Evernote

I’m not going to have this blog become a source of full reviews, as there is plenty of that on the web already. I much rather spend my time on my thoughts of a service/product and if you want more in depth information, feel free to Google it.  Just Google “Evernote review” if you want some more full information.

Some of the real advantages are the multitude of ways that you can get information into, and out of the service. If you can imagine it, they have a way for you to access the service, from email, screenshots, pics, web, desktop, or hard editing, there is always a way to save anything.  Being accessible from pretty much anywhere lets you get acces to your notes simply as well.

I have been fortunate enough to be using for a few months and highly recommend it. I am pretty much a news junkie with 500+ RSS feeds coming into my Google Reader every day, and so a way to save information somewhere to unload my overcrowded brain does help. I find I use it in waves, where I’ll have a few days that I’m saving a ton of information to it, then not use it for a few days. Full websites I still save on my Delicious account, but Evernote is good for bits and pieces of information, or images.

There is a lot of talk about the OCR ability of images on Evernote. The service can essentially pull text out of images that you store there. Very useful if you are out and see a street sign that you want to save. Snap a pic with your camera phone and send that to Evernote. Later you can search your Evernote for a word in that sign, and it should come up. I have had mixed results with this feature, but it works about 50% of the time I would estimate. Enough to be cool, but not enough to depend on.

With their public release yesterday, they also gave the web portion of the program a much needed facelift, making it even more useful. I still wish they would implement the thumbnail views of your notes that are available on the web version into the application version, but I’m sure they’ll get around to it.

All in all, a good service and along with my Delicious account, lets me save everything I could need to recall later. Give it a try here.

If you have ever been in a teaching role, either as a parent, company trainer, or educator, then you have probably seen it before. The “click”. The moment where your student just suddenly gets it.

I was out with my daughter this yesterday evening teaching her the maneuverability section for her upcoming driving test. When you take your driving test in Ohio, you are required to maneuver through orange cones in reverse. She is a very good driver already, but in our last session at the practice area for the cones, she had a lot of difficulty with it. It was very frustrating for her, and disheartening for me to see her struggle with it. She’s a pretty much straight A student and is not used to struggling to learn something.

This time, a suggestion to rely more on her mirrors rather than turning her head so much seemed to help. First try, second try, She Got It! She did it repeatedly after that and I could feel the confidence build in her, and the pride (and fear “Oh my God, she is going to be driving!?”) build in me.

It clicked for her and now she has it down. A little more practice won’t hurt of course, but the learning process is mostly over. Finding the thing to make it click in a student is usually similar for most people you teach, but it can be unique in certain cases. Creativity and Persistence on the part of the student, and the teacher, is what brings success.

Some of what is floating in my head which can wind up here might be some other things of importance or interest to me. Expect to see posts about my family, tech and gadgets, trends, observations, light politics, tips, gaming, networking, sales and service, or just whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment.

I am a family man, first and foremost as anyone who knows me will tell you. I am a Conferencing Consultant second specializing in Audio/Web/Video Conferencing, so if you need to talk to many people, I am the guy to get you there. Other than that, I know a little bit about a lot of things and plan to jot most of it down here.

Let’s hope I keep up on it.