When I was looking for a software to synchronize my Palm information with Google Calendar, I found CompanionLink for Google.

I could not find any review for CompanionLink for Google but bought it anyway because there were not many alternatives available.

It has given me many problems.

Some of them are – my Palm and Google records :

1. were deleted – I use Palm to help me remember my friends’ birthday and I missed a couple of them because of this

2. were date-shifted – eg I originally entered a birthday event on Aug 19, but after synchronizing, the event goes to Aug 20. This caused me some embarassment.

3. were  duplicated – this is the latest I discovered (see picture above)

My review for the software – it’s not very good.

Buy it because there’re no alternatives but be careful of the problems above.

Update on 19 July 2008:

The above was my original post. A few days after it appeared, a few CompanionLink posted comments to offer to help.

I logged a support ticket and they did try very hard to help.

It’s still unresolved because I could not reproduce duplicating and deleted events. I am keeping my fingers crossed that they will eventually resolve.

You might have better luck than me and the CompanionLink staff will certainly try to help it work for you.

David Airey’s website was hijacked. Don’t buy davidairey.com.

And check your gmail filters.

Read David Airey’s account of how his domain got hijacked with gmail filters

1. Big red (or eye-catching) words.

2. Join me

Join Me And Over 247 Fellow Blogging Enthusiasts In This
One-Of-A-Kind Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program
And Protect Yourself From Further Price Rises…

3. Protect yourself from further price increase

read above

3. An honest to goodness mug shot

4. Promise of easy money with little work

“Today working no more than 2 hours a day I’m making a consistent USD $4000-$6000 every single month from my Blogs! And it’s a STABLE, reliable income (actually, it’s growing every month!) built on a solid foundation, not a temporary ‘flash-in-the-pan’ ‘here-today-gone-tomorrow’ pipedream.”

5. Claims to be your friend

Dear Friend,

My name is xxxx. You might know me from my Blogs or my Blogging email newsletter. (They have an aggregate readership in excess of 120,000 people every month).

6. There is a new program

My new program is called XXX…

7. Encouragement to click

Click Here To Join XXXX

Click to Join Today and Protect Yourself From Future Price Increases…

8.There is a threat of future price increase

Protect Yourself From Future Price Increases…

9. An HONEST Q & A

17 Questions About Program XXX
With Honest Answers…

10. Irrefutable proof

11. Lots of testimonials

12. Satisfaction guaranteed

13. Bonuses

Special Bonuses – 5 Exclusive Audio Interviews
with Top Professional Bloggers

14. Don’t wait

Don’t wait, sign up right now, and let’s begin this Blogging journey together!

15. A signature

Technorati tags: scam, internet

Stories like Yaro works only 2 hours/day to make $5k a month is what fools many people to think that

blogging is easy money

blogging is easy

blogging  is easy work

By Yaro’s own admission, the blog post was just a gimmick :

So is my claim a marketing gimmick? Is it something I state just to lure people in with dreams of an easy working life for a high financial return? Am I using some kind of trigger to convince you that my program is the answer you have been looking for?

Well yes and no.

Even in admission, he is still doing marketing double talk – yes and no.

LIAR.

Read The truth about blogging for a living.

Chris G gives the lowball truth about blogging about money.

I don’t even know what lowball actuall means, I just coined it. People who blog get to make up words as they go.

But I wish I read Chris G’s post before I started my first blog venture. It might have stopped me from signing up for a 3 year hosting plan.

Now I am poorer, with a longer list of failures to rue over.

If Chris G was my friend, I could well be the guy in his post.

It’s a long grind with no results – I know this very well. I am still grinding, not consistently but still grinding and nowhere nearer recouping my investments.

Is blogging going to make me rich ?

I doubt it.

Why then do I still write this ?

Heck, I have dumped a lot of USD here, I might as  well get use some bandwidth, some space, some CPU time, some whatever, so that it’s not a complete loss.

Me.dium is eerie.

I installed it out of curiosity.

After  installation in Firefox, I got a new sidebar that shows other people who are surfing ‘near’ me. I don’t know how me.dium decides who is ‘near’ me.

Anyway, as my ‘cyber-neighbours’ surf, I see what they are browsing. I could also see me.dium updating what I was browsing.

As I don’t know how me.dium decides who is near me or who I am near, this gives me the creeps. I don’t want people I don’t know seeing what I browse.

When I was doing some administration on this blog, me.dium also updated that I was at my blog. What if my neighbours could then somehow reach my blog’s administration page with me.dium ? I don’t know whether they could, it is just a fear.

The whole experience is like reading in a lift with everybody around looking over my shoulder. I don’t like it.

I quickly uninstalled me.dium for these reasons:

1. Web surfing for me is a private matter.

2. I certainly don’t want people I don’t know see what I am browsing on the web.

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

1. Store and serve application resources locally

2. Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database

3. Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

For its premier launch, it enabled Google Reader, Google’s RSS reader for offline mode.

It was …. ‘unimpressive’. The technology is impressive but enabling Google Reader is not. When I started reading RSS feeds, I started with a client RSS reader (Pluck). Then I moved on the BlogLines because I liked it being web-based.

A client based RSS reader has several advantages:

1. slow to download all the feeds (I collect a lot of  feeds)

2. takes up space on your hard disk. This is not really a big issue. It is more of an irritation of having some ‘junk’ accumulate on my PC over time.

3. disjoint – I like to click on links in a feed that takes me to another web site. An offline RSS reader cannot do that if I am offline. So if I can only half-read in an offline reader, why bother ?

Google Reader on Google Gears has all of the above disadvantages plus it downloads only 2000 articles.

Google Reader was not built for Google Gears.