Originally Posted July 28 2008

Like many of you, I use iTunes to save and store my music collection.  In addition to the CDs that I purchased, I have several that I created and friends had given to me.  When they got imported into iTunes they show up as 'Track 1', 'Unknown Artist' etc.  not to mention the missing album art.

I was poised to spend the better part of the afternoon listening to each song and manually filling-in what I knew about it when I found a very handy program that will do this automatically!  It will even download missing album cover art.  The best of all its free!

The program is TuneUp for iTunes (for Windows).  Once you download and install it, it will run next to iTunes.  You can then drag and drop any song and it will automatically fill-in the information including the album cover!

I mentioned that it is free but there is a catch – Your are limited to 500 songs (including album covers) and up to 50 album covers.  After that you will have to pay-up.

TuneUp can be downloaded from: http://www.tuneupmedia.com/

My experience is that I was able to find almost all my missing information for my 15GB music collection.  TuneUp was accurate, but it is not 100%.  It wasn't able to label all missing information and it did mislabel a few songs.  Overall, it did fill-in about 300 songs which was great!

As part of my services I can setup your iTunes collection on your computer to play on your stereo without the need of an iPod.  Just give me a call at 512-451-9720 or email me to schedule your appointment!

Originally Posted July 6 2008

This three day weekend reminds me of a question that I am frequently asked, 'How do I setup an 'Out of Office message' in Outlook?'  I am a little reluctant to share the process for reasons I will explain a little later.  But, depending on how your e-mail is setup there are a few different ways.

If you use Microsoft Outlook and are in a company that has an Outlook Exchange Server (a piece of software your IT guys use to manage your company's emails), you can simply setup your Out of Office message in Outlook by:
1. Tools > Out of Office Assistant

If you don't have this option then you have to setup your Out of Office Assistant a different way.  Essentially, you have to log in to your e-mail management web page and create the message in there.  Each service has its own process.  Here are a few links to help.

GMail - Vacation Responder
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=25922

Network Solutions - Auto Responder
http://customersupport.networksolutions.com/article.php?id=326

Go Daddy - AutoResponder
http://help.godaddy.com/article/369

Yahoo - Vacation Response
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/basics/basics-52.html

The reason I am apprehensive to have people turn-on an Out of Office message is because your message will be sent to everyone including spammers.  So in your absence, you can be notifying a spammer that your email address is a live and valid address.  This is not so much of a problem if you (or your IT department) have some type of anti-spam protection.

The other reason is because of security.  Since so many people work from their homes, why tell everyone that you will be out of the office until ___?

As a reminder, be sure to turn-off your responder when you get back into the office.

That's it!