Future Me

Future Me is a neat little website where you write yourself a letter about goals you plan to accomplish for the future or whatever you want to write about. You set an email date and Future Me will email your letter to you. At that point, you can revisit the letter to check for any accomplished goals. Neat, huh? You can also get Future Me as an app on the iPhone.

Future Me can also be found on Facebook and Twitter too. To date, there have been almost 2 million Future Letters written. Click This now to start writing to your future.

I think it would be awesome for students to try this tool and have it emailed to them one or so years later. In the midst of trying to find a picture to go with this post, I stumbled across a young person who did this as a student in high school about 5 years ago. I read his post and found it funny that he thought the idea was pointless but still he compared what he had written to what was going on in his life right now.  Although at the time he really didn't want to do the assignment, I think it's a great tool to get students thinking about the future. I emailed Jacob with not much hopes from hearing from him but to my surprise, I got a reply in about an hour. I asked him a few questions in my email and his responses are a much-needed reminder for educators to make sure they are well-prepared for their classes and that we show as much enthusiasm as possible when teaching. If we aren't excited about a lesson than how can we expect are students to be?!?

Jacob wrote:

The only thing I remembered about the class: 1.) that I wrote the letter to myself, and 2.) I would have rather been in other classes. From what I can recall, I would say it had good intentions, but it was poorly implemented. I think if the teachers were more on-board with the idea, and the lessons were better prepared, I would have found it useful.

He continues to write:

I am glad I wrote the letter though, even though I think half of it was just garbage text I wrote to take up time and space ("remember Heroes?" for example). It made me remember the ambitions and goals I had back then. And even though my life didn't turn out like I had planned, I'm very happy with where I am now.

Thanks Jacob, for your time and input. I hope it's a simple reminder to us educators that it's also our attitude that matters and not just the kids.

Check out Jacob Low's Dear Future Me post here.
Image from Jacob. Please do not copy.

Always Have Your Contacts

Have your ever lost all your contacts? Were you mad with yourself because you didn't have a backup system in place? Try importing your contacts to Gmail, a service of Google (if you don't have an account, it's free) and you'll never have to worry again.

You don't have to get rid of your other accounts, this is just to have a central location for all your contacts. Once you're finished exporting from your other locations, you can import them to your mobile devices. Cool, eh?

Importing from Yahoo!

1. On your Yahoo! Mail page, click Options in the upper-right corner and select More Options.
2. From the list on the left side, click Contacts.
3. Click the "Tools" button just below the Contacts tab.
4. Click "Export".
5. You options are:
• Microsoft Outlook:
• Netscape/Thunderbird:
• Yahoo! CSV:
• vCard Single File: (recommended for Palm Desktop users)
• vCard, Zip of .VCF files

Importing from Outlook

1. Click the File tab.
2. Click Options.
3. Click Advanced.

4. Under Export, click Export.

5. In the Import and Export Wizard, click Export to a file, and then click Next.
6. Under Create a file of type, click the type of export that you want, and then click Next.

The most common is Comma Separated Values (Windows), also known as a CSV file.

7. Under Select folder to export from, select the contact folder that you want to export, and then click Next.

 Note    Unless you chose to export to an Outlook Data File (.pst), you can only export one folder at a time.

8. Under Save exported file as, click Browse, select a destination folder, and in the File name box, type a name for the file.
9. Click OK.
10. In the Export to a File dialog box, click Next.
11. Click Finish.

Import from Hotmail

• Select Contacts from the top Hotmail navigation bar.
• Click Print View.
• Highlight the contents of the table (including the headings Name, E-Mail and Phone as well as all your contacts) with the mouse.
• Press Ctrl-C (Windows), Command-C (Mac) or Alt-C (Linux) to copy the table.
• Create a new spreadsheet document in Excel or OpenOffice.org.
• Select Edit | Paste from the menu.
• Look for rows that have the E-Mail column empty. You can sort the data by the column to find and manipulate them en bloc.
• If you have any email addresses in the first, the Name column, cut and paste them to the second, the E-Mail column.
• In the E-Mail column, remove all whitespace characters.
  • In Excel, right-click in an email field and select Column | Trim from the menu.
  • In OpenOffice.org, you can search for "[:space:]+$" (excluding the quotation marks), making sure Regular expressions is checked under More Options, and replace it with nothing.
• Select File | Save As... from the menu.
• Make sure you use CSV (Comma delimited)(*.csv) or Text CSV (.csv) or a similar format involving "CSV" for saving the file.

Now you can import your contacts and their email addresses from the saved .csv file to your desired email program or service.If you want to sync your phone with your Gmail account, click this.

Learn how to quickly add a signature to your emails in Outlook. This mini-tutorial walks you step-by-step on how-to add text, images and links and how-to change your font.

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