MicroWorks Newsletter
Tech News and Tips June 2008
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In This Issue
Evernote; The Ultimate Post-IT Note
Dr Randy Pausch
Dr. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

To view the reprisal of his lecture (as seen on Oprah Winfrey show) click on Randy's picture. It's about 10 minutes long.

To view the complete lecture, click on the link below. It's 76 minutes long but it's worth every second.
Complete Lecture
Quick Links...


Happy Father's Day!

The best part of my job is getting to review, test and experiment with different technology products. My parents gave me the bicycle pictured below for my 10th birthday. It was the 1973 Peugeot PX10E. This bicycle was the bike to have if wanted to get "serious" about biking. This bike helped start the "10-speed bicycle" revolution of the 1970's. Prior to the 10-speed racing/touring bicycle, the majority of bicycles were heavy duty single or 3-speed bikes. They were built like tanks and weighed almost as much. You had to have legs of steel to go up hills. But my new Peugeot was light and fast. It had 10 gears so I could easily shift into a lower gear to get up those challenging hills. Bicycling became my favorite sport and I loved riding my bike all over Philadelphia. Boy, I wish we had cyclometers back then so I could have tracked all those miles.
Peugeot Bicycle
My fondest memories of my childhood are riding
my bike with my friends and my father.

So right about now, you must be asking yourself; "why would a tech guy be telling me all about his bicycle?" The simple answer is that my Peugeot 10-speed was my first tech gadget. In 1973 Microcomputers (PC's) were yet to be created and Pong (the first home video game) was still two years away from hitting store's shelves. For me, my 10-speed was the essence of Hi-Tech. I loved my bicycle and I wanted to learn everything I could about how it worked and how to take care of it. I spent hours upon hours every weekend working on my bicycle before and after rides. My connection to technology was cemented with that birthday present.
 
Check out the review of Evernote below. It's not as cool as my beloved bicycle but it's pretty close and you don't have to work up a sweat to enjoy it. 

This month's video is truly inspiring. I can't recommend it strongly enough.


BJ Levitt
MicroWorks
Evernote; The Ultimate Post-It Note

I use Outlook as my email client, calendar, contact list, task manager and note taker. Overall I'm a real Outlook fan. It lives on my laptop and synchronizes with my Smartphone so I have my most important information available to me at all times. When I first heard about Evernote, I thought to myself, why would I want another information storage application?

Evernote

Well I've been using Evernote for about a month now and I love it! It has technology built into it that really changes the way you think about storing and managing information. First, Evernote's data (notes) live on Evernote's servers accessible by any Internet connected computer. But unlike other web only applications, Evernote also has a standalone application that you can install on your computer (PC, Mac and Smartphone). The key is that Evernote synchronizes your notes among all of these different platforms so whether you're on your computer, your phone or at an Internet café, you have full access to your notes.

The really innovative part of Evernote is that its servers have built-in OCR (optical character recognition). This isn't your run of the mill OCR, it's very powerful. As soon as you add a scanned image or picture to Evernote and Synchronize, the Evernote Servers perform a super-fast scan and transform your scans and pictures into searchable notes. This one function, has changed the way I manage information.

I hate piles of paper in my office so my goal has been to be as paperless as possible. The problem with traditional scanning is that it unless you go through the work of performing OCR on everything you scan, you can't search for information inside the document. With Evernote it happens magically in the background as you synch and it's OCR technology is amazing. You can take a digital picture of business card, add it to Evernote and boom, you can now search for any information within that business card as if you typed it in. It also does a good job with handwritten information. You have to try it to truly understand how cool this capability is. A side benefit of the synchronization is that you have an automatic backup of your information.

Evernote is free but is still officially in Beta testing. I've found it to be rock solid and if you're interested, I recommend giving it a try.  

http://www.evernote.com/
Please feel free to forward this email to anyone who might get value from it.

As a client of MicroWorks you have an easy and direct way to get answers to all your Technology questions. Just email me at bj@microworksfl.com and I'll email you back an answer as soon as possible. MicroWorks doesn't charge for Email support if you're currently one of our clients.
 
I look forward to your questions and comments.
Sincerely,
 

BJ Levitt
MicroWorks Consulting, Inc.