These past few months, I’ve been using a cool resource called Evernote. It’s one of those grass-catcher programs that lets you throw everything into the hat… then forget about it ’til you search for it later. (Alas, I’m mixing my metaphors.) There are iPhone apps, and even apps for Windows Mobile (it’s about time!). You can use a website to access your stuff, or run a program like an application on your laptop. You can forward an email into your own account of Evernote — and wait, there’s more. Any time you forward a PDF, Evernote ‘reads’ it and recognizes the characters on the entire PDF! … which means, it now becomes incredibly accessible to you for whole-text “needle-in-a-haystack” searches. For more info on Evernote, or to use the free version, check out…

http://www.evernote.com

Now the base level of Evernote is free. That’s cool. But there are some advanced features (including the PDF scanning capability) that are called “Premium” features and they set you back something like $25 a year. (Still a deal!) But if you want, they’ve given me 10 free invitations (I know — Christmas; what can I say) so I can ‘invite’ 10 people to free premium months. So here’s the way we’ll do this. In the link below (immediately under this item), find this item on Brigada and leave an *anonymous* message saying you’d like the free premium trial run. When you leave the anonymous message, you’ll have to provide your email address to the system (which I will see) but none of it will show up on the ‘public’ website (that the world sees). I’ll pick the first 10 email addresses and those folks get a free ride. So — if you’re interested, better hurry. All it takes is 10 takers and my invitations are gone. This deal expires January 11th.