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I’ve received some emails from people asking where the heck I’ve been?! No tweets, no posts…it was like I fell off the face of the Earth according to some of you!

First off, I’m happy to see that if I indeed did fall off the face of the Earth, there would be some loyal followers/readers who would come look for me! Thank you!

But, the reason I was gone is not a happy one. A dear friend of mine has been on her deathbed. She was devastatingly struck by a terrible virus and has been in and out of a coma for two and a half weeks. We’re not sure she’ll make it…she most likely will need to have drastic surgery that will wipe out all memories and make her a shell of her former self.

Now, before you send me comments praying for my friend’s recovery, I should probably tell you who she is…here’s a picture:

 We met in January 2008, shortly after her older sister, Toshiba passed on.

We’ve had some good times, but on Sunday, February 21, 2010 our relationship changed.

She became distant, slow and unresponsive to the slightest question. She occasionally even had the audacity to hang up on me and freeze when asked to perform the most simple of tasks.

At first, I thought this was the common cold…something that some maintenance, fluids and rest would resolve. Soon, I learned though…she was gravely ill with a mystery illness.

Ok…enough hyperbole. My computer, one of the loves of my life, is sick….horribly sick. This post, is meant to let you know that I’m still alive but also to warn you of some REALLY BAD STUFF floating around out there ready to infect even the most buttoned-up computers.

PLEASE, take my advice and take a few minutes to put into practice some of the stuff I have had to do these past couple of weeks. It could save your personal data, your precious memories, your business and even your identity!!

The next few posts are going to dole out some pretty specific information and tips. Please come back for the series. I mean it. I’ve had the worst 2.5 weeks of my entire computing life (and that’s a long life, BTW, I used to program in BASIC! so please heed these warnings.

I’ll have a list of symptoms I experienced, what others tried to do to help, and why even the best efforts of some of the top malware and spyware experts ultimately wasn’t enough. I’ll also post some tips and resources on how you can diagnose your own computer issues and how to head off some trouble before it gets really bad.

I’ll also be posting a follow-up to something I wrote about the backup service, Carbonite. If you are using Carbonite for your automatic backups, you’ll want to stay tuned and learn what I learned.

Seriously, it was almost a disaster!

So sit tight and get ready for a weekend of computer security education and tips. This is a great time to get on the ball and prevent what I have gone through.

In another life, I was quite the marketing critic. As a teenager, even, I would mark up with a thick red pen the direct mail advertisements my family received in the mail and send them back to the advertiser with my notes and corrections.

Yeah, I was THAT girl.

Branding, especially, has always been a particularly interesting subject to me. How a company chooses to represent itself and position itself in the marketplace has always fascinated me. My poor husband and family have to listen to me rant and rave all the time about how Company A really dropped the ball on that campaign or how Company B let a golden branding opportunity slip through its fingers.

These rants are usually met with a glazed over look, or a slight snore….

But this Southwest Airlines -vs- Kevin Smith war has me intrigued. While I obviously side with @THATKevinSmith on this particular issue (disgruntled consumers, unite!) I find @Southwestair ’s response baffling and fascinating all at the same time.

So, I share with you my official response to Southwest Airlines as I posted on their apparent, “justification and mea culpa” post on their website. It’s buried there among the high-fives for Southwest from people who can’t seem to accept that not everyone is a size 4 and the former customers who have sworn off Southwest for good. It’s in there, somewhere.

But I can’t let a good rant go bad….so, here ya go!

As a business owner and armchair critic of big business’ branding…wow, did you guys drop the ball on this one! Instead of becoming, “The Airline That Kicked Kevin Smith Off a Plane” you could have worked this entire thing to Southwest’s advantage by becoming the airline that caters to Customers of Size.

Shortsighted pride escalated this entire situation. Kevin Smith has over 1.6 MILLION followers on Twitter. His demographic of follower and movie audience is THE EXACT AUDIENCE a brand like Southwest wants in its pocket. Can you imagine if you had harnessed this power and turned this customer service debacle into an opportunity for Southwest?

What you SHOULD have done, was apologize profusely, issue an IMMEDIATE statement that Southwest has decided to aleviate the discomfort and embarassment that certain larger customers may experience on OTHER AIRLINES by implementing a strategy to incorporate two specific seats per aircraft that are 20% wider to accomodate Customers of Size.

THEN, you should have hammered home that plan with a witty ad campaign, won over Kevin Smith as an ambassador for your brand and then you could have possibly have even had a Kevin Smith cameo in your ads. Those ads would have been viral, no doubt, giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars of free advertising. Not to mention the goodwill and a loyal customer base among a fast-growing demographic of customers who are larger than the current seats.

In short, pride and Big Business Buffoonery let you miss a golden opportunity to capture yet ANOTHER loyal customer base that you can add to your “discount flyer base”. You could have blown the other airlines out of the water with this one. Instead, you turned a bad situation worse and missed an amazing and one-time branding opportunity.

Hope all the corporate red-tape and short-sighted customer service was worth it….

I scored a great deal on a $25 gift certificate for our local Chevy’s Tex Mex restaurant that my husband and I plan to use for a date night! The $25 gift certificate cost me $2! Yep, two bucks!

I also received a $15 “floral reward” from FTD  that I might have to pass that on to my husband! Hint, hint!

Here’s the deal: Save 80% off Restaurant.com $25 Gift Certificate orders and receive a $15 FTD® Floral Reward. Use code HEART and Pay $2 thru 2/14/10.

Visit Restaurant.com to claim this deal….remember to use coupon code, HEART to get the discount!

I mentioned in an earlier post, MUCH earlier, that I was on the hunt for a dishwasher and I compared the cost of “time” to the cost of the dishwasher itself. Sometimes, when you have to make up for a machine’s inefficiency and you lose time doing so, it just makes simple sense to replace the machine and regain your time.

Well, I’d love to say that I followed through on my own advice way back when, but…I didn’t. Life, as it were, got in the way and we never replaced the dishwasher. Now I’m finding myself in an even worse situation because it works even more horrendously than it did before, even after a good cleaning and maintenance. Sixteen years, this little workhorse did it’s job, but I’m afraid it’s time to put it out to pasture.

So the 2010 Dishwasher Hunt is on! Coupled with some stimulus money in Minnesota as part of their “Cash for Clunkers” program for appliances, we hope to get a good deal and get a dishwasher that can keep up with us!

We’re looking for:

* Energy Star Rated: we want to save energy AND money!

* Better capacity than we have now…enough room for big pots and pans, but also able to handle little stuff like sippy cups.

* QUIET…we really need for the dishwasher to be quiet since our kitchen is right next to our family room.

* Some sort of way of keeping our two year-old out of it! The lever alone doesn’t work…he’s mechanical!

* A way to really sanitize our dishes, especially the things our son uses. It seems like our current dishwasher gets hot, but not REALLY hot.

* Some sort of mechanism that pulls the grit out and away from the dishes rather than sloshing it all around. A grinding and filter mechanism would be great!

Our dilemma: We have white appliances now…OLD, white appliances. We’d like to upgrade, but we’re stumped. Do we add one mismatched stainless steel appliance to our kitchen with the HOPE of upgrading them all at some point, or do we go with white again? It’s a tough decision. What if we sell our house before we have all of the stainless steel? That’s a tough one!

So the 2010 Dishwasher Hunt is on….your opinions and recommendations?

Wow! I just did the “math” on what it really costs to use that new Bounce Dryer Bar. To be fair, I have never used it and never purchased it so this isn’t a review on it’s efficacy. I have no idea if it really works, so don’t take this as a “review” per se but more as an alert to how sometimes, even something efficient that saves time might not be worth the money.

In this week’s Kmart circular, there is mention of a 44-use Bounce Dryer Bar at a price of $5.49. Right next to it is mention of a box of Bounce dryer sheets, 120 count for $5.49 as well.

If one can get 44 uses out of the dryer bar, that means that per use, the cost is 0.127 cents. By contrast, the cost per sheet of dryer sheets is 0.045 cents. If I were to compare the dryer bar in the same terms as the sheets, that would mean that it would be the equivalent of paying a whopping $15.24 for a 120-ct box of dryer sheets!

Um, no thanks.

In fact, I wouldn’t even spend the $5.49 they want for the sheets! THAT’S too much too in my opinion and I never pay that much.

I’m all for things that take out a step or making something more dummy-proof. Goodness knows there are days I need a little help like that. But this is just not something that seems worth it to me at all! Not to mention that the 44-use dryer bar is touted as a “Two Month” bar.  That would mean that it would only truly last 60 days if you did less than one load a day. I do two loads a DAY and it’s just me, my husband and our son. When you consider towels, sheets, blankets, throw rugs, shower curtains, hand towels, dish towels, dog beds, high-chair covers, etc. you can see how even two loads a day is being conservative.

I know some people love this thing, but I just don’t see how the price is justified. I went to the Bounce website to see what else I could find out about it and the opinions are definitely mixed. In fact, here is one person’s opinion about it…boy, not happy! Damage to her dryer! I have to say, even before reading that I wondered whether attaching something with adhesive to a burning hot appliance was a good idea. I had qualms about even trying it even if I could get my money back as per their money back guarantee.

But my main point is that you have to be careful about conveniences…even things that realistically *could* save you a bit of time. I just don’t happen to think the Bounce Dryer Bar is one of those conveniences for which I’m willing to part with so much cash.

Hot deal alert!

Stop by CVS.com and register for their photo service and you’ll receive 50 free photo prints with free pickup at a local store! These prints are 100% free as long as you have a local CVS store for pickup.

What a great way to get those holiday pictures off your camera and developed for Grandma and Grandpa!

http://www.cvsphoto.com/account/register.aspx

Enjoy!

 Bring on the New Year and a new resolution to keep up with the bookkeeping!

Here are two free printable worksheets for you: a monthly expense sheet and a monthly income sheet. No opt-in required…no hoops to jump through, just a free and easy download to get your New Year started off right!

Printable Monthly Expense Worksheet

Printable Monthly Income Worksheet

Now I know many of you prefer to do your bookkeeping for your business and home online or with software, and I promise to have some good tips for those methods as well, but sometimes I find having a sheet to write things down is just a bit more convenient, especially if I put it in a workbook (coming soon, by the way!) or a binder that I have right on the desk.

Plus, these sheets can be a great place to temporarily record your expenses and income until you can make it to the software or your spreadsheets or whatever you are using.

To save them to your computer, just right-click and select, “Save As”. They are in PDF format so you’ll need the Adobe Reader to open them (free and available here).

Enjoy!

Well, 2009 is coming to and end and you may be looking toward the next few months as you prepare your 2009 tax return. If you own a small business, you may also be looking for some last minute tax deductions. Have you considered pre-paying some of your business expenses in advance before the end of the year to get them on the books and listed as a 2009 business expense?

This might be a great time to:

1. Pre-pay professional membership fees.

2. Renew professional licenses which are set to expire soon.

3. Purchase postage and mailing supplies for the coming year.

4. Purchase ink, toner, paper and other supplies for your home office.

5. Purchase equipment such as a new printer, fax machine, phone system or computer.

6. Pre-pay for webhosting fees for 2010 and beyond….I recommend Dreamhost.

7. Renew some domains set to expire soon.

I’m not a tax professional, so of course you will want to run these ideas by someone and do your own due diligence, but some of these ideas might help lower your tax liability for 2009 and get you off to a great start with some pre-paid expenses for 2010!

p.s. Some of these ideas may save you more than just on taxes….consider that some advertising packages and webhosting companies may also extend you a discount for pre-paying your account in advance. The hosting company I use, Dreamhost, offers a substantial discount when paying one year and even two years in advance.  For more information, click here to visit my Dreamhost Promo Codes page with all of the details about this promotion.

Resource Links:
Amazon.Com Printers and Ink Deals (free shipping on most orders $25+)
Amazon.Com Office Supplies Deals (free shipping on most orders $25+)
Amazon.Com Tax Software Deals (free shipping on most orders $25+)

If you’re like me, you probably found yourself a week or two away from Christmas wondering how you were going to manage all of the errands, shopping, greeting cards and most of all….paying for it all. While my husband and I had a plan for paying for everything, we found ourselves wishing we had set more aside during the rest of the year.

Now is a great time to set up a holiday savings account for NEXT year so that when the holiday season arrives, you’ll have a healthy chunk of cash waiting for you, ready to be spent.

My husband and I did that this year, but we neglected to include some additional expenses that we will add for next year. We opted not to do a holiday card this year, mostly because I was sick for two weeks and would have never completed them on time, but also because the expense was just one we didn’t feel we wanted to bear this year. We didn’t factor in the $35 visit to Santa, nor the fact that there would be a holiday storm that would cut our shopping short and force us to purchase some more expensive gifts than we had planned.

This year, as for the coming year, we will be using the automatic deduction/deposit feature of our ING Direct account. Inside our main account with ING, we have set up several sub-accounts for different savings goals. One of these sub-accounts is appropriately named, “Christmas” and we have a set amount transferred from our regular checking account into that sub-account every week. The great thing is that we can adjust that amount anytime we like, so for these next two months after Christmas we will probably transfer a modest amount and then ramp up to a slightly higer amount starting in late Winter.

Because these transfers are automatic and rather invisible to us, we never really miss the money and it’s fun to check in every couple of months and see how much we have accumulated. We also plan to take a portion of our tax refund and make a lump-sum deposit to help boost it. We can also transfer “windfall” money into that account as well…rebates and refunds, birthday and holiday money, or any other bonus money that comes to us throughout the year.

Our goal for 2010: To have every penny of holiday money set aside in that account waiting for us by Thanksgiving. Using this year’s budget, and allowing for the visit to Santa, holiday card expenses and a 10% slush fund, we now know how much per week we will need to deposit and how much we will likely subtract from our tax refund to make it the balance it needs to be in November. Added bonus….the interest we will earn all year long on the deposited money.

We are using our ING Direct account, and have found it to be the easiest way to save. While the account is attached to our regular checking and savings accounts, there is a 2 to 3 day delay from when you request a transfer back down to those accounts. While some people might find this inconvenient, we actually like it because it encourages us to keep the money in the account and not transfer it back down to our regular household accounts on a whim.

Best of all…as you know…. I like things to be automatic and easy!!

If you don’t currently have an ING Direct savings account, or their paperless (i.e. no checks) checking account called Electric Orange, did you know you can actually get paid to open these accounts? Seriously! What a great way to start your holiday savings for NEXT year! As an ING Direct customer, I can send exclusive invitations to new members allowing you to receive a bonus for opening either the ING Direct savings account, Electric Orange checking account, or both! Doesn’t getting $25 for free sound like a nice way to jumpstart your holiday savings?

If you would like to receive an ING Direct referral invitation, please follow these steps:

1. Stop by my “Support” section here on AutomaticMoms.com. Click here to go there now.

2. Open a “new ticket” and select the department, “ING Direct Referral Request”.

3. Include your email address where you would like the invite sent and I will process the invitation and ING will send it to that address.

4. Click on the link in the email from ING and setup your new account! You will get a $25 account bonus when you follow the ING instructions.

Hopefully, this tip will get you well on your way to an easier, less stressful Holiday 2010!

After nearly two years of discussing it, my husband and I finally made the switch to Vonage and so far….so good! We had wanted to make the switch to Vonage for quite some time but had some questions and concerns. Hopefully, my review of the service and experience switching will answer some of your questions as well.

This is one of the most extensive and detailed reviews of a product I have ever written, so if you are truly interested in how switching to Vonage can save you time and money, pull up a chair and a cold drink and get comfy!

Why we decided to look into Vonage

We had already made a partial leap toward VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) when we switched from our old-school landline to Comcast Digital Voice. With that experience safely under our belts (and burned on our psyches) we decided to make the switch to Vonage. A friend’s family had been using Vonage for a couple of years and I had noticed that when we spoke, there was very little difference, if any, from their old service. That was a good sign.

Here are some factors that played into our decision to switch:

1. Comcast Digital Voice was ok…nothing spectacular. The service was not always predicatable and I had trouble with calls suddenly dropping or breaking up into a “digitized” sound at the worst possible times. A technician visit to our house resulted in no change and numerous calls to their technicians resulted in no explanation for why it was happening.

2. The price for our phone line seemed to creep up a little every three to four months. While we did get a small discount for having our phone, Internet and cable on one bill, it wasn’t significant enough a discount to stay with service that was spotty.

3. We were paying extra to have long distance service in the United States and limited countries. In fact, I’m not entirely sure we could have even called Canada with our old service and not seen an additional charge.

4. We wanted stability. We wanted to know exactly what we would pay every month, regardless of the calls and where they were to. We also wanted to be reasonably sure that the price wouldn’t go up a little every month.

How we learned about Vonage

A friend of mine had been using Vonage for a couple of years and I never noticed a difference in the quality when I spoke to her so that was my first testimonial. A few checks of forums to see what other people thought also led me to believe that the service was reliable and CLEAR. A clear phone connection is super important to me as someone who works from home and must often make calls to businesses and co-workers.

Vonage: The signup process

I decided to take advantage of their referral program and reward my friend who told me about Vonage. At the time I signed up, Vonage was giving away two free months to new customers and two free months to the person who referred them. The referral process was easy and just required me to enter my friend’s phone number into the online form. I have not confirmed if she has received two months of credit to her bill yet, but I will update when I do find out.

The signup process was very fast and easy to understand. The best part was that I didn’t need to be the one to make the “break up” phone call to Comcast and tell them I just wasn’t into them anymore. Once I had established that I wanted to use the service and entered my contact and billing info, I was assigned a temporary phone number. Once my equipment would arrive, I would be on my way!

The equipment arrived a bit later than I expected because UPS left the package, in the rain, at the wrong house. A kind neighbor noticed it IN THE GRASS and brought it to my door. This is NOT the fault of Vonage, only UPS and I don’t hold the late delivery against Vonage in any way.

Inside the box were three pieces of equipment, a user manual and a quick start diagram. The three pieces of equipment were an adapter box (about the size of a DVD), a power cord and a network cord that connects the adapter to the back of your modem or router. The fold-out diagram is very easy to understand and the directions are thorough.

The directions are flow-chart style and indicate, “do this first, then this, then this”. Simple! I won’t go into the nitty gritty of what I plugged into where, because all of that is laid out in the instructions. Suffice to say, it was less than 5 minutes until I had a dial-tone.

I made a test call to my Mom and she said she didn’t notice any flaws in the call. She said it sounded different, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She said, “I don’t know, maybe it sounds even clearer than your old service and that’s why it sounds different?” My husband called from work and was not able to detect any difference at all. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear, but we decided to keep testing it for a few days and see how it went.

Because Vonage can transfer your phone number to their service, but not right away, we were assigned a temporary phone number. I decided to forward our calls from Comcast (using Comcast’s online service center) to the new number in the meantime so we wouldn’t miss any calls. It worked perfectly!

A few days later, we were convinced that the switch was a go! As I mentioned earlier, Vonage takes care of porting or transferring your old phone number via a button in the online control panel. They instructed us not to call our old phone company and simply cancel service because that would also cancel our phone number….not good. So I initiated the transfer with one click and got periodic updates via email about the progress. Within about five days the transfer was complete and so was our switch to Vonage!

Vonage and their 25 Standard Features

The Vonage World package ($24.99 a month) comes with the following features standard….. self-explanatory features include: Caller ID with name, Call Waiting, Call Waiting with Caller ID, 3-Way Calling, Called ID Block, Call Return, Do Not Disturb, Anonymous Call Block, and Repeat Dialing.

Additional standard features include but are not limited to….

 1. Voicemail Plus: Lets you check your email online, or on your phone and you can also get email and text message notification of new emails.

2. Call Transfer: lets you transfer your call to another phone number (cell phone, etc) mid-call! You don’t have to hang up, just transfer the call and keep talking from the new phone. This would be a great feature for a small at-home business when you need to run out to a client meeting or other errand. Keep on talking!

3. Vonage Online Account: Everything (and I mean, EVERYTHING) about your account is available online in an easy-to-use dashboard system.

4. Enhanced Call Forwarding: forward your calls to any phone number in the world!

…..and a bunch more! Check the Vonage website for more details on some of the other features. Since we have not used some of these,  don’t feel I should review them because I can’t give an accurate opinion.

Some things I really like about Vonage:

1. Their online dashboard system that lets me access every aspect of our Vonage account from setting up voicemail alerts, to listening to voicemail, to making changes to our service. To this day, I have never had to call Vonage or speak to anyone about anything related to our service. That’s the way I like it!

2. Voicemail is easy to use and flexible. You can opt to receive an email each time there is a new voicemail waiting for you, or for an additional small fee (25 cents per voicemail) you can have an attachment of the voice mail (in .wav format) emailed to you along with a transcription of the voice mail. I tested this service to see how accurate the transcription was, and it was perfect! You can even have these emails sent to up to five different email addresses and it’s still just 25 cents for each individual voicemail. Great for families or if you would like alerts at work, home, and on your smartphone. You also receive a basic SMS text message as well.

3. Long-distance service is free (from the United States) to about 60 countries (see the Vonage site for a complete list). Long distance service within the United States is also included.  Be sure to check to make sure that calls to cell phones in your desired country are included (too many to list here) because there are only some of the 60 countries that include free calls to cell phones in addition to landlines.

Some things I don’t like as much about Vonage

1. It really only works well with a true, high-speed Internet connection. This is not for someone who is working with a mediocre connection. How can you tell? Call your Internet service provider and ask if you have the medium/higher-end connection. This is particularly true if you are running multiple pieces of hardware (a desktop, laptop computer, wireless home network etc) on one connection all at the same time. My home is wired for everything (wired and wireless) so there is constantly something using my bandwidth but I haven’t had any trouble at all.

2. You may need to adjust the amount of bandwidth that Vonage uses for your connection. I put it in the “not like” category simply because it is one extra step for someone who has multiple things running. That said, adjusting the bandwidth in your dashboard is quite easy and fast.

3. I wish that Vonage would let you listen to voicemails as streaming in your dashboard rather than making it a .wav file that you either have to open with your default program for .wav files or download and open later. In my case, my default program for .wav files is iTunes, and if I don’t have it open at the time I want to listen to email, I need to wait for iTunes to boot up. If they made this one change, I would be thrilled and plan to bring it up with their development team.

What you should know about options and add-ons

Vonage offers a variety of options and add-ons in addition to their standard, Vonage World service (which we have) that gives us unlimited local and International calling to 60 countries for $24.99.

Annual Prepay Options: Vonage offers Vonage World (the regular plan with International calling to 60+ countries) for a yearly fee of $239.99 which brings your average monthly price down from $24.99 to $19.99. This is a yearly savings of about $60.

There is also a limited plan for people who use under 500 minutes a month. It’s called, appropriately, the Basic 500 Minutes Residential Plan and at the time of this review costs just $17.99 a month. There is also a “Pro” plan that costs $34.99 a month that also lets you use your computer to make calls instead of just your landline phone. Business plans are also available, but I have not used any of them in order to review.

What you need to know before switching to VOIP or Vonage in particular:

There are some considerations you need to be aware of before switching to Vonage or any VOIP provider. First, be sure that your Internet connection can handle the load. I don’t recommend that you try to use Vonage with a slow connection, so if you live in an area where high-speed Internet is notoriously not “high-speed” you may want to think twice about this.

Second, you need to live in an area or have a history of good and reliable sources of electricity. If you live in a rural area and your electricity is prone to outages or if you live in an area prone to natural disasters, you may want to stick with a landline. No electricity means no Internet which means no phone. No phone, means no access to 911 so be aware.

Third, I recommend that you only switch to a VOIP provider if you have a backup phone such as a cell phone. Any outage, whether electrical or Internet means you don’t have access to 911 in an emergency. This is especially important if you have children. DO NOT SWITCH TO VOIP WITHOUT A BACKUP PLAN.

Fourth, be sure that when you setup your Vonage account that you specifically check in your account for the recorded address for you in the 911 system and make sure it’s accurate since this is the information that will be given to emergency personnel when you call 911.

 My overall impression of Vonage

In summary, I highly recommend looking into Vonage if you have considered a switch to a VOIP provider and have seen your bill for regular landline service creep up in the past few years. We live in an area that has the infrastructure to support the switch (high-speed internet and reliable power) and feel it was a good move for us both in terms of having good reliable service and for the financial savings. We are saving about $15.00 a month ($180 per year) on average compared to our old service. To us, that is a significant savings and was worth the switch!

Feel free to ask specific questions in the comments! I’d be happy to share more details about our experience with Vonage!

P.S. If you join Vonage using this link, you will receive one month of service for free. In the interest of full disclosure, so will I. I’m an actual Vonage customer and other than free months I receive for referring new customers, I have not been paid or compensated in any way for this review. So there!

Technorati Tags: Vonage, VOIP, voice over Internet protocol, phone service, phone, landline