Recently, It seem that every time it is my week to contribute to this blog something crazy happens.  The first time it was our email server going down.  This time it was our phone system. On Monday, my office started the transition to a hosted VOIP phone system.  We were expecting the phones to be unavailable for an hour or two.  Turns out, it is more like a week.

While the phones were down, if you called the Technology or EC department you heard a message that the numbers had been disconnected.  I didn’t like that, so I had the numbers forwarded to our Central Office.  Our Central Office gets a ton of calls already, and our calls were slamming them.  I had to figure out a different solution.

At this point I remembered I had a Google Voice account that I had never used.  If anyone was with me when this happened, I think they would have been able to see a light bulb turn on above my head.   I actually signed up for the service when it was called Grand Central.  With a Google Voice account, you get a new local phone number, then you set that number to forward to a variety of numbers.  For example, if I were to use Google Voice for my personal number when someone called it, Google Voice would ring my cell phone, home phone,  and work phone.  You can even customized what it will ring based on the caller id.  If my mom called it would ring all of my numbers.  If my mother in-law called it would go straight to voicemail.

Straight to voicemail is the feature I used this week.  I had the EC and Technology numbers forwarded to my Google Voice account. I sent up a voicemail message explaining our phone situation and invited the caller to leave a message.  Any they did.  Every time a voicemail was left, I received an email with the option to listen to the message.  I would listen to the message long enough to figure out who it was from and forward the email on.  It worked perfectly.

My RSS feed reader, Google Reader, is full of unread blog posts, my inbox has is full of junk mail and spam. The grass in the lawn is so deep, people riding by probably think we have moved. It is too hot to worry about it. July 4th was fun, but was over too fast. Now, its time to start getting my laptop organized. Backing up to an external hard drive is one of the best tech decisions I have made. This morning, I tried to backup my Blackberry and this has resulted in multiple entries in my MacBook’s address book. Now, all my teacher groups need editing. That has to be one of the best reasons buying an iPhone. But, that is another story.  Here are three easy steps to think about if your desktop looks like mine.

1. Save your files to “My Documents” or any location you think is easily recalled and where you can easily retrieve your files. It is advisable not to populate your computer desktop. You have to create folders for several file types and according to use; five folders for your desktop folders may be enough for easy file searching. Always bear in mind that there should be no individual files on your desktop to avoid messy-looking computer desktop—only folders. I noticed on my student’s laptops that some students even had color coded their folders.
2. Inside desktop folders, create main folders for more specific categories of your files. Save move your files according to relevant folders. Make sure that your folder names are descriptive of what files are in them.
3. If you think that you still have hundreds of files in your folders, further break them down into subcategories.  If you have that many folders, you might need to think about backing up and deleting some files from you laptop.

Backup– Backup– Backup!!!!