As I said in one of my Online Calendaring posts, I've been using Mobile2Web.com to get email to my cellular phone. I decided to expand the to contacts and calendar and also to use their OWA interface more. Since it's a free service, there's advertising that goes along with it, and I'm fine with that. But, it degraded the user interface to the point that I couldn't really use it as my primary interface and, with the free service, you get OWA and mobile access, you DON'T get access from Outlook. In looking around, I found that 1 and 1 has a Hosted Exchange account for $6.99/month. I signed up and have been using it for a couple of weeks, now. I have to say, I'm quite pleased with it. It's a joy to update a contact on my mobile phone, have it reflected on my OWA interface and also reflected back to my Contacts folder in Outlook ... and KNOW that updating ANYTHING from ANYWHERE will be handled just as seamlessly. If you're interested in signing up for any 1-and-1 services, if you'd go through this link and I'll get some credit for it.
I know, Outlook isn't perfect -- far from it! But it's the best I've got right now. As always, I'm open to alternatives and if you have one, please forward it on!
1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) will hook you up to Google local search. Give a city and state and then say the business name or category and it'll read you matches.
Was out looking for the newest version of SyncToy (which, by the way, is up to V1.4) and came across the following goodies: Microsoft Photo Info 1.0 which allows you to view and change a picture's metadata from within Windows Explorer (puiblished Jan. 22, 2007), XML Notepad 2007 (published Mar. 22, 2007) which makes it a little easier to view and edit XML documents and Microsoft Network Monitor 3 (published Feb. 21, 2007), a network monitor and analyzer. That last one is nice and runs on Vista but I still prefer Ethereal