LITTLE ROCK — In a recurring nightmare, we're still in college. But we're late for class, have lost all our notes, haven't paid attention for months and are about to flunk out. Then we wake up and remember that we aren't in college anymore and already have degrees.
Those of you who are still in college (you'll have this nightmare later) should check out StudyBlue.com. If you've lost your class notes, you can probably find notes just like them right here. You can also find outlines of your textbooks and flashcards to help you prepare for exams. You can view these tools on your computer or an iPhone. (So why are you paying all that tuition?)
StudyBlue was started at the University of Wisconsin and has since spread to 2,100 colleges. If it hasn't yet spread to your campus, you will probably still find useful info since many colleges use the same textbooks. You can also interact with other students, find tutors and get study reminders.
According to a survey by StudyBlue and another Website, SurveyU.com, contrary to popular opinion, students spend much more time studying online than they do viewing Facebook or game sites.
GETTING AHEAD
Eighty percent of all job offers come from people who know you, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So you need to network, as they say. A new job Web site helps you do that.
It's UpMo.com, which stands for upwardly mobile. The service measures your readiness for your next promotion and helps you get there. New to UpMo is the "intelligent job search," which filters jobs using criteria you supply when you fill out your profile page. It uses salary data from 4,000 jobs at salary.com to show what you might be able to earn, and uses simplyhired.com to scour job boards and company Web sites for postings. You also get a membership in the UpMo group on LinkedIn.com, which may bring you contacts to help get you that next job. (We are both on LinkedIn, by the way, but are not looking for jobs.)
To us, the role models at UpMo were intriguing. You can choose a role model from dozens of suggestions in your chosen field. These are real people with real life stories, though you won't be able to send them an e-mail unless you already know their address. You can see their career plotted on a graph superimposed on that of your own career. It gives you a good idea of what people did to get where they are. Joy chose Dean Takahashi, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who now covers video games for VentureBeat. You can keep selecting role models until you find one that inspires you.
The service is free for the first 10 days. After that it's $7 a month, or $30 for six months in advance.
THE DROP BOX
We're on a never-ending quest for the perfect way to share large files, keep home and work computers synced, and do it all for free. We think we found the solution at an Internet service called Dropbox.
You start by installing the program on all your computers. A drop-box icon appears on each of their screens. Drag your files into a drop box on one computer and the next time the others are connected to the Internet, the files will show up in the drop boxes on all computers. You could have a Mac, a Windows and a Linux machine, but your files, photo albums and music collections will stay in sync on all three.
Drag stuff into a "public" folder if you want to share it. Right-click a folder or file, and you'll see "Dropbox" as one of the menu items. Click it and choose "link" and you'll get a link you can copy and paste into an e-mail or text message. The recipient can click that link to get the file.
To view your files online from a computer that doesn't have the program installed, you sign in at getdropbox.com. If you accidentally delete a file, you can later undelete it. The free version of the service comes with two gigabytes of storage space, which for us is plenty. If you want more space you can get 50 GB for $10 a month, and 100 GB for $20 a month.
INTERNUTS
Medeguide.com has information on getting medical procedures done in other countries. If you think prices are too high where you are, you might want to go somewhere else. We read about a woman who had a knee replacementdone in New Zealand for less than half the cost in the United States. A luxury-hotel stay was included. Bob once sat next to an airline passenger on the way to have open-heart surgery in South Africa; the cost was onetenth what it would have been in New York.
Rejecta.org is the Web site for Rejecta Mathematica, the online journal for scientific papers rejected by other journals. Some great papers have been rejected by journals that should have known better. Paul Lauterbur, the father of magnetic-resonance imaging, had his research paper rejected by the prestigious Nature magazine. He later won a Nobel Prize for his discovery. The Rejecta Web site was founded by four graduate students at Rice University in Houston.
Badbonds.com allows bail bondsmen to collaborate regarding their current and past clients. They can exchange information with each other and with bounty hunters. Interesting site on an oddball topic.
NOTE: Readers can search several years' worth of On Computers columns at oncomp.com. Bob and Joy can be contacted by e-mail at bobschwab@gmail.com and Joy. schwabach@oncomp.com. You can also hear us discuss topics on the radio at blogtalkradio.com/oncomp.
Business, Pages 20 on 08/24/2009