Remembering Toll Free Phone Numbers

I recently upgraded to a Motorola Q Smartphone and ran into an interesting problem. I was trying to call a company who's toll free number was spelled out in the form of a word (to allegedly help me remember it). As it turned out, the knowing the word did not help.

When it comes to phones in my house: we have no land-line, my wife has a Blackberry, and I have this Moto Q. When I tried to dial the "easy to remember" number, I found that I did not have access to a phone that actually had the traditional letters on each digit of the phone's keypad. The number keys on both the Blackberry and the Moto Q are working double duty as part of the QWERTY keyboard on the devices.

To resolve the problem I had to find a site with the letter to phone key pads.

I felt this issue was worth noting as it just never would have occurred to me that it would be a problem to begin with.

Encryption and Thumb Drives

Recently my wife ran into a situation where she had misplaced her new thumb drive (thankfully, she found it), but it got me to thinking about securing mine. These flash drives are a great way to carry around information, but they are also quite small and obviously, easy to lose.

A quick search led me to the TrueCrypt encryption app. Their site says that they are currently on version 5.0a and I am looking forward to working with it. If all goes well for my flash drive, I am going to have to seriously consider doing this with my laptop as well.

Feel like I am about five years behind the curve on this, but better to admit that than to have the problem just go unchecked.

Final Frontier

At work, I receive the mail from a couple of public email addresses and these addresses have a habit of getting hammered with Spam. As a practical matter, I cannot filter spam on the server level because I need to be able to see what getting flagged as Spam and isolate it into a separate folder in Outlook.

For the past few years I have been using a program called MailFrontier Desktop to divert the spam out of my Inbox. MailFrontier was up to the task for a while, but lately it has started to miss more than it filters out.

Trying to solve the problem, I clicked the "check for updates" button in MailFrontier and found no updates available. I then took a look at their website. I found that MailFrontier.com now re-directs me to SonicWALL. It looks like they got bought out. I have no idea how long ago this happened; it could have been last week or last year.

Google still has a link to a live ordering page on the MailFrontier site so I could renew my annual license when it expires. Mind you this leaves me spending money on what is likely a dead product, while watching my Inbox fill with spam; not a good solution.

I spent a few minutes wandering around the SonicWALL site, but could not find an obvious upgrade/re-naming of the MailFrontier Desktop app. There is a software product there, but it is described as being for "qualified customers who need to protect 25 mailboxes to over 5,000 mailboxes using their own SMTP-based e-mail or for Managed Service Providers to use to protect the SMTP-based e-mail of their customers." This leads me to believe that I am not the target audience. I have to assume that the SonicWALL folks are not interested in my business as an individual.