So, with a casual thought, I checked the wireless coverage map to see how many far-off places I could visit while downloading to my new e-reader. What I found was, although I could enjoy lightning-fast 3G downloads while visiting our Choroa Safaris office in Arusha, Tanzania, I would have to drive over an hour north of my small, but cosmopolitan town of Bend, Oregon, to reach the edge of the worst coverage. Nice.

Kindle…sometimes works better in remote eastern Africa, than sitting at a Starbucks on a major US highway.

At least they talked me out of spending $259.

I’ve been a little apprehensive since Lenovo bought that part of the business from IBM a few years ago. IBM had earned a large amount of respect from me with their laptop products for both quality and service. Even though I understand Lenovo was the manufacturer behind the IBM product, I still had to wonder if the brand would continue as before.

My friend ordered the W-series laptop as he is a power user working from the same desk most days. (I always opt for the little X-series) Even with my pleading, he didn’t opt for the ultra-cool dual-screen extension that comes as an option.  When his new laptop first arrived, one side of the keyboard was spongy and felt unsupported from underneath. Not one of those things that you think might be a figment of your imagination, but a real honest-t0-god problem. Lenovo admitted that the issue was part of a known recall, which begs the question why this unit ever shipped. Instead of just issuing him a new laptop, they repaired the one he had. When the his laptop arrived to the office again, signed off by quality control, the Windows 7 boot screen hung for over an hour demanding another call to support. Today the laptop seems to be working fine, but it’s only a few days old. I’ll continue to monitor it’s health and wonder if the reputation of the ThinkPad as the don’t-have-to-worry-about-it-because-it-just-works laptop might be a thing of the past.

I wonder if cities require a permit to draw on the sidewalks. And if so, what kind of permit is it? Seems like this would be a fantastic advertising idea in the right setting. A while back, the BendFilm Festival used a similar idea by stenciling their logo all over the sidewalks of downtown Bend. I don’t know how well that went over with the city, or whether they asked for permission, but I do remember several of the logos persisting on the sidewalks for quite some time. Effective idea.

There are a number of different options today, in large part thanks to the greater capacities in storage media. However, my favorite option right now doesn’t even use storage media. (Well, not in the traditional sense you’d think of.) Mozy.com will back up an unlimited amount of data from your home pc utilizing nothing more than your internet connection. You just download a small application, checkbox the folders you want backed up, and it does the rest automatically. If you’re doubtful as to how easy this can really be, they’ll let you backup up to 2Gig of your files for free. That’s the service package I’ve been using, and I’m really a fan.

Now, I normally do not like anything with a monthly recurring fee (it’s like being pecked to death by a duck), but I think that unlimited backup for $4.95/month isn’t bad. On an annualized basis, I’d probably spend more than that on any other solution. Maybe not in dollars, but certainly in time and fuss. They even offer a nice discount for those that would pay for a year or more up front (as I will.)

Now the justification was easy. One scanned receipt, that would have otherwise been misplaced, would easily pay for this device come tax time. So it was with much enthusiasm that I purchased the gadget and rushed it home to install my new business process. Some of that enthusiasm was lost when the installed software did not want to load on my laptop. The rest of that enthusiasm was lost when it also would not load on either of my desktop machines. I called tech support in Mumbai, who quickly and diligently went to work on the solution. No small feat I might add. By the end of the “session”, I’d allowed them to install remote software on my machine, log into my laptop, and carefully rearrange my administrative services and registry.

The biggest drawback, it seemed, to their software is that it uses MS SQL Server. Now, I don’t have so much experience with all of the different database packages that I could intelligently discuss the pros and cons of all the major brands (we get along quite nicely on MySQL), but what I do know is that everytime I have a software package which is built on SQL Server, it sucks. And I don’t use that word lightly…they are just plain awful. (Some of the later versions of Act! come to mind.)

Even after the tech support guys got the system working, it was slow, and my laptop started up with a SQL error everytime I rebooted. In general, I lost interest in the software and the little scanner.

But, fast-forward a few months. I’m happy to report that Neat has come out with another service patch for their little software package, and on a lark, I installed it on one of my desktops, and who could have guessed? It worked. Worked great, in fact. Now I’m like a little kid that found a Christmas present long forgot about. I’ve scanned an entire stack of receipts and marveled as the OCR engine grabbed the amount, date, vendor, and a host of other information and neatly (no pun intended) stored it into the database.

“The Oregon Economic and Community Development Department, now known as “Business Oregon”, is hosting two public forums on Thursday, July 23 to discuss the agency’s plans for economic development in Central Oregon following the elimination of the local Business Development Officer position by the department. The 90-minute forums will be held at 7:30 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. at the Hitchcock Auditorium on the campus of the Central Oregon Community College in Bend.

Once again, thank you for taking part in this effort.”