Dean Craig

Every week someone asks “can you get this announced today?” or “why isn’t my _______ in the announcements?”

Someone else asks “why do we take time to read the announcements?” and someone else wants to know “why didn’t I heard about ______?”

Some may think we are choosing favorites … and everyone thinks that “fair” is a biblical mandate! (NOT!)

How we connect to the people we want to get our message to is important to all of us, and it’s becoming harder and harder to break through all the noise and clutter in life.

Whatever you believe, we all know this; the way we communicate is changing, and it’s changing fast. This video shows how change is making it easier to reach a wider audience, but harder than ever to actually connect to it.

click here if the video does not appear above…

Dean Craig impressions, productivity, relationships, small groups, social networking, tech

I’ve had my Blackberry Storm for about a month now and it’s just what I’ve been waiting for.  I been using a Palm for about four years (I need to use it for phone calls too, so I have to have Verizon) but I was in the middle of my contract when the Storm came out so I put it off as long as I could.  I got the upgrade free after a generous discount from my mom … (thanks mom).

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Dean Craig google apps, mobile, relationships, social networking, tech

One of the few things that Gmail lacks is an easy way to “save as” a single email to your hard drive without setting up an email client like Outlook and downloading all your mail.

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Dean Craig google apps, tech

Google has a photo storage and sharing service called Picasa. You can upload a large number of images to it for free, and share those images with anyone you want.

One of its features is to create a sideshow with an album. Example here.

Another way of displaying them would be to embed the slideshow into your website like this -

So, how’d I do that?  Easy…

Sign in to (or sign up for) your Google Account for Picasa Web Albums at http://picasaweb.google.com using your Google Account username and password.

Upload some images.

Click the My Photos link and select the album you’d like to make a slideshow.

Click Link to this album on the right panel.

A new Embed Slideshow option should appear. Clicking this option creates the code for a Flash slideshow from the album you’ve selected.  When you update this album, your slideshow is automatically updated to show the latest photos. You can select from five photo sizes for your slideshow (up to 800 pixels) and you can also edit the resulting code for more flexibility.

To embed the slideshow, copy and paste the HTML code that’s shown into your blog or webpage.

Dean Craig google apps, productivity, tech

I just got me new Centro from Verizon this week – the 3 1/2 year old Treo 650 finally bought the dirt so they upgraded me for next to nothing.

I had such as hard time finding the info to get the Google Apps version of Gmail working right again so I thought I would share what I learned with you.

1. The Centro needs an application called “Java Virtual Machine”. You can download this [here]

2. Reboot your phone.

3. In order for the Gmail for mobile application to properly function, the IBM JVM requires several configuration changes.

Go to “Preferences” on the Centro, scroll down to “IBM Java VM” and review these configuration settings.

Check “Use Double Buffering”

Check “Use high resolution coordinates”

Set “Memory maximum” to at least 4Mb.

Set “Maximum java thread stack size” to 4kb (this is the one that makes the alignment all messed up if you fail to change it.

4. Open the “IBM Java” from your launcher. Click on ‘install’ and enter this url: http://gotwww.com/gmail/1.jar (this is the google apps verion 1.5.0)

Accept all the warnings and you’re in.

Upon launching the application for the first time you can take a look at the options under ‘menu’, ‘go to’, ’settings’.

Update: 2009.09 … I recently ditched the Centro for a new Blackberry Storm.

Dean Craig google apps, mobile, tech