Google Keg Party

Google has so many excellent utilities and gadgets on their site that it’s hard to narrow down which ones to highlight but I’ve chose a couple of my favorites here. I hope to revisit other nifty applications things in the future. One of the handiest is their online calendar. This calendar allows your co-workers, family, and friends to see your calendar and you can view schedules that others have shared with you. Once configured, you can view the calendar simply by logging into your free Google account from any internet-connected device including mobile phones. Mobile phone users can set up customizable reminders that will send a timely reminder in the form of text message or email so that you will never forget another event.

Offices or people who work in groups will find this sharable calendar very valuable to keep track of who’s doing what where. It can also be used to organize group events such as keg parties or team sports I do not recommend mixing the two.

With Google’s “Calendar Sych” application, mobile professionals can synchronize the calendar between Microsoft Outlook’s calendar and the calendar built into a smart phone. When properly installed, you can enter a calendar event into your phone, or Outlook or Google calendar and the event will be automatically synchronized between all three calendars giving you access to your updated calendar no matter where you are.

I use this service to synchronize my iPhone calendar, home calendar and office calendar so that no matter where I am I can input an event and view it at any location.

Shutterbugs will love Google’s Picasa application. This free application provides basic photo-editing tasks and will scan your computer for all your pictures and organize them for you. Once installed, you can use Picasa to backup all your pictures directly to Google’s website. Once they are uploaded to Google, you can easily share the pictures and galleries with friends and family.

A side benefit of this ability is that you will always have a backup of all your pictures in case your computer bites the dust. One drawback here is that Picasa only allows a maximum of 1GB of free storage space. If you want more, you have to pay. Google recently partnered with a company called Eye-Fi that simplifies uploading pictures to you computer and Picassa. When you purchase 200GB of online storage from Google, they will send you this cool little wireless device that fits in the SD card slot of your camera. The card provides 2, 4 or 8GB of temporary storage space for pictures. The cool thing about this card is that it automatically uploads all your camera’s pictures to your computer or Picasa (or both) whenever you are within range of your home’s wireless router. This makes transferring pictures from your camera to your home computer as easy as turning the camera on. The card is available for about $50.00 retail of you can get a free one by purchasing 200GB of online storage from Google for $50.00.

Share Your Life

Other than good beer, the other thing I need most in my life is organization. One look at my office desk will tell anyone that I am a hopeless jumble of ideas, plans and good intentions in various states of completion. I used to depend on my wife to tell me exactly when and where I needed to be. She was very reliable but I decided I needed something that would better fit in my pocket and that has a mute button. So I replaced her with an iPhone.
My iPhone reminds me when to take my medicine, when to leave for the next soccer game and reminds me of birthdays and anniversaries as long as I remember to enter them into the thing. A problem that I used to have is that I had a calendar on my home computer and a calendar on my office computer and one on my iPhone that did not “talk” to each other. If I needed one event to appear in all my calendars, I needed to actually remember to enter it into each calendar separately. That presents a problem for people like me who use calendars because they can’t remember stuff.

Now, with the advent of Google Calendar Synch, I can enter my event in either my home, office or iPhone calendar and it will automatically synchronize to all my other computers.
The set-up for this is so easy anyone can install it. Simply go to www.Google.com and sign up for a free Google account. The Google account gives you a free email address along with the whole bunch of other nifty online tools such as a word processor, spreadsheet and dozens of other neat applications. The account also comes with an on-line calendar that will function as your “home base” for calendar synchronization.

The next step is to download Google’s free “Calendar Sync” program onto your home, office and iPhone/Blackberry. Once installed on your office computer, the software will copy all your events in your Outlook calendar and synchronize them with your on-line Google calendar. When you get home, sign into your Google account again and install the Calendar Synch software on your home computer. It will then synchronize the calendar on your home computer with the Google calendar and, subsequently, your office computer.

The last step is to install the same software on your Blackberry or iPhone. Once you do that, anything you enter in your Blackberry/iPhone will automatically enter themselves in all your other calendars in real-time instead of having to manually synch them daily.

You can also share your Google calendar with anyone else such as office personnel and friends or use it to manage your sports team schedule. At my office, each of my technicians have their own Google calendar. They share their calendar with me so that on the off chance I need to know where they have been for the past few days; I can simply pull up my Google calendar to check their schedules.