So finally (after a day) my new Cisco Voice-Over-IP phone has self-configured and told me about new voice mail, let me choose one of 25 ring tones, and allowed me to use its screen to search our department phone book to look up phone numbers.

It plugs directly in to the office data jack, then the computer plugs in to it (so now if our Internet connection goes down, the phones don't work either). It's supposed to be configurable from a web site, but I'm not sure how to log on so maybe that's not an option. Pretty slick none-the-less. And it looks sexy.


Sometimes you find a software utility that's just so cool and useful it's worth paying for, even if it has a free version. That just happened to me for RoboForm. This little gadget stores all kinds of information for you and then automatically fills it into web forms.

It's highly customizable and has some AI behind it to make good guesses for form fields that aren't quite the norm. It also has an area to let you enter custom form field names and values, plus it offers multiple identities, each of which can have different fields or values for various forms you might want to complete.

I found this tool when I went hunting for this kind of thing when I had a web form that I had to fill out about 30 times with slightly different bits of information. RoboForm made that series of operations a breeze (just using the back button to return to the form didn't work because the form cleared itself).

I do believe this tool will make testing and development of web forms much more efficient as well, because I can set up a number of identities and test with various responses repeatedly with a button click rather than typing in variations into the form's fields every time. Should make my wrists much happier.


Yay for technology!