Going Paperless and Digitizing Documents that Take up Space

I have decided I needed a side project along side my bedroom artwork project, so I decided I will get organized. I will use my new Neat Receipts for Mac by Neat Co. to scan all our documents and make them easy to search through and eventually export to our gmail account so we can view the database from anywhere!


I spent 6 hours yesterday scanning and getting to know how I want to use this software! But once I got on a roll there was no stopping me! I got all our taxes and related items from 2007 to 2009 imputed and organized. The software is easy to use and it appears from online comments that they have made updates to fix issues.


I had no clue anyone else was as interested in this until my post on facebook yesterday which triggered my post today...

mrs. onion: Just got a neat receipt scanner for mac and am loving it! Think I am going to sit on the deck all day and scan our precious documents, gotta love going digital. After everything is in and organized we can upload it to google docs so when we are at work we can still search and view our documents that there is no way we would find even if we were at home!
caller number 1: Is it just for receipts? One of the best purchases I made recently was a business card scanner. I got rid of about 300-400 cards lying around my office in a matter of hours.
mrs. onion: No it recognizes business cards, and anything smaller than 8.5 width or smaller! It is super rad! I made a folder called taxes and I scanned all our forms, w2s and the h&r blocks business card! So u have 3 categories contact, receipt and document, you can choose what field u want and don't want. It is searchable and color coded to the type of category!
caller number 1: Interesting. BTW, do you really get that many paper receipts? Seems like most billing companies are going paperless these days.
mrs. onion: I am using it mostly for our house documents, taxes, car title that sort of thing, stuff that if the house burned down we may need! Most if not all our billing is done paperless and automatically paid out which is super nice! I think we write 4 checks a year and that is to the water company!
caller number 2: I still haven't figured out how this darn thing downloads to Quicken without having to save a file as an intermediate step. If you figure that one out, please let me know. Otherwise I pretty much agree with you.
mrs. onion: it pretty much scans the document and allows you to pull info from it to populate fields that then can be exported out various ways

Interesting Phone Ap's

There are some really interesting phone aps out there right now. There is this really neat ap for the iphone for any musician out there! It plays the song while the sheet music is scrolling to show you where you are in the score. If only they had had that when I was a kid I would have been able to learn so many more songs. To check out the ap go here.

For other musicians tools go here.

Philly for a week!

The first week of August I had the luxury of going to Philly with my husband as he had business there for the week. He worked long hours as I strolled all over Philly. We stayed near Love Park where I spent many hours reading the in the hot hot sun. The restaurants were fabulous and very well priced compared to Boston. I had been to Philly and had the 10 cent tour from my in laws as they grew up there.

The one afternoon that my husband had off we spent walking around, eating and visiting the penitentiary. This place was amazing and also had a local artist who did a cat installation throughout the prison. To wrap up our trip we went to go visit his grandfather who is doing remarkably well for his age and still remembers Latin where he learned as an alter boy in the catholic church.

Daily Dose of Inspiration-East Coast Style Part 2

Debonair Mag is a really interesting site that has found a niche with men's fashion and technology and has so far has a nice site and hopefully more content to come.

Bill Mahoney of Willy the Jackass has a great site with food pictures gallour but of course I am biased he is my husband and I have actually eaten most of the food you see there and it is damn good.

Maryann Devine from smArts has a niche blog on marketing the arts that has some great information.

Daily Dose of Inspiration

Today I used Friend or Follow and it is a handy twitter tool that allows you to see who you are following and who is following you. I thought this would give me an opportunity to feature some of the people that I follow but that don't follow me.
Jeff Dempsey has a great blog on office pranks that are very original and creative so if you are in the mood for some mischief check him out.
Aaron Irizarry has a great blog or vlog that he posts very frequently and has great info and news in design.
Antonio Carusone is an amazing designer with some great buys of his typographical work.
Angela Moore has some great info on SEO info and link building strategies.
Tomorrow I will use Friends or Follow to share some of my followers.

Polka Dot Backgrounds-Free

Are you looking for polka background? Maybe you want to spruce up your My Space page? Well here are a bunch of links for you to take a look at

My Cute Graphics

Brilliant Backgrounds

Skeedio

Polyvore

Ms Premade

Free Code Source

Rad Profile


Hope you enjoy the Polka Dot Backgrounds!

10 Fantastically Green Sites

Here are a few green oriented sites that I think are worth checking out, in no particular order...



Modern Eco Homes has everything you could ever want for the home and the best part is they feature eco deals of the day.


Mod Green Pod is a green home store offering 100% organic cotton.



Eco Geek has the best information on everything green relating to technology there is even a story on an air quality index reading wrist monitor.


Green Upgrader has information on how easy it is to live a green lifestyle.


The Green Office which is exactly as it sounds allows us to have an easy way of accessing eco friendly furniture and supplies for the office.

Groovy Green has the most random cool green stories out there, if you are looking for something new and interesting to read about, this is where it's at.


Home & Planet has some of the neatest recycled home accessories, made out of some really interesting materials.


Wedvert provides solutions for greener weddings and other big events in a very elegant manner and great at keeping the green in your pocket.


Ideal Bite is an easy guide to almost everything green from clothing to transportation and reads easily, always a bonus.


Eco Street is the place to get your eco news and see what is going on in the world of greenery from eating green to green technology.

Daily Dose of Inspiration

Xavier Encinas has a great blog named Swiss Legacy a blog focused on typography, graphic design and inspirational matters.

This Ain't No Disco is a great inspirational blog for anyone interested in design.

Twitter's New Search Might Just Change Everything

Big changes are in the works for Twitter and their realtime search features, says new Twitter VP of Operations Santosh Jayaram, changes that may spell the end of the status quo both for the microblogging platform in particular and the entire concept of organic searching in general.

Jayaram, who previously worked on Google's search quality team, spoke two weeks ago at a TIEcon 2009 preview conference about the changes Twitter is planning to implement to their search features, providing attendees with a compelling look at how the microblogging platform may rise up to challenge even Google in terms of indexing Web 2.0 content.

The most major change Jayaram spoke about concerns how Twitter indexes content. Until now, Twitter's realtime search feature has been limited to Tweets themselves; the content of each Tweet is indexed and searchable through Twitter's search engine. That, Jayaram says, is going to change - at an unspecified point in the near future, Twitter will begin crawling and indexing content linked from Tweets, not just the tweets themselves anymore.

Look out, Google - Twitter's got your number. The change to Twitter's search feature is huge, and it all boils down to analytical data, and the immense value that such information carries with it. Twitter's ability to track realtime trends already puts Google's to shame - and taking that ability off the twitter.com domain means that the microblogging platform is poised to become the internet's premiere Web 2.0 content index. Even the brief delay of a few hours in Google's search engine results represents eons in the hyperspeed context of the modern internet. Twitter can fill in that gap, and Jayaram provided us with some juicy details about how they're going to be doing that.

One of the ways that Twitter is going to increase the relevancy of its search engine is by introducing a Twitter "reputation" ranking system, says Jayaram. Currently, when searching a popular trending topic, or clicking its link on the Twitter sidebar, users are usually overwhelmed with a wealth of "hollow content" like retweets, comments, and so on. Twitter's reputation ranking system will change that by providing users with an authoritative view of trending topics and keywords on Twitter, instead of just flinging users into a chronological timeline.

That change alone will improve Twitter's search by leaps and bounds. I can't wait to find out more about when we can expect to see these changes implemented, and how Twitter plans to show users the data that it collects about off-site content.

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Crookers the ultimate musical inspiration

The Crookers are the ultimate duo from Italy spinning the best of records to groove out and do some design. I found this You Tube video called Cooking with Crookers. This was found while looking for inspiration for my husbands new cooking blog that I am trying to come up with a rad identity for. So please go check them out you won't regret it.

Daily Dose of Inspiration

I was just over at Ideas on Ideas and read this post and it is so so true.

Tutorial Blog is just that, you can find anything for mac, design, technology and advertising that you could ever want.

Steampunk-Game

Steampunk is a fantasy that is set in neo-victorian times and portrays how life would have progressed we had never moved passed steam. I love the dress especially but have found that the books that I like most are very steampunk. There is some great jewelry on etsy just put in steampunk in the search, alot of clocks and their parts are used to make different art as well.

I find that I am attrached to the gear like aspects as well as airships. I found this game Storm Winds and thought I would share it with you. It is a shooter game that you build up your weapons agains different armies that fly in. The artwork is definately a thumbs up.

Daily Dose of Inspiration

Ads of the World great for checking out new ideas and interesting concept, the blog is very informative and great content.

Brian Hoff over at the design cubicle rocks out some great posts a must for daily reading.

Daily Dose of Inspiration-the I've been slackin' edition

So since I have been slackin' (and I have been because I have needed to get my bookmarks organized) I decided to beef up today's Daily dose of Inspiration.

Street Attack has a very energizing, inspiring blog that taps into various kinds of media and really gets you pumped.

Designers Who Blog ummmm who doesn't love it!

Emigre Fonts, I have always been a fan of Elliott Peter Earls great design examples.

A ridiculous amount of info at Logo Design Love.

Because you it's not always smooth sailing The Graphic Mac.

Daily Dose of Inspiration

Over the years I have collected a lot of bookmarks of different designers, resources, technology and I frequent them at least monthly, if not weekly and some daily. So I thought I would start sharing these blogs with all of you out there and my goal is to share daily. I am sure there will be some that you have heard of and others you haven't. Some of these are new to me as I ventured into the twitter world and found like minded individuals. I am racking my brain as to whom I have followed the longest and I can't remember so here are a few that I have followed the longest.

CreativeTech Types-a great resource for any designer, mac owner or tech nerd.
Creative Bits-this blog is great because you can post things and get feedback and they have a variety of articles regarding design and what is going on in the design world.

I will continue to roll these out and add them to blogroll as I write about them.

Now Better Tasting

I was out and about yesterday and ran into the above picture. What I want to know is who advertises something as "Now Better Tasting"? What did it taste like before? I am sure or hope I am sure that it wasn't the ad agency suggesting this slogan something this horrible ends up coming from a stubborn client who came up with the idea and thought it was brilliant.

Awesome Programs for the Google Android Phone

I know that everyone and there brother has an iPhone but I have t-mobile so I have the awesome google android phone. I love it and what I really love about it is that most of the programs are free unlike the competitor. Last night I ran across a facebook sync application that syncs your facebook account to your contacts on your phone. You log on and it finds your friends photos and attaches them directly to your contacts list on your phone. I think this was a great application that saved me a lot of time "pimpin'" out my phone. So if you have the android go ahead and check out the market place it's free.

The Rays and Graphic People Post 2

It is currently 11:50 and I have already run across the people vector a new one that I haven't seen yet it was an advertising on pandora.
I wonder how many more I will come across today or any given day for that matter but I will keep you updated.

The Rays and People Graphic that is EVERYWHERE

There is one graphic that is getting a lot of use and is everywhere! I have seen it on trade show booths, then I was back in Minnesota and had to go to Taco Johns and get me some potato ole's and there it was in green and yellow on the window cling.


The rays are appearing everywhere from tv where bam uses it in his intro background to clothing. Frenches buffalo wing sauce has the rays on their packaging and have seen other hints in the grocery store aisle.

The people with the rays is really getting on my nerves there is one on a billboard on my way home and a ticketmaster banner at the mall. They are freakin everywhere.

But I am so twisted that I would love to see other examples to see how people work with them differently.

When Webinars Are Bad

We just spent a small fortune to switch over our software at work and the major selling point was the teaching sessions we would receive. Ha is all I have to say I think that our money is going towards their "teaching" staffs education while trying to teach us. Now we are a small ad agency I will give them that but we still deserve a good teacher. I have been to 3 sessions have learned absolutely nothing. In fact, I think I have taught our teacher a thing or two and I hadn't even opened the program until our 3rd session.

Nothing is more irritating then having to wait for our webinar teaching sessions to begin and to have it go over and make me stay late at work with an hour drive ahead of me. On average we start 10 minutes late and go over at least 20 minutes and haven't even learned anything. Today we spent 20 minutes filling out a spec sheet, ummmm not really that hard you just type shit in. The teacher doesn't address our questions or if she does she says we will get to that in a later session. We were supposed to start using our new software next Wednesday but we haven't even skimmed the surface of what they pitched to us as selling points.

This teacher is really lucky that we are so easy going and don't go off because any other agency would be throwin' down the smack. When teaching marketing and advertising people you need to realize that we are not stupid, and that we are used to having to blow through things at extreme speeds, this is our business. And one more thing it is really annoying to have you mute us and forget to unmute over and over again because you haven't drank enough water and your voice is out of wack. PS the word um 30 times in 5 minutes (yes I counted, I was bored) does not constitute as teaching.