Dopp Juice Archive

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked someone to resize an image and heard the response, “How?” The quick answer is “Use Photoshop,” but not everyone has a $600 budget for image editing (or the time to learn such a complex program!). Add in the fact that many people work on public computers and various platforms, and even the most basic software is hard to rely on.Let’s face it: sometimes it’s hard to find a decent way to fix an image quickly. Enter CreatingOnline.com. They took a common problem and found a way to offer a free solution. Their Online Image Editor makes it easy to upload any picture, resize it, tweak the colors, crop it, and add text. All within your browser. And it works with Firefox!If I sound overjoyed, it’s because I am. This makes my work 100 times easier. Now I can ask someone to resize an image, send them the link, and trust that they’ll be able to handle it. And I know I’ll be using it too, while floating between public computers on campus. I do have a few gripes. It’s not flawless. The “add clipart” function, while useful, doesn’t allow me to resize the clipart images to make them fit the composition. Dragging objects across the screen, while impressive for a browser application, doesn’t work very smoothly or quickly. But it’s free. It crops and resizes from the web. Use it for that, and forget the fancy clipart. It does its job well.

Somewhere near the top of my list-of-things-to-do-this-year is getting organized (at least, I think it’s near the top, but I forget where I put that list…). Not just pens-in-a-cup organized, but actual on-the-ball, able-to-size-up-life organized. That’s why I followed a link to the “free” D*I*Y Planner page. It claimed flexibility and customization. I imagined it would set me up with a system I could just print out, patch together, and throw in my bag. But no, its first step is to buy a planner. A real planner. And that’s where all my troubles began in the first place…Reasons I dislike off-the-shelf planners:

• They’re expensive. If I buy cheap, they will fall apart or annoy me for some other reason.
• They’re always customized for the wrong person: not me. Granted, this is what D*I*Y Planner claims to fix, and they seem to do a pretty good job at it. But if I’m going to spend that much money on a real planner in the first place, I’d like it to work with me without requiring a complete makeover.
• They’re either too big to carry around, or too small to hold what I need. I have not yet found an in-between.
• The calendar pages have a similar problem. The spreads never give enough space for daily lists and task blocks, unless I go day-by-day, in which case I can’t view my whole week at once (and I’m now carrying too many pages around).
• The brands tend to have proprietary page sizes and hole placements, so you can’t mix and match.

The likely solution to all this would be to just buy a PDA, but I’m not convinced it will fix my organizational crisis. For one, they’re even more expensive. Second, I don’t trust hard drives with important information. They tend to crash. Third, I’m at a computer all day long anyway — it’s nice to take a break and look at real paper. The real solution is time and money — money for a decent planner and time to customize it. In fact, the solution to everything is time and money. Interestingly, these are two things I lack right now.

Have you checked out Seth Godin yet? He’s up there among my favorite public figures. He writes a lot, theorizes a lot, and tells us all how to market more effectively. “Knock Knock” is Seth’s new free ebook. I’m a big fan of free things in general, but this one is really worth our time. He talks about websites — any website — and how to get what you want from it more effectively. It’s not just for web developers. Website owners will learn a lot, too. You can download the ebook here from me. If you want more, go visit Seth’s Site. Click his head to read his blog. It’s inspiring.