Time Zone Check shows the time zones on a pretty map

Since I started my company, I’ve worked with many people from all across the globe. Five or ten years ago, this would have been virtually impossible, or at least extremely expensive. My telephone bill would have gone through the roof. But today, with e-mail, instant messaging and Skype, it’s easy and affordable to communicate with people everywhere.

So now that distance and communication costs are no longer an issue, I’ve found that there is a new challenge: finding the right time to talk. With clients in many time zones, this sometimes takes a lot of calculating and planning. Fortunately, the web offers nice tools to manage this too. One of the prettiest I know is Time Zone Check. This site shows me a map of the world, with my own current local time. Then, when I point my mouse at the location of someone I would like to talk to, the map shows me what time it is in their part of the world. I can even search for cities by name if I don’t know the exact location.

The map also shows me where it is night and where it is day, the places in the world where they’re currently enjoying daylight savings, the abbreviations of the time zones and the time difference between those time zones and my own time zone.

The most common reason people give for not making backups of their computer is: “I forgot”. That’s understandable, but also very unfortunate. Especially when there are free solutions that allow anyone to make regular backups.

Mozy is a free backup tool for your computer

One of those products is called Mozy. It’s a piece of software that you install on your computer (did I mention it’s free!), and then you can literally forget about making backups. Mozy will remember for you, and automatically make those precious backups once or twice a day, or just as often as you want. The backups are stored on Mozy’s servers, on the internet. So if your computer or laptop is stolen or breaks, your data is still safe and sound, ready to be restored as soon as you have a working computer again.

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http and www are a given, but what comes after that?

Your domain name is the first point of contact on the internet. It is a vital part of the address of your website and of your e-mail address. You’ll be using that domain name for a long time, so it’s crucial to spend some time deciding on the best name, to find out if that name is available and to register a few variations of that domain name. In this article, I will present some tips and suggestions about the steps involved.

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I read an article the other day, reporting on some shocking statistics from a study by Accenture. They surveyed 800 American and British frequent internet users. It turned out more than half of them had only one password for all websites, web mail, online banking and other internet usages. The reason people give for doing so is easy to understand: its very hard to come up with and remember different passwords for all different sites.

This week, Google posted some guidelines on their Official Blog, on how to choose a good password and how to keep it safe.

In my business, I constantly have to come up with new passwords, for accounts and systems I work on for my clients or for my own use. Instead of being creative with new passwords, I use a tiny little tool on my computer that generates completely random passwords for me. It’s called Password Generator, and it’s free! You can download it here (PC only).

What this program does not do for you is remember which password you created for which site. That’s the second challenge. My web browser Firefox can remember them for me, and since access to my PC is protected by a password too (and that one I do remember of course), I feel it’s reasonably safe this way.

Update October 2009

Google have posted an article on their official Gmail weblog, with tips for choosing a smart password.