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Some of you will be aware of Google Alert but do you use it? I have it set up to let me know every day of new pages published or new posts published that have key words in it or phrases that relate to what I’m doing. Even my name, so I know when someone is publishing something that might relate to me. The spelling of my name is not common so it doesn’t mean I’m going to end up with hundreds of posts every day but the occasional one comes through and it helps me keep track of when articles of mine are published, or when someone might have made comment about something I’ve said or done online.

An alert came through 2 weeks ago that mentioned Lisa Bevere and Kathie Thomas were speaking at a conference together in the US. I got excited when I saw that one – I hadn’t heard of this particular Kathie Thomas before (a pastor in a large church) but I do know who Lisa Bevere is and as I’m moving more into the speaking arena this year, in both the business and Christian business circles, it seemed prophetic for me – a thought and hope I’m going to hang on to!

The alerts are also useful for another reason. If you operate a blog in a particular topic you could have alerts let you know of posts or articles by others in that topic. It could help provide a whole lot new material for you to write about and link to! KMT
blogging, google alert, topics, keywords

Tags: Technology by Kathie Thomas
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I much prefer to use email when communicating with most people. The reason being is that I don’t need an immediate answer in most cases, but I do need one that is clear and receiving it in written form gives me the opportunity to re-read it (as opposed to re-playing it – which you can’t do with a phone call after it’s finished, unless it was recorded) and respond at a time that is appropriate for me. It also means I don’t have to worry about what time it is wherever the receiver is – as opposed to picking up the phone and calling someone.

But over the past few months I’ve had people pick up the phone to talk to me, and whilst this normally wouldn’t be a problem if they were local, the people ringing me were from other countries, and they hadn’t checked what time it is where I am before they rang. Which can be a real problem. I really don’t like getting phone calls at 10.45pm, 2.55am, 6.15am and at other odd times. It really surprises me that the callers don’t even think to check before they call to work out what time it is in another country on the other side of the world from them. After all, on the web, there are sites like the World Clock which allows you to work out what time it is right now anywhere else in the world. So, why don’t people use it – particularly those who are in business?

About a month ago I’d had a lady call me at 10.45pm because she’d just received an email from me. She was in India but it hadn’t occurred to her what time it might be in Melbourne, Australia and she just picked up the phone to ring me to discuss what we’d been emailing. I got a bit of a surprise because I honestly wasn’t expecting a phone call at that hour and was just finishing up things for the night so I could go to bed.

So, the point of this post is to prompt the reader to think first before picking up the phone. What time is it at the destination end of your call? Might be better to send an email asking for a convenient time to call and use the meeting planner at the world clock to assist your planning. KMT

Tags: Technology by Kathie Thomas
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My office computer is over 4 years old and starting to get tired and slow, at least from what I remember it used to be like. It is backed up regularly, cleaned of .tmp files but struggles to defrag – probably because it has thousands and thousands of files and many gig of data. I had decided last Christmas I would shop for a new computer in the new year but with our holiday overseas earlier this year, and then an upcoming convention that has taken my attention outside of normal work (not to mention all the blogging on other blogs) I just hadn’t gotten around to it. But then the old computer stopped working 3 times in the last month – thought it was a sign I should take notice of before a real drama occurs.

So, yesterday I trotted down to Officeworks and looked at some of the specials there and brought home specs for three of them. I also looked at Dell’s specials online and printed off the specs there too. Graham and I pored over them and compared notes, then decided which was the best one and I trotted back to Officeworks to pick up my brand new HP Pavilion 1240a and also Win XP Pro.

I installed the operating system last night (it had Win XP Home and I wanted the Professional edition) but left the software installation till today – a good 10 hours later and the software is installed, most of my data is transferred over (I’m sure to have left something out) and now I’m finetuning, resetting things and getting it to look how it was before. It’s all the modifications that take the most time as reinstalling software and transferring data over does not always mean the modifications come too. But so far, I am quite happy – it fires up much, much faster (something like at least 4-5 times faster) and closes down quickly too. And I can carefully work at creating new folders and items and hopefully maintain some order without it getting out of hand.

Oh, I do love to play and whilst for some, they could think of nothing worse, for me it’s something I enjoy doing – a fresh start! KMT

new computer, old computer, fresh start, Officeworks, HP Pavilion

Tags: Technology by Kathie Thomas
4 Comments »

I send out a lot of email newsletters, on behalf of clients, or for my own business. What amazes me is that consistently the same email addresses will return messages that indicate their mailbox is full, they’re over quota, or something similar. In most cases these are business email addresses. I don’t get it – why are their mailboxes consistently full? And why don’t they do something about it?

To me, email is almost like the phone. The phone rings, you answer it, or your voicemail does, and collects a message for you. You check for messages and return the call if required.

Email arrives in your inbox – you check it at least once daily. You reply or delete as required.

Perhaps people leave their email on their mail server, even though they’ve downloaded it – personally I don’t see the point. It means you have to physically log in and clear it out – unless you have it set to empty every few days or so. Evenso, if you get a lot of email, you run the risk of filling up and bouncing mail very quickly. That doesn’t come across as very professional for a business. 10megs doesn’t go far these days – if that’s the standard mailbox size you have. Or whatever size mailbox you have, it will fill up – it’s not infinite in size.

It doesn’t take much to set up rules in your email program to filter through email as it comes – put aside what’s not important for reading later and bringing to your attention what is important and should be responded to. If someone has an email address on their business card, website, letterhead or elsewhere, then it’s reasonable to expect that people will contact you via email to do business. So why would people run the risk of missing out on business by letting their mailbox fill up? A mystery to me. KMT

email, mail server, full mailbox, over quota

Tags: Technology by Kathie Thomas
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