The Cutting Edge of Online Marketing

A few weeks ago, I posted info on taking control of the spam that invades all of our inboxes on a daily basis. In Spam filling your INBOX? Get relief now, I gave a few suggestions on what you can do to totally eliminate the spam you receive.

The ideas included SpamArrest, a service that can eliminate 100% of spam emails from your inbox, now and forever.

Monday’s email newsletter confirmed that some of you have taken me up on the idea and decided to free your yourself and your time from dealing with spam.

Monday’s mailing produced a few SpamArrest confirmation requests. This is a message that SpamArrest sends to email senders that are not in the recipients address book (at least not the one uploaded to SpamArrest) that requires manual intervention that a spammer just doesn’t have the resources to do.

Of course we took the minute or so to update our info with SpamArrest so our subscribers will continue to get our “news and views you can use” without a hitch.

Of course, some of you may be saying “What IS this SpamArrest thing and how does it work?” The company has a brief, animated demo that you can see by clicking anywhere on the big box below. You’re not committing to anything by watching the demo, but you may be freeing yourself from spam email forever.

I’ve made it available here so you don’t even have to go to their website.

Go ahead and have a look.

And if you sign up for SpamArrest, be sure to add “Update@MHMSM.com” to your SpamArrest address book so your twice-weekly newsletter will be sure to get to you.

Tired of paying exorbitant licensing fees every time you install or upgrade bloated, unstable software? Here are a couple of Office alternatives that won’t cost you a dime.

The best known of these is OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org (OOo) began as StarOffice, developed by Star Division and acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999.

The OpenOffice.org suite is composed of Writer, a word processor similar to Microsoft Word or Word Perfect; Calc, a spreadsheet similar to Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3; Impress, a presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote; Base, a database management similar to Microsoft Access; Draw, a vector graphics editor similar to early versions of Corel Draw and Microsoft Visio; and Math, a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae.

OpenOffice.org can read and write all popular file formats, including .doc, .xls, .ppt, etc. It can also read and save .docx, .xlsx, .rtf, .txt, .csv and more so you don;t need to concern yourself with file compatibility.

OpenOffice.org Start Screen

A feature of OpenOffice.org that I really like in the “one click” creation of PDFs from Writer and Calc. Another is the ability of Impress to export to .swf so that a presentation can be viewed on any computer with a Flash player installed.

OpenOffice.org is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. There is also a Mac-only fork called NeoOffice which contains most of the features of OpenOffice.org.

Don’t think that OpenOffice.org is a “cult” application only used by the anti-Microsoft crowd. Wikipedia says, “OpenOffice.org and StarOffice had secured 15-20% of the business market as of 2004. The OpenOffice.org web site reported more than 98 million downloads as of September 2007. OpenOffice.org 3.x reached one hundred million downloads, just over a year since its release.”

OpenOffice.org is released under an open-source licence (the LGPL), which means it may be used free of any licence fees, for any purpose: private, governmental, commercial, etc. Once acquired (either as a free download or as a CD) it may be installed on an unlimited number of computers, and may be copied and distributed without restriction. OpenOffice.org supports extensions, allowing users to add on extra functions easily from an extensions repository. This is a key differentiator from the competition.

Again quoting Wikipedia, “studies have shown that OpenOffice has reached a point where it has an “irreversible” installed user base and that it will continue to grow.”

Quoting Wikipedia one more time, “The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free and open alternative; later versions of StarOffice are based upon OpenOffice.org with additional proprietary components. The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Oracle Corporation (having acquired Sun Microsystems). Other major corporate contributors include Novell, Red Hat, IBM, Google and others.”

If you’re just looking for a simple, but very powerful word processor that is Open Source (free) and will run on Windows, Mac or various Linux flavors, AbiWord may be just the ticket.

AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

AbiWord allows you to collaborate with multiple people on one document at the same time. It is tightly integrated with the AbiCollab.net web service, which lets you store documents online, allows easy document sharing with your friends, and performs format conversions on the fly.

What use is a Word Processor when you can’t share your documents with your friends? AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types, such as OpenOffice.org documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, HTML web pages and many more.

Choose one of these Open Source solutions that meets your needs and you’ll be humming along free from those expensive proprietary licenses.

Finding yourself overwhelmed by the constant demands the latest technology and gadgets bring into your life? Find your self spending more and more time on the phone, handling emails and doing business when you should be spending more time with your family?

Cell phones, smart phones an other tech gadgets are wonderful tools for doing business, but they can also distract you from personal time with friends and family.

Today, Tim Connor addresses these issues in his Weekly Relationships Tip in his Words of Wisdom Blog at MHMSM.com. Take a few minutes to read it (you don’t need anyone’s permission). Let any calls or emails go for a few minutes while you take in what Tim has to say.

Words of Wisdom from Tim Connor.

In early 2010, somewhere high above the northern hemisphere, Mark Krywko decided he’d had enough. The CEO of Sleek Audio, a purveyor of high-end earphones, Krywko was flying home to Florida after yet another frustrating visit to Dongguan, China, where a contract factory assembled the majority of his company’s products. He and his son, Jason, Sleek Audio’s cofounder, made the long trip every few months to troubleshoot quality flaws. Every time the Krywkos visited Dongguan, their Chinese partners assured them everything was under control. Those promises almost always proved empty.

via Made in America: Small Businesses Buck the Offshoring Trend | Magazine.

Digital inspections raise constitutional questions about how robust the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee “against unreasonable searches and seizures” should be on the border, especially in a time of terrorism. A total of 6,671 travelers, 2,995 of them American citizens, had electronic gear searched from Oct. 1, 2008, through June 2, 2010, just a tiny percentage of arrivals.

via ‘Digital Inspections’ at U.S. Border Raise Constitutional Questions – NYTimes.com.