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It’s one thing to suffer from information overload, but what about contact overload? Business cards collecting dust, incomplete contact records in Outlook, duplicate names in your mobile phone. Say goodbye to all that with this simple, yet effective unified contact strategy for the business person: digitize your business cards, import, merge and purge, automatically add email addresses replied to, then keep them in sync across all of your contact files. Here is what I do…

DIGITIZE YOUR BACKLOG of BUSINESS CARDS

Take that stack of cards and send them off to CloudContacts who will get them into digital contact files starting at $30 for 100 cards.

GET READY

1. Sign up for Plaxo Premium account for $60 per year
This will give you the ability to syncronize your Outlook, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, LinkedIn and AOL contact lists (Sorry, Plaxo doesn’t have a clean sync with Gmail). Plaxo will also enable deduplication of your contacts file.

2. For Outlook users, purchase and install Add Contacts for $15
This will let you automatically add email addresses to your Outlook Contacts file every time you hit “reply”.

3. For iPhone users, buy and install CardSnap Business App for $15 from iTunes App Store.
This handy tool will help you digitize your business cards as you get them. This assumes you have your iPhone contact file linked with Outlook or of the other mail services supported by Plaxo.

SETUP THE SYSTEM

1. Import CloudContacts contact files into Outlook
This is pretty simple…just login to CloudContacts, download the CSV and import into Outlook.

2. Install AddContacts and set it up
The setup for this is located in the Outlook Preferences tab. You can choose how you want it to behave.

3. Link up your accounts with Plaxo
Install the Outlook Addin from Plaxo and setup the synchronization for all of your various accounts within Plaxo.

4. Dedup the Contacts in Plaxo
Use Plaxo’s Deduplication tool to clean up your unified contact file, which Plaxo now has shared across all of your linked accounts. Once complete, the updates will save and populate to your linked accounts.

ONGOING MAINTENANCE

This is pretty much automatic for you with two exceptions: regular deduplication and importing new business card contacts.

1. Importing new business cards as you get them
Using CardSnap or CloudContacts import new business cards into your Outlook or iPhone contacts file.

2. Dedup your contacts regularly
Access the Plaxo Deduplication tool monthly or quarterly to keep your records and files clean and up to date.

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Hand vac picks up pet hair

The Shark Cordless Hand Vac (aka Pet Perfect Hand Vac) picks up an amazing amount of pet hair and dirt, even when you think none is there!

A combination of a powerful motor and brush head really pulls up an amazing about of pet hair and dirt on most any type of carpet. I’ve used in my cars and on rugs at home.

The brush can be removed for a standard “hand vac” head, or insert a narrow nozzle attachment for hard to reach places.

The biggest and perhaps only drawback to this vac is the battery. The battery tends to get weak very quickly, so the length of time to get maximum power can be limited.

All in all, this vac is worth its weight at getting up dirt.

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By default, Carbonite does not backup EXE files, video files or any files larger than 4 GB! Now if you are getting into the video thing like me, this could be a major drawback. Also, if you have random files that are simply too large, you are hosed. And if you save EXE files you have purchased and downloaded, you are in trouble.

Luckily, you can still manually select these for backup, but there is no way to make this the new default setting. One other way to catch these items, should you forget, is a small clear/white dot on the corner of each folder indicating that folder contains items not being backed up. Files backed up are indicated with a green dot.

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Unlike traditional hot tubs which essentially chemical bomb the water, you should enter an ahhNatural tub clean. If it becomes overwhelmed with oil and bacteria, you may need to resort to chlorine to get it back to clean state. I have resorted to using chlorine on a few occasions, but only to get my water back to “normal”. When I do this, I remove the ahhNatural bag from the tub until most of the chlorine has dissipated.

ahhNatural specifies using hydrogen peroxide to shock the tub and keep it clean. I usually do this after refilling the tub. Over the course of using the tub, I use “MPS” – monopersulfate. There are a few forms of this compound on the market, which most pool supply stores will carry at least one. Essentially this uses oxygen, like peroxide, to keep the tub clean. You should experiment with various MPS brands. SpaDepot offers an MPS I have used consistently. However, I have found that when the water gets really dirty, you may eventually go through a large quantity of MPS. What I have noticed is that in large quantities, MPS will break down into some cloudy material. This may give you the impression that your water is dirty. It will eventually get filtered out, but you may need to resort to chlorine to get the tub back to normal. Too much MPS can wreak havoc with your pH too.

The biggest tip is that pH is critical. It is true that your ahhNatural water will stabilize to its preferred pH, which will likely differ greatly from the standard spa pH level. I have also lived in two areas where the water is quite different and can impact how easy it is to maintain your pH.

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The switcher supports numerous sources of photos:

• Any folder on your computer
• Flickr
• Facebook
• SmugMug
• Picasa
• Webshots
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I am a Flickr user and can choose which “set” I want to use, or simply use popular photos from across Flickr.

There are an amazing number of settings to choose from: picture mode, change frequency (30 seconds to 7 days), multiple monitors just to name a few. You can even select background montages/mosaics of your photos.

John did an amazing job for a free app. Download it here.

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