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Since I’m moving on from my current job at Ann Taylor, I thought I would share an essay I wrote for them comparing performance and quality in a help desk environment. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on this when I wrote it so I was about 80% happy with how it came out. You’ll notice near the end, it’s not a tight as it should be. Maybe one day I’ll go back and finish it up the way I wanted but for now here.

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Jott is one of my favorite new services this year. Dial a 1-800 number, say who I want to Jott to and speak. In a few minutes my voice is translated into any number of web services Jott supports. Today they added support for Google Calendar so now I can create appointments when I’m on the run by just dialing a number and speaking. Saying “Steve Job’s Macworld Keynote at 9 am on January 15th” is a lot easier than logging into Google Calendar and typing that all out on my iPhone. Thanks to Jott I can now blog, tweet, add a todo and create an appointment without typing a word. Best of all Jott is free.

Digital comic files come in two flavors, CBZ and CBR. They are just renamed ZIP and RAR files containing JPG files. While Quicklook can look at JPG files, it cannot look into a compressed file for them. Over on the arstechnica forums, a user named gheritt has whipped up a Quicklook plugin that allows you to view CBZ files. It displays them inline similar to a PDF file. Only CBZ files work right now. There is no built-in support for RAR compression in OS X 10.5 so CBR files will not work, yet.

Download the file directly from here and install into /Library/Quicklook.

I few weeks ago I discovered Jott, which I found to be amazing convenient when on the run. While it was good for sending me reminders and the occasional Tweet, the one thing I found myself wanting is a way to Jott to my todo list. My todo list of choice just happens to be Remember The Milk. I tried to hack a Jott to RTM using my RTM email but that was a failure. So I sent an email to Jott a few weeks ago and lo and behold, they added a Jott Link for Remember the Milk today. It uses the RTM API so you can select where your tasks are saved. Right now it supports the task name, when it’s due and what it’s tagged with. If your a Remember the Milk user, the ability to call in your tasks epic.

One of my favorite features in iPhoto is its ability to compare changes you’ve made to the original with the press of a button. In previous versions, it was assigned to the CTRL key. With iPhoto ‘08, this no longer works. For days I was hating the new iPhoto because it seemed they removed this feature. After a little digging around, I found that Apple has not removed the feature but just moved it to the SHIFT key. I’ve actually found this to be a welcome change as I check against the original a lot and the SHIFT key is much easier to locate and press.

The other area in my life thats getting a makeover this month is my finances. Starting this month I’ve developed a budget and a course of action for my debt. I’ve been using wesebe.com to keep track of my money almost daily. Wesebe hasn’t been perfect but its been what I need for now. Hopefully as the site matures, new features and bug fixes will be added. Only thing I’d really like to see is automatic updates of my accounts instead of the chore of downloading each statement then uploading them.

One of the first things I did this month was to give myself an “allowance”. I tend to get carried away with purchases and I’m a sucker for impulse buys so instead of doing the “envelope” method, I went with a more forceful approach.

I’ve given myself $100 allowance a week to live on. On Friday when my paycheck gets direct deposited, I transfer $100 to my Paypal account right away. I only carry my PayPal debit card with me instead of my bank’s debit card. Actually I have my bank card stashed away so its hard to get at. The $100 has to keep my cars gas tank filled, keep me feed and any purchases I’d like to make for myself during the week. Another advantage for me is that it takes 3-4 days to transfer money into my PayPal account from my bank. This curbs the thought of just transferring money onto my card if I want to make a purchase and don’t have enough in my PayPal account at the time.

Due to my work schedule, I tend to eat out ALOT. This was a big money hole for me that I’m trying to fix. Due to my “allowance” I have to be careful when and if I eat out now. If i want to pick up the newest game, comics or DVD this week, I’m going to have to pass when the guys order a pizza at work. To get me eating better, I allow myself to use my bank card if I actually go shopping at a store. This gives me incentive to make a shopping list and try and find the best deals so I don’t have to dip into my allowance.

The second thing I did was to setup an ING Direct Savings account. For the past few months I’m been trying to put money into a savings account at my bank. Problem with that is I always saw what I had in savings which gave me a false outlook on my money situation. I could always move money out of my savings account immediately if I needed extra money. With ING the money is deduced automatically and it goes into a different savings account that I don’t ever have to look at. Plus it offers 4.5% interest. My plan is to forget about that savings account and just let it keep growing and adding interest.

I got a lot of financially rebuilding to do but these are just the first few steps I’m taking. Next month I plan on calling all my creditors and get a “state of the union” from them so I can devise a debt reduction plan.

Last month I started cleaning up my RSS feeds in the hope of making them less of a chore. Well, its been one month since then and I have deleted 72 feeds that have saved me 10,000 articles a month. This has helped me keep my RSS feeds manageable and I no longer feel like I’m a slave to Google Reader.

One of the biggest things I did was remove digg from my RSS reader. Why? Well first off it was my highest traffic feed, so deleting it helped save me hours a day and 2nd, I also go to digg.com anyways to digg articles. There was no real reason to have it in my RSS reader. So now what I do is once a day goto digg.com and look through the last few pages digging and reading as I go.

I can still trim a little more in the way of feeds but for now I’m a lot more productive during the day as I’m not tied to my RSS reader all the time. If I delete my new top traffic feed, techbargians.com, I can save another 2500 articles a month and probably some money too since I won’t see all the great bargains that I “must” have.