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Random thought:

PowerPoint in your Palm

If you've ever wished you could walk into a meeting, take out your Palm-type organizer, plug it in to a projector, and run a PowerPoint presentation, I have good news for you: You can.

Two companies offer products that allow you to present a PowerPoint show without having to carry around a computer. Portsmith makes the Pitch Solo and Pitch for Palm (both about $250). Margi Systems offers Presenter to Go (about $200 for most models).

I spoke with Alan Werk of iGo (representing Portsmith) and with Ward Nash of Margi Systems.
Real Audio: PORTSMITH - Alan Werk 0:58 q-compress it
Real Audio: MARGI - Ward Nash 1:18 q-with the product

Devices from Portsmith

Pitch Solo

The Pitch Solo lets you deliver notebook-quality PowerPoint presentations from your Palm. You install the presentation by hot-syncing and then attach a VGA video projector or monitor. You can control the slide show remotely using the infrared capabilities of the Palm device.

The Pitch Solo works with Palm m500/505/515 and i705 series units.

It includes iDisplay for displaying the live screen of the Palm device so you can face the audience instead of having to look at the screen.

For units that have secure digital cards, larger presentations can be stored there.

Pitch for Palm

The Palm device (m125/130/500/505/515 or i705 series) slips into a the cradle-like Pitch device and the presentation comes directly from the Palm device. As with the Pitch Solo, Pitch for Palm supports secure digital cards.

For more information: http://www.portsmith.com/.

Devices from Margi Systems

Margi has devices that support CompactFlash/PC Card, SD Card (Palm, Treo, Kyocera), Springboard module (Handspring), and Memory Stick (Sony). Because Margi supports CompactFlash/PC Card, it can offer a solution for those who use Pocket PCs or Windows CE devices instead of Palm units.

Instead of being limited to VGA mode, Margi unit provide output in full color at 1024x768 (XGA).

For more information: http://www.margi.com/

Thank you, Microsoft; you, too HP

I have a second PC that sits beside the main computer. I use it for various applications that need to run 24 hours per day -- website monitoring, autoresponder messages for clients and the like. Saturday morning, I noticed that Microsoft wanted to install a new security update. I started the process.

The computer would not reboot. Since it's an XP system, "last known good" should have worked. It didn't. The solution: Get out the HP operating system backup CD, boot from them, and restore the operating system.

If you buy a PC from a small company, you'll get a real copy of Windows XP. If you buy from one of the big guys, you get a "recovery CD" that's supposed to make things "easy" for you.

• If you get a real copy of the operating system and something goes wrong, you can reinstall the operating system without having to wipe out everything on the disk.
• If you have a "recovery disk", recovery means erase the disk and reinstall the operating system. Period. No choice.

Given the way in which this computer failed, there's only a small chance that a "repair" would have worked. But I would have liked to have been able to try it. I might have been able to get the system going well enough to grab some settings files that I could have restored later. Since this is a machine that does not store any data, I don't back it up. Maybe I'll start copying settings files to the main system -- the one that does get backed up regularly -- so that the next time Microsoft decides I don't have enough to do, the recovery will be a bit faster.

And I really do wish that Microsoft, HP, and others would stop trying to make my life "easier". It invariably has the opposite effect.

Are dot-coms run by idiots?
THIS IS NOT INTENDED TO BE A RHETORICAL QUESTION

Every now and then I have to renew my curmudgeon's license and something that happened on Friday gives me the perfect opportunity to do so. I suppose that the ratio of idiots in charge is about the same among dot-coms as in the overall business community. It's just that a stupid decision by a dot-com cretin is immediately obvious to everybody.

I've used the Jfax service (and, previously, the Efax service, which was bought by Jfax). I've been pleased with the way the service allows faxes and voice messages to follow me around. The service is more expensive than it should be, but it does what I need it to do and I pay the bill every month.

I've chosen to use Jfax for a national toll-free number for voice messages and faxes, so I pay for all messages -- sent or received. Even so, Jfax displays a small advertisement in the top banner of the viewer. The ad is about the size of a postage stamp. Since I'm paying for the service, I feel that there should be no ads, but maybe the ads are keeping the price down a bit. They're an annoyance, but not a big one.

I should make that past tense. They were an annoyance, but not a big one. On Friday morning, I received a fax. I tried to read it on-screen, which is what I do with most of the faxes I receive. Unless I need a printed copy, I don't print it. But I cannot read the fax on the screen because some [expletive deleted] at Jfax has decided that the postage-stamp ad isn't good enough. Now the ad extends vertically across most of the screen. The advertisement (for General Motors) makes reading the fax impossible. If I want to read it, I must print the fax.

Who did it and why?

What kind of mush-for-brains administrator would make a decision like this? It essentially eliminates one of the primary reasons I prefer Jfax to a real fax machine: no paper. If I must print the fax, what's the advantage.

I even followed the link on the ad, thinking that Jfax would at least be polite enough (or smart enough) to REMOVE the vertical extension after I followed the link. That wasn't the case, either.

Do people who make decisions like this make them before they have their first cup of coffee or after they've had a few beers? They certainly can't be making decisions like this when they're coherent.

How hard did I try to read the fax?

Scrolling the image up and down made the banner go away for approximately 3 seconds. I concluded that I could probably read the entire first column of the fax in 10 or 15 minutes if I kept scrolling it around. That didn't seem like a good use of my time.

Here's a low-quality Real Video example of me trying to mouse away the ad.

How hard did J2 try to fix the problem?

Friday evening, I received a reply from J2 (the company that owns Jfax and Efax). Clearly the person who responded hadn't even taken the time to understand what the problem was. I received a canned "did someone send you a junk fax?" message:

Thank you for your inquiry.

If you are a jConnect user and you believe that you are in receipt of a junk fax, we ask that you take the following steps:

1. If the junk fax contains a phone number, fax number or other contact information to "unsubscribe" from receipt of additional junk faxes, please do so.

2. Submit the offending fax to us at http://www.j2.com/contactus/abuse.asp. We will investigate your complaint, and attempt to prevent any further transmission of junk faxes from the same source.

If you believe that a jConnect user has sent you a junk e-mail (for example, one that includes a jConnect number for the collection of opt-out requests), we ask that you forward the offending e-mail to freehelp@mail.j2.com so that we can identify the sender and take any necessary action.

We appreciate your patience in this regard, and look forward to continuing to make the j2 experience a positive one for you.

(Please note that all messages sent to this e-mail address trigger the above autoreply and are not read by our Customer Service Team. For assistance with any issue other than a junk fax complaint, please visit our Help section at http://j2.com/help.)

Thank you for contacting j2 Global Communications. For any future correspondence regarding this issue, please reference this case ID in your message: XXXXXXX.

Sincerely,

-Mischelle XXXXX
j2 Customer Service
1-XXX-XXX-XXXX

Don't run your business this way

Here's a little free advice for J2:

1. Stop doing things that annoy faithful users. (I started using Efax shortly after the service was announced and switched to Jfax only when I needed a service that Efax didn't offer. Since both are owned by the same company, I think this should qualify me as a loyal user.
2. Hire people for customer service who will actually read complaints and respond to them, not glance at a word here or there, guess about what the problem might be and send a canned message.

Additional management tip, also offered for free: If you do #1, the people doing #2 will have a lot more time to spend doing the job right because there won't be many complaints.

Nerdly News

The fastest Internet growth is in ...

The Associated Press reports a Nielsen NetRatings study that suggests Raleigh, North Carolina, is the region where Internet use is growing fastest. IBM's personal computing division calls that area home. The survey says that nearly 1 million (924 thousand) people in the area now log on from home -- a 29% increase in just the past year.

Nashville and Sacramento are tied with the second-highest growth rate -- about 19% in the past year. Hartford's Internet usage grew ay 17%, followed by Washington, D.C., and Houston at 16%, then Minneapolis (15%), Cincinnati (12%), and San Diego and Indianapolis (11%).

Q&A: Wordperfect

I received an interesting question from a listener regarding WordPerfect this week.

"My employer is planning on phasing out Corel Word Perfect in favor of Microsoft Word. The reasoning, as far as I can tell, is because they think that Corel is going out of business. I have been unable to determine if that is the case.

"I have been a Word Perfect user for many, many years. I also use Word. I much prefer Word Perfect for ease of use, ability to perform functions that I use everyday, the tables and graphics are far superior to Word. Many of our employees are very upset that this software might not be available in the future. Many of the forms (over 200) and documents we have are created in Word Perfect and do not successfully transfer to Word.

"Do you have any information about the Corel Company? Are they going out of business? Any info you have may help us. We REALLY want to keep Word Perfect!!"

Synchronicity strikes again. I've been complaining about dumb decisions made by dot-coms. This would be a dumb decision by a company that is probably not a dot-com. This company has 200 WordPerfect templates and people who understand WordPerfect and like working with it. Word is substantially more expensive than WordPerfect and tends to confuse WordPerfect users because it tries to be so "helpful".

My reply:

Ask your employer, "If you owned a warehouse full of masking tape that your employees found suitable for the task at hand and easy to use and you heard that the company that made the tape was going out of business, would you throw away the warehouse full of tape and buy tape from somebody else?"

Does this employer want to pay you to recreate 200 forms in Word? As you know, they will not successfully transfer to Word without additional work.

But that doesn't address the key question: Is Corel doomed? Well, in the past 2 years, Corel has made some calculated purchases that strengthen its position as an end-to-end communications company. In terms of product offerings, they are stronger now than they have ever been.

In 2000, Microsoft invested $135,000,000 in Corel. The last time I heard, the amount of cash in the bank the Corel still has from this deal is $135,000,000. In other words, they're paying their own way and they have cash on hand.

If you like the Corel/Wordperfect product, if it's working for you, if it will continue to work in future version of Windows (it will) -- why pay more money to buy a product that is often considered by users to be the inferior product?

What's the ROI? What's the point?

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