After acquiring the Buffalo LinkStation NAS, the next step was to move our photo's and music onto the new drive. Having wrestled with iTunes before and experienced the difficulty of rebuilding your iTunes library on a new machine, I hopped over to the iPod Lounge (www.ilounge.com) to search for a better way. Unsurprisingly, this was one of the most popular topics, and as usual iPod Lounge delivered a nice succinct rundown of the available options.More...The preferred method seemed to an iPod utility called CopyTrans, which promised to re-build your computer iTunes library from your iPod. Long and short, it worked exactly as advertised and everything was wrapped up in 20 minutes. WindSolutions also sells some other iTunes utilities, including one that can purportedly repair corrupt iPod files. I can't vouch for that one, but I can tell you I am very happy with CopyTrans. CopyTrans is available in a free trial version (only does 100 songs) or the unlimited for $20.

About 9 months ago I purchased Google Docs/Gmail Enterprise for my ___domain. The Enterprise version is the same as the free, but it allows you to use custom domains for a small yearly fee. I am convinced that this SAS model will be the predominant way companies deliver basic computing services for their employees. I am NOT convinced it will be Google hegemony, but probably either them or Microsoft. In general Microsoft doesn't "get" the web, but they do understand productivity software. Google get's the web, but there are some major holes in their product line. Most of all they need Project & Portfolio Management and collaboration SW and it needs to be integrated. It probably wouldn't hurt to either buy or CLOSELY partner with SAS vendors for common back office things like timesheet and payroll.

I don't know anyone using this tool in the business world, but it really makes for a fantastic Project Binder for a PM. One of the challenges of managing projects is the vast amount of documents and e-mails that accumulate. I have never been one of those PM's that prints out and neatly organizes everything in a 3 ring binder. Typically I just jam stuff into a folder. This approach works fine but doesn't really fit with the way I prefer to organize information. For me, the "killer app" of modern software is fast and accurate search. Some people keep "Zero Inbox" I keep zero e-mail folders and delete nothing but spam. With search and "group by" I can find things much more quickly. If only this approach could be applied to electronic docs in a multitude of formats. One Note let you do just that. Basically anything on your screen can get sent to one note. It really is a great little tool.

Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide (NYT)

Click on the image to play against the computer.

A note about google apps -