One of the great things about my job is that I am able to spend a lot of time reading about and researching new tech opportunities for our office.  The only downside to this is that there is a ton of noise out there — from fledgling startups to seemingly important blog posts to Twitter action that’s interesting, but not necessarily relevant to my work. It’s gotten to be so much that I’ve been keeping NetNewsWire closed during the day so that I’m not continually distracted by new items from my feeds.  I have become more reliant on to-do lists to get things done,...

My wife and I have recently been trying to rid our home of anything we don’t use on a day-to-day basis.  Along the way we’ve come across old cell phones, an old PDA, and even an ancient digital camera (it’s like, three years old).  These gadgets are usually great eBay fodder, but I have to be honest: I don’t often have the time and energy to list the item, figure out packaging, and head out to the post office to ship it.  Enter Gazelle. Gazelle is trying to keep old electronics out of the landfill (a noble effort), and they are offering cash for your old stuff.  We had a...

It happens every year.  August hits, and I start thinking about the next recruitment cycle and the changes that I will make.  First on my list is preparing for the fall travel season, but I’m also considering how I’ll make sure of different means of communication when working with my prospects: Print. This is obviously a given for most offices, and most of what we do is automated.  I’ve begun to really question this way of delivering content.  It’s so expensive, and we have no way of evaluating its effectiveness. Phone. There’s no doubt that this has been the status...

If you are like me, you are always trying to figure out the best way to keep track of items on your to-do list.  I have gone from Remember The Milk to a spiral notebook to iPhone “Notes” (and the list goes on).  While I wait for Gmail (Hope is a Google Apps school) to launch its to-do functionality, I thought I would share one tool that has served me well for the last several months and that I will probably stick with for some time. Ta-da List (from 37 signals) came highly recommended to me as a “free and simple” way to manage my daily tasks.  It allows you to create as many...

This week I stumbled across ParticleTree, a web development blog.  Prominently featured on the blog is a service called Wufoo, a project by the authors of ParticleTree.  They tout the service as making forms “easy + fast + fun.”  I couldn’t agree more! If you don’t have someone in your office that knows programming well enough to develop online forms and/or your IT department is swamped, Wufoo could be a great solution for you.  In addition to a ton of template ideas, Wufoo also provides a variety of CSS options, meaning that you can really customize the form the way you...