his article, "12 quick IT productivity wins," such as:

1. Stop losing, start finding
2. Meet less, work more
3. Use IM (with caution)
4. Free up your help desk
5. Get the news you need
6. Get a handle on your projects
7. Stop micromanaging
8. Double your displays
9. Give your WAN a boost
10. Play the game — literally
11. Look for easy ways to integrate
12. Think strategy, not tactics

Google Docs And Spreadsheets

Please note that Yahoo! is linking to this page from the search engine because it doesn't have most of the other 100+ pages of this blog in its index yet.

If you're looking for information on why BloggerBotIsDead and the best alternatives, then please follow my link to my blog post's page, because the recommended alternatives have problems you should know about and no one else is reporting on them.

If you're looking for information on the many ways to safeguard your data, computer, and network for free, then please start on the most recent page of my blog.


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Google Docs And Spreadsheets

Collaborate with your colleagues over the Internet using shared spreadsheets and word documents by using Google's free Docs and Spreadsheets (Beta) Web application. Only you and the folks you select can access these online documents. Upload existing documents or create new ones online, and then share them remotely with your colleagues. The documents are stored securely on Google's servers, so no need to worry about snoops.

Use a Web browser to edit your documents from anywhere: at the office, at home, at school, from a hotel while on travel, or anywhere else one may imagine. Best yet, you and your remote colleagues can share and edit the documents at the same time. Document revisions list who changed what and when to help keep track of multiple collaborators' edits.

Need your own copy? Export a copy of the document to your hard drive. Worried that your spreadsheets and documents on your hard drive may be lost during a data disaster? Store a copy of them online with Google's Docs And Spreadsheets. The convenient auto-save while working online with Google's Docs And Spreadsheets helps prevent data losses due to power outages or Internet disconnections.

This Web application has the look and feel of common Office programs, so they'll be familiar, and productivity won't drop while learning how to use the application. When finished with the document, publish it online as a Web page with a single mouse click. When it's published, choose whether the whole world may view it, or certain people you select may view it, or no one else at all may view it. These documents can even be posted to a blog if desired.

Be warned that the Web application is a bit slow, and of course it's still in beta, so don't expect too much.

6 Tips For Increased Productivity

Worried that you and your co-workers will have to re-learn how to use the new Microsoft Office 2007 applications with so many menu and toolbar items having been replaced with buttons on the new UI Ribbon? Don't let the new changes slow down your productivity. Use the old shortcuts and learn some new tricks with Christopher Elliot's article, "6 tips for increased productivity."