I hate my cell phone’s voice mail service because:

1. it takes toooooo long to get my voice mail messages. That annoying automated lady they use talks way too slow (I’m sure they do this on purpose so you use up more airtime minutes.
2. if I skipped a bunch of voice mail messages and now want to listen to the latest message that just came in, I have to re-listen or re-skip all the other messages first before I get to the new one.
3. I tend to skip or save a lot of old voice mail messages, and often forget to go and delete old ones so my mailbox ends up getting full and new callers can’t leave messages (and I have now way of knowing this unless I call myself and realize I can’t leave myself a message!)
4. I use my computer way more than my phone, and I’d rather just click a button to hear my voice mail than have to call my phone, press a bunch of buttons, etc.

Now, here is why I just fell in love with this free service called YouMail.

At it’s most basic level, it’s a replacement for your voice mail service. Using simple instructions from YouMail, you basically set up your phone so that if you don’t answer a call, it goes to voice mail (but their voice mail system, not your cell phone provider)

Now, one neat thing about YouMail is that you can check your voice mail messages in two different ways. One is the usual way of using your phone to call and get your messages (except again with easy instructions you will set a different speed-dial number to get your messages from).

The other way is that you can set it up to get an email notification whenever you have a new voice message, and you can just click the link in the email to hear your new voice mail message (it logs you into your YouMail account)

You can easily play, delete, and save voice mail messages from your online account. And, you can download voice mail messages, email them to a friend, etc.

Now, being able to check my voice mail from the web is great, and for just this feature alone I would switch to YouMail. But it gets even better…

YouMail explains this best on their web site and even has some cute videos (spin offs of the Mac vs. Windows commercials), but in short… you can set up contacts in your YouMail account. For example, you can set your boyfriend/girlfriend or whatever as a ‘contact’, and when they call you, if you don’t answer and they get your voice mail, you can set it up so they get a custom voice mail message!

You can either create your own outgoing message or use one of the hundreds of pre-recorded messages on YouMail’s web site.

There are also pre-recorded messages for Ditchmail, which is a great way to handle telemarketers, or people who call from blocked/private or unknown numbers. Some messages are the standard “this phone does not accept blocked callers” type messages, but you can also do some fun stuff, such as use fake error messages for these types of calls (and YouMail has plenty to choose from as well)

Anyone not set up as a ‘contact’ will just get whatever you set as your default outgoing message.

Anyway, check it out for yourself at http://www.youmail.com

Technorati Tags: cell phone, voice mail

I came across a great plug over the weekend that works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer called Price Advance. This plug-in is a huge time-saver and works great.

Here is an example… let’s say I’m shopping around for a Western Digital 320GB portable drive. I happen to be on Target’s web site, and they have it for $159.99.

Normally I would then look up the exact same hard drive on other web sites (Best Buy, Buy.com, Amazon, etc.) and see if any of those sites have it for less.

Well that’s exactly what Price Advance does for me, automatically!

For example, Price Advance automatically showed me that several stores carry this drive for $20 less than Target:

Price Advance automatically works with many popular online shopping sites:

I highly recommend this plug-in, and love that it works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. You can download Price Advance from here.

Technorati Tags: firefox plugin explorer

However, if all you need to do with a picture is email it to someone or place the picture on a web page, you should reduce the picture size so that the graphic file will be smaller (which means it will transfer or load quicker).

There are many graphics programs out there, some costing hundreds of dollars that you can use to resize pictures. For the average computer user, these programs are pricey and overkill.

If you just need features like the ability to resize an image, sharpen it, “save as…” as another image format, or even create a slideshow, I strongly recommend you take a look at a great free image utility called IrfanView.

IfranView is completely free for non-commercial use and runs on Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista. It is available in a large number of languages including Spanish, German, French, Korean, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Arabic, Swedish and many others.

IfranView also supports batch processing. So for example if you have a folder of images that you want to do the exact same procedure to (reduce to a certain size for example) you can run it as a batch and it will process all selected files at the same time.

For more advanced users, it also can cut/crop photos, apply various effects (blur, sharpen), allow you to change the color depth, and also supports Photoshop filters.

Technorati Tags: conversion, digital, graphics, images, photos

Windows XP

Windows Vista has some cool features, but for many reasons I opted to have Windows XP installed on my latest laptop instead of the Vista it was going to come with, and I’m very glad that I did after hearing many horror stories and frustrations from Vista users.

I won’t get into the XP vs. Vista discussion here, but you can find some great information here on why Windows XP should be saved.

There is a petition at SaveXP.com that you can sign and hopefully enough people do so that Microsoft changes their mind about dropping Windows XP.

Please take a look at the above site and help support the SaveXP movement!

Technorati Tags: windows xp