Billy Fire LLC

One of my children bought an Asus EEE 900A. Its a very attractive little machine. 9 inch screen that is surprisingly easy to view, a small but ergonomic keyboard, and, because this device uses solid state storage, it is silent and has excellent battery life.

The downside, the disk drive is only 4 Gb.

Before we bought it 4 Gb seemed small, but after all, it wasn’t that long ago that I paid about $500 for a 120Mb drive for my IBM desktop, and 4Gb still holds a lot of word processing documents. Or so we thought…

When the Asus arrived it included … Continue Reading

I think Quickbooks is a great program. I use Quickbooks 2006 and I have resisted upgrading to a later version because it does all I need, fairly well.

One of the features I do not like is the email invoice function. Instead of being able to send an emailed invoice directly, you have to send it via a Quickbooks server. But there is no real need for it. If you connect to the Internet using an ISP then invoice emails could be sent in exactly the same way as any other email.

The real reason for this feature, of course, is that … Continue Reading

I just set up an account with BudURL. Like some similar services it takes a long URL and shortens it.

The twist with BudURL is that is includes analytics behind each link that you create. So, for example, you could include a BudURL link in a Twitter Tweet and then see analytics on any clicks on that link.

I will post more when I have examples of the analytics.

BudURL includes free and paid services based on the number of links you create.

Its nearly Christmas and last night I created my Christmas card address labels, a task I do not overly like.

I am a big fan of OpenOffice, it does everything that I need, everything that MS Office does that is of any importance and sometimes more, for example you have a huge amount of flexibility in which file types it can open and edit. You can also create PDFs directly from OpenOffice.

One thing that I don’t think is overly easy is creating address labels – especially ones that do not include blank lines (if a field in a database is empty, … Continue Reading