It's been a little over two years since we graduated from college and today began the Great Purging of the Papers. We quite literally have two boxes full of notes, papers, etc. to sort and determine what's good, what's bad, and what's Clint Eastwood. Which is why I bought one of these:

It's called a Canon PIXMA MP210, and it's a photo quality all-in-one thing. But mostly I just care about the scanning, which is key to archiving old papers. Somewhere mid-college I lost a hard drive or three, meaning a lot of papers went out the window. Plus I like to have the comments from my various professors as they tore my papers and tests into minute shreds.

The scanner has relatively mindless scan-to-PDF functions, which is great because that's exactly what I need. And the great thing is that is only cost $70.00. Which seems fair to back up every piece of average-GPA Hillsdale writing sample I have ever written.

As an early adopter, you tend to sign up for web services long before they make it big and get purchased by the big guys (or in rare cases, become one of the big guys). And in many cases, a big guy (Google) takes a cool idea (Writely) and turns it into something that millions are using every day (Google Docs/Apps). Many of the services I have been used have been purchased by the big guys in some form or other: CBS owns Last.fm and Comcast has purchased both Fandango (a year ago) and Plaxo (this month) relatively recently. It seems that 95% of the time, both myself and the web community at large are pleased with the overall results of these mergers/takeovers/swallowingups. But then there is that 5%. Let's take a look at them in depth.

Jaiku

When Google bought this "other Twitter" 7 months ago, we all expected tons of feature-updates and Googlified integrations. According to the Jaiku FAQs of the purchase, "Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users." And yet it has been months, nothing has changed, and users in general flock to the open, updated Twitter (recent Twitter server problems notwithstanding).

Feedburner

When Google bought Feedburner, the web stats/publishing application, I personally expected tight integration with Google Analytics to make a one-stop web stats software. Again, little has changed and I'm still logging in to one Google application to check visitors and one application (without a Google login) to check feed readers.

GrandCentral

This one is my personal annoyance. GrandCentral is a great phone service; heck, I use it for a home voicemail system as I don't have a land line. While this one is a bit more established than, say, Jaiku, I still haven't seen the Googlification that I have anticipated. Why can't I receive text messages to my GrandCentral number? Why doesn't it identify numbers from public ID databases? Why why why?

Like it or not, I think the reality is that the Big Guys don't always turn Cutesy StartUp into Pure Gold. While many of them become software and sites we frequent, just as many disappear into oblivion forever, or at least remain in some form of early beta status that doesn't make it to the Big Top. Personally, though, I'd love to see the Big Guys dedicate some more time (and publish regular updates!) to those little startups that still have thousands of loyal users. After all, I imagine they invested that dough for a reason.

We switched over to AT&T/SBC/Bell South/Cingular for DSL today after two years with the cable company. No big deal all together, but I'm glad I was able to find instructions to set up the DSL without using the CD that comes with tons of "customized" software, a Yahoo browser that's merely a reskinned Internet Explorer, and the like. If you're thinking about signing up for AT&T DSL at any point, check out the instructions I referenced about here.

Here's what my new Speed info is looking like:

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I'm not particularly thrilled that this is what I'm getting with the cable company. Download speed is fine, but what is up with the upload?

For those of you Twitter users out there, I imagine that you've been having spotty network problems all night. Turns out that they know about it and posted a short blog post about it here:

For those of you who have spotted intermittent errors tonight, we're working on it. We restarted a database that normally restarts very quickly without resulting in any site degradation. Tonight, that routine changed—it's taking a long time to restart which is causing intermittent 500 errors for some web visitors. We're bringing it up to speed now.

The errors seem to pop up when you try to visit a profile page (ex. my Twitter profile) versus the main Twitter page.

And for those of you unfamiliar with what Twitter is, just know that it is a 140-character max way of constantly answering the question, "what are you doing right now?"

Did you know that today is RSS Day? Do you even know what that means?

For what it's worth, you should check out Google Reader if you haven't already. And for a better summary of what RSS Day means, you can visit RSSDay.org. Here's a quick snippet of what it is:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.

The main benefit of RSS is that it enables people to stay connected with their favorite websites without having to visit them. Once you subscribe to a particular RSS feed, you will automatically receive updates from the website that publishes the feed, whenever they release new content. The video below illustrates the process.

Do you RSS? If you do, how many websites do you have in your reader? I just checked in Google Reader, and there are 194 feeds. And that is after I cut it down a few months back.

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Thanks to Google's Earth Day challenge, it is much easier to find means of public transportation in cities both nationally and across the world. I realize that this is a slowly growing project (it requires submissions from public transit offices) but I have noticed that it has greatly improved the Google Maps functions. Check it out, the list of available cities is here.

I'm no Che Guevera (especially considering as I'm late to this party anyhow), but a very real thing happened recently that'd be really funny, except it's not a joke. I'd link to tons of articles about it, but instead I'll link to Veronica Belmont's great description here and give you a brief explanation below.

Essentially T-Mobile's owner is suing a technology/gadget blog for use of a color they own the rights to, except that the rules only apply if Engadget (the website) was selling a similar product, blah, blah, blah basically it's a load of crap. So here's a cute logo put together about it.

I've been there. I've lost a cell phone and the 300 phone numbers that go with it. You don't plug someone's info into your email service and manage to lose it. Your Outlook and Gmail aren't sync'd together, nevermind your Yahoo and MSN emails.

So what's the solution?

The good news is that Plaxo has been around for a little while and has been able to develop. It has plugins for most webmail clients, Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple's mail, etc. Even better, if you're a Plaxo user and update your own contact information, it will send your new info to all of your friends. Remember when you had to send out an email or letter when you moved or changed your cell phone number? Exactly.

I'm guessing that 85% of the people reading this cannot see the direct value of this to their own situations. But think of it this way. You might not "need" it today, or at any forseeable point down the road. But that reality will change moving forward, as more and more people become entirely technomobile. You need to be able to have your information with you, and not just the first name/cell phone numbers you have in you flip phone. So why not take a preventative step now, so that when you lose your phone you already have things back up for you. And then one day when you have a smartphone, you'll be able to click a few buttons and sync all your contacts to your phone.

It just makes sense.

Don't know what it is? I'm too exhausted to tell you, truthfully, but suffice it to say that it creates the chance to have a "One Log-in to Rule them All," Tolkien-esque way to login to sites that support OpenID. This site will soon, again, after I work out the bugs from the last experience.

I encourage you to look into it by poking your head around over here.