Tired of waiting on hold – outsource your waiting to India

December 7, 2007 by Ben Shoemate

It’s not just for Fortune 500 companies, you can use a company like Brickwork and pay someone $4/hr to sit on hold for you. From the website:

Remote Executive Assistant

Do you spend more time on routine administrative tasks instead of important business issues?
Are you suffering from information overload?
Are you finding less time to devote to your personal interests?
Are you up against a deadline and need help with research on your project?
Do you have an interesting idea but need help in creating a business plan?
Do you need assistance for extensive internet research and database creation?
Do you want to create/improve your website which gets you more customers?

Tasks they do:

Formatting/beautifying any MS office files like word, excel, PowerPoint
Quick mail mergers and sending mass mails in your name; Email & fax blast
Internet search or any other sources that you provide them access to
Designing customized greetings cards and sending them on your behalf
Fine tuning your logo, business cards and other stationary including converting image to vector
Data processing like data entry, OCR conversion; creating the PowerPoint presentation from the handwritten data;
Updation, normalization & standardization of database;
photo edits; b/w to color
Shopping
assistance like comparison of models & prices, listing of shops
within a specific area with address, phone number & route map

Has anyone tried this?

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How to upload and archive all old Chats from Yahoo IM, AOL, and others into Gmail

November 29, 2007 by Ben Shoemate

I love how Gmail stores all your chats and makes them available for search. But what about all the chats from before? – I have 10 years of IM’s saved – ICQ, Yahoo IM, AOL IM, Jabber, etc. My goal is to get them all uploaded into GMail. Here is how I did it.

The first thing you need to know is that in GMail, your chats are actually stored as normal emails with a tag "Chat". So all we need to do is convert the chats to email, upload them and tag them as "chat". Below are the 5 steps to get them uploaded!

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7 Email Visualizations for Thunderbird

November 13, 2007 by Ben Shoemate

Now that I have all my old email in one place, my next project will be to create some visualizations to start analyzing it. What do I mean? I’m talking about graphs, charts, tables, heatmaps, grids, networks, etc that illustrate patterns in the email. For example – I have roughly 40,000 emails (closer to 20,000 or so were sent by an actual human, and fewer still were sent only to me – but I don’t know for sure and thats part of the problem). My goal is to have a set of Thunderbird plug ins that will allow me see patterns like these. These are 7 visualizations I think Thunderbird (or Gmail) needs. If I get a lot of interest, I might actually build them so let me know what you think in the comments (no registration needed but I do moderate so it might not show up right away). Read more » »

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How to organize your hard drive

November 10, 2007 by Ben Shoemate

This is a problem every one struggles with: what is the best file structure for old files? The problem is actually compounded by the need to do routine back-ups. As I was going through all my old hard drives as part of my email project to upload all my email into Gmail. I took note of the various ways I organized my files over the years, the various folder structures I adopted. My digital life is dominated by projects – personal projects (most half-baked and half-finished), client projects (with thousands of files each with multiple versions), and team projects (like personal projects only with multiple people). Then, like everyone, I have downloaded files (in the form of mp3s, images, videos, and saved web pages), personal photos, and miscellaneous documents.

Here is my strategy… Read more » »

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Google Talk and Lotus Sametime – does not work

October 17, 2007 by Ben Shoemate

Tonight, I discovered what is wrong with the internet, it is very easy to verify something is possible, but almost impossible to validate that it is not possible. Let me give you an example. I was very excited when I read this article on Google’s Blog about IBM Lotus Sametime supporting a new protocol that would allow it to connect with Google. So, i tried it. I tried adding my gmail account to my IBM Sametime client – Presto! – there I was, but permanently offline…. That was strange, I can clearly see that I’m online… So the search begins. I search IBM’s internal website W3 – lots of IBMers asked the question back in January when the news first broke. Back then the answer was “It can be set up by the network admin at the Sametime server, but IBM has not implemented it.” So there is was, *proof* that what I was trying to do was not possible. But that was January, now its October, no one has said its impossible, today yet, or even this week or month. And this is the problem with definitive dis-proof. There is just no easy way to prove that something is not possible. Read more » »