It used to be you had to pay to get your credit report, then federal law required the credit agencies to provide us with one free credit report each year. This was a huge step forwards but the interface was and still is tremendously clunky and once you’ve viewed it once – not the easiest to get back to. You can still get those official free credit reports from each of the three credit reporting agencies here.

Thankfully, newer and easier ways to gather your credit reports are now becoming available. I want to talk about two of these – Credit Karma and Quizzle.

Credit Karma offers you a free credit score pulled from TransUnion. It appears you can re-pull your score as often as you like. In addition to giving you visibility into your score and report, Credit Karma compares your score against other Credit Karma users, provides you with a Credit Simulator to see how various actions would positively or negatively affect your score, and provides customized offers for credit cards, auto insurance, home mortgages, etc. that could potentially lower your expenses. Credit Karma is able to provide the service for free by offering these sorts of targeted sponsor offers.

Quizzle is part of the larger conglomerate, Quicken Loans. Quizzle pulls your credit score/report from Experian. Unlike Credit Karma, you can’t repull your report any time you like for free – only once every six months – but hey, that’s still pretty good, right? Quizzle also offers a number of free features similar to those found in Credit Karma. Credit Karma also has some premium features you can purchase – but aren’t obliged to – such as basic and advanced credit monitoring on a more frequent basis. The prices aren’t bad – working up to around $8/mo.

Between these two services you can get two out of three credit reports for free. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of a similar service that offers credit pulls from Equifax. If anyone is aware of such a service – I’d love to hear about it.

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I am continuously encouraging individuals and businesses to make backups of their systems. I am continually shocked by the number of individuals who take no steps to protect their data against a catastrophic failure and repeatedly see clients who ask, “So…can you get my documents off this computer?” Far too often I have to tell them that I cannot, that it might be possible to if the drives are sent to a data specialist – but the cost will be steep and even then the results not assured.

There is no reason for anyone to be without a backup of their sensitive and important data. In the past this was a time consuming and costly endeavor – now it is simple and inexpensive. One service (amongst many) that can assist in this area is SugarSync. SugarSync provides you with 2 GB of free storage – no strings attached. This is enough to cover your critical documents – but won’t be enough for those thousands of pictures you’ve taken with your digital camera. But for $5 a month you can get yourself 30 GB (this is what I have) – which should be enough for most enthusiasts – though probably not enough for those with large music collections (they have even larger subscriptions for you – still at reasonable prices).

Let me highlight just a few of the reasons I love SugarSync:

• Versioning: SugarSync backs up your files – but what happens if you have a Word document and you make an edit to it and then save it? Does your old file get overwritten on SugarSync? No! SugarSync keeps the old version and the new version – and allows you to roll back to older versions. This is a huge feature – extremely useful.
• Syncing: SugarSync allows you to install the client on multiple computers/devices that then synchronize files between the systems – in my case this includes my home laptop, home desktop, and work desktop. Now you can access your files from anywhere – make edits from anywhere – and know you are always using the latest copy of your file.
• Simple Web-Based Editing: You can access your files via a web browser on any computer and SugarSync automatically handles syncing the changes back to SugarSync – no need to download the file, open the file, save the file, upload the file – now SugarSync compresses all of these steps into a smooth operation.
• Sharing: You can share your files with others. This is a great feature – and can be done on a strictly controlled basis so only those you want to can access your files.
• Platforms: SugarSync supports not only Windows but Mac and Linux. Further SugarSync provides extensive mobile device support including the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry!

That said – I do have a complaint (and will add more as they arise):

• I use SugarSync for my personal files but also for my church. Unfortunately, I cannot tell my SugarSync to sync files from my church account. I have to use the web-based interface. This is a significant nuisance and there is no reason I shouldn’t be able to download the church files as long as I authenticate. This has been a long-standing issue and SugarSync has done little to resolve it.

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I’ve been using Zakta for several months now as my primary search engine – and it is about time for me to spread the word through this blog. Google is now my secondary search engine – yes, I still use it, but 95% of my queries are resolved by Zakta.

Why utilize Zakta? Social Search. Google created SearchWiki which could have knocked the social search competition out of the market – but then they abandoned this important project. Zakta is a better, older, more mature engine with features similar to and exceeding SearchWiki.

Here are the killer points for using Zakta as your primary engine:

• The results displayed to you are sorted not only by algorithmic methods but also by what others like you think about these results. Thus, results which might be on the tenth page of Google but really are the best result will show up on the first page of Zakta.
• You can remove and reorganize results and when you come back to that query they remain in the same order. This allows you to create a customized resource showing you the pages you like best for a specific topic.
• Zakta oftentimes offers a “reference” site for a query. This is a encyclopediac source (e.g. Wikipedia) that is consider to provide generally reliable and objective information on a topic.
• Zakta oftentimes offers a best bet for a search result – this is when they feel confident that your query’s answer will be found on a specific site – saving you from sorting through the results yourself.

Here are the big areas I think Zakta needs to improve in:

• They include foreign language results in their results sometimes, especially when it is a more refined query. They need to include primary language results only unless an option is enabled to allow for foreign language results. I’m sorry, I can’t read Chinese – that link won’t help me…and I’m sure my Chinese (Spanish, French, Ethiopian, etc.) compatriots suffer the same frustration when results appear in English (if they don’t know English – I am always amazed and impressed by so many who speak two to four different languages!).
• If you eliminate a result from a search query it disappears but there is no way to get it back. There needs to be a trash bin for restoring queries.
• Sometimes, even if you provide quotation marks, Zakta seems to include results where the words aren’t together – or where it is entirely unapparent why the result is in any way related to the query. I should not that as someone who works in IT and a wannabe polymath, I somewhat regularly receive no results pages from Google – so this is not something most users will experience – I seem to always need or want to find arcane information.
• Zakta allows you to search the other major search engines right through their site – unfortunately they don’t provide a way to say “include this result in my Zakta results” or “allow me to edit this result” – it needs to be a seamless Zakta interface no matter what search engine I am using. This will likely occur through a browser add-on – they have one currently but it doesn’t have this feature.

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iChange, like so many other sites, offers guidance on losing weight and eating well…but it goes so far beyond what other sites are currently offering with a number of unique features. Let me just highlight a few:

• When you register with iChange you can choose a personal nutritionist to assist you. Right now this is either Diana Young (registered dietitian, specializes in ADA methods, served as Chief Clinical Dietitian at two major hospitals) and Linda Miner (registered nutritional counselor, specializes in metabolic typing, holistic and alternative medicine approach). These folks are really available to you – ready to answer questions and give you counsel on how to progress towards better health.
• iChange takes a really holistic approach. Many sites focus on weight loss, mood monitoring, nutritional diets, and so on – but very few talk a full-fledged and well-rounded approach. iChange offers nutritional/meals modeling, weight loss / exercise, fluids, calorie, mood, energy, sleep and stress monitoring.
• They offer a simple checklist that only has three items on it at a time that encourage you to take small steps towards increasing your health. As you finish a step you are given another task. You can bang these out or take your time.
• There is an incentive system – its minor (e.g. web-based “awards”) – but still pretty cool. We all like “earning” awards or achieving accomplishments (why else do so many people play farmville)?
• The community is proactive in reaching out. Within hours of registering I received a contact from another member (a SuperCharger) who asked how I was, introduced herself, let me know how she’d successfully used iChange, and generally provided encouragement to continue on. This is unlike other communities for health I’ve been involved in, where there isn’t that sort of proactive effort to reach out to new members.

You might think a site like this would cost something – many other health sites with more limited functionality do – or have a freemium model. But iChange is entirely free.

So, my advice – go register. Give it a try. It takes ten minutes to get yourself through the initial setup and its very intuitive. I think you’ll find it well worth your time.

In closing, I’d like to make a list of some enhancements I’d like to see in iChange. While these are enhancements that should be implemented – I’ll reiterate again that iChange is far ahead of any competitors I’ve seen thus far.

• The ability to monitor medication intake.
• Eventually, the site will need a profit model – they have a few links to Amazon associate products tucked away, but this really should be tightly integrated into the system.
• There is a nice row of boxes along the top with checkboxes that show you your progress in various areas, unfortunately they aren’t clickable!
• The iChange site is a bit slow sometimes. Need to ramp up the server power.
• Links in emails to attached documents take you to the main iChange page – not very helpful.
• When you download a document, its name is just a string of random letters and numbers, it’d be nice if the PDFs had names reflecting their purpose. Of course, I can rename them, but still…
• Create a Facebook app. – this will be a huge marketing item. It will provide individuals who view an iChange profile with a quick and convincing advertisement to use the program – e.g. when they see we’ve lost ten lbs using the service and so on.
• Eventually, it’d be pretty cool to see it allow us to “schedule” things we should be doing on a semi-regular basis – e.g. do we need to make an appointment with the dentist, doctor, or optomologist? I’d like to see this expanded to include more general task management – I used to use a service (whose name I can’t remember and has since closed) that reminded me of things I needed to do around the house and with my automobile – allowing me to take better care of my house and belonging – things like changing furnace filters, checking batteries in smoke alarms, and taking the car in for inspection/maintenance.
• I’ll add more as I think of them.

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• Fast.
• Reliable.
• Lists/Categories.
• Facebook Integration.
• Amazon Associates Integration.
• Ratings/Reviews.
• Recommendations.
• Under Ongoing Development.

I’m willing to compromise on some of these, but you get the idea. I’ve begun doing a review and here are my thoughts thus far:

• LibraryThing – Only supports two hundred books in a free account, then $25/lifetime membership. I’m more than willing to pay for something good enough…but two hundred books doesn’t begin to handle the collection I just exported from Visual Bookshelf (around 1700)…so, unfortunately, I’m not going to spend time on LibraryThing…I’m unwilling to pay for it unless I know I’ll use it.
• Goodreads – User interface is fairly nice. I like the “test” to see what kinds of books I like from the start. I’m not happy that there doesn’t seem to be an option like VB has “Not Interested” – one can rate or add to bookshelf.
  • Does the whole “reload entire page when you delete a page” rather than being AJAXian.
  • When you click “edit” to choose what “shelf” you want to place a book on it doesn’t auto-close the overlay window when you choose a new shelf.
  • You can’t mass edit the books (e.g. there is no checkbox to choose multiple books and delete them or to change their status from read to to-read).
• Shelfari – Nice user interface, but not happy that they want me to change my csv into a tab-delimited in order to import my VB library.
• weRead – A slightly smaller number of my “friends” on Facebook utilize this application than VB.

In case LivingSocial cares, here are the issues that have been driving me away from them:

• The application is really, really slow and it doesn’t use AJAX on things like removing books – meaning there is a complete page reload each book removal…way too much wasted time.
• The application lacks an easy way to operate on a large number of books at one time.
• Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of broken images instead of book covers when using Visual Bookshelf.
• Visual Bookshelf lacks full exporting capabilities – for example, one’s rating/reviews don’t get exported in the CSV.
• It isn’t easy to sort my books by one’s I’ve read versus want to read, one’s I own versus want, etc.

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It is missing one feature (IMHO). For me, I have certain availability ranges. For example, I may be available for breakfast, lunch, or dinner – and I might be available to do these between 7-9 a.m., 11 a.m. -2 p.m., and so on – but I can only realistically do one of these for each segment. If I have a lunch from 11-12 on Tuesday I cannot also have a lunch from 12-1 or 1-2. It’d be nice if Tungle allowed me to specify within a range of time how much of that time can be utilized for meetings.

I imagine I am not the only one for whom this would be useful. In my particular instance I am employed full-time and I would use Tungle to handle meetings associated with my position as elder / youth minister at my local church. I have some flexibility in when I take a break, but can’t take that break for extended periods of time – since I have other responsibilities. It would also seem handy for counselors – who optimally should schedule only a certain number of clients each day even if they have additional time slots open – this way ensuring that they have time for paperwork and case review.

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• Obout – Offers a large variety of controls, several for free. They also offer free licenses to students. A few of their controls are: Grid, TreeView, HTML Editor, Spell Checker, Calendar, Easy Menu, AJAX Page, and Splitter.
• ComponentArt – Offers a large variety of controls for ASP.NET AJAX, MVC, Silverlight, WPF, etc. A few of their controls are: Calendar, Chart, Editor, DataGrid, Snap, and Splitter.
• Karamasoft – Offers a large variety of controls for ASP.NET including UltimateAJAX, UltimateCalendar, UltimateEditor, UltimateEmail, and UltimateTabstrip.
• Telerik – A huge variety of controls for ASP.NET AJAX, MVC, Silverlight, WinForms, and WPF. Also have a number of other productivity tools for development. Some of their controls include Calendar, Captcha, Compression, Editor, FileExplorer, Grid, SkinManager, and StyleSheetManager.
• DevExpress – Offers a set of sixty controls for free. Has a large variety of premium controls available for ASP.NET, WinForms, WPF, and Silverlight. Some of their controls include Charting, Grid, Data Editors, Calendar / Scheduler, Gauges / Dashboards, and Utility Components.
• ComponentOne – Large variety of controls and tools. Includes calendar, expander, formdecorator, gridview, headercontent, splitter, superpanel, and tooltip amongst others.
• (Added: 5/21/10) Infragistics – Large variety of controls.
• (Added: 5/21/10) GrapeCity.

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If you do sign up – say hi – I’m davemackey on stackoverflow.

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These Gadgets can be used anywhere on the web, in Google Desktop, in Google Docs, and on one’s Google iTalk pages. There is a huge gallery of Google Gadgets here(2). I browsed over tonight looking for some functionality to add to a spreadsheet (didn’t find it). Imagine my surprise as browsing through the directory I selected New and was greeted by a score of pornographic images.

Had I accidentally clicked on another directory? Nope, it was New. Was it possible that someone had just spammed the first page? Nope, the second and third pages revealed similarly disturbing images.

Some may think I’m simply overreacting. I’ve seen a Sports Illustrated cover and am screaming bloody murder. This is not the case. I’ve become accustomed to flipping past trashy apps in Google Android Market(3)…this is much worse. I’m talking overtly sexually explicit imagery.

I’m sorry to Google for posting this as a blog post – but I know that the fastest way to get a reaction on this topic is in this manner. Google, “Do No Evil” – a company which has set high standards in many arenas – needs to step up in this one. I don’t understand how an oversight like this has occurred – but it must be stopped immediately. I know Google can do it – I believe in them. Join me in calling upon Google to act in this manner by sharing this information (or a link to this post) with friends.

Whatever your position on pornography, I hope you can support the need for guarding our children against exposure to explicit images. Google SafeSearch does a fairly good job protecting our children against accidentally stumbling across pornographic materials – why is Google Gadgets not undergoing the same sort of filtering? Is it not as readily available to children? In fact, one does not have to search for the wrong words to turn up explicit materials – simply click “New” and you’ll be overwhelmed with the images.

Struggling with Pornography?

I’m concerned that some who read this post may be struggling with pornography or other sexual addictions and that this post could serve as a stumbling block for them (or you). If this is the case, I want to point you towards a couple resources that may help:

• XXXChurch – “XXXchurch is designed to bring awareness, openness and accountability to those affected by pornography. We are an online community that tours the world speaking at colleges, churches and community centers. XXXchurch.com exists to help those who are in over their heads with pornography, both consumers and those in the industry.”
• Porn Again Christian – A free eBook on pornography and masturbation by Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church.

Continue to fight the good fight.

Footnotes:
(1)http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/
(2)Working with teenagers I know that the compulsion to look at pornographic images is oftentimes irresistibly strong. Knowing that some teenagers might click through if a link was present, I have decided not to post the link. Anyone who knows how to perform a web search can easily get to the Google Gadgets page – I just don’t want to facilitate such action by those who are already struggling to resist temptation.
(3)Not that the apps in Google Android Market are acceptable either – especially b/c of their accessibility to young children.

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