I haven’t really reviewed anything in a while, mostly because I’ve been spending my time writing (when I have time) about Facebook and Twitter. The other day though, when I was using my Dropbox, it occured to me that I need to talk about this…since I use it so much.

I work at home a lot and often times I’ll need to transfer files from home to my work computer. In the past I’ve used several different ways to do this: Email the files to myself, put them up on an FTP site, put them on a thumb drive…you name it I’ve probably tried it.

Lately though I’ve been using this service called Dropbox and I love the flexibality and ease of use. Dropbox lets you sync your files online and across computers
(public or private) so that you can access them from anywhere. The beauty is in its ease of use though.

Their web interface is pretty sweet letting you upload files in a batch process or one at a time if you want. Browsing files is easy too with file type icons and uploaded date information for easily locating your files.

I love the desktop interface though. After installing a small program on your computer, Dropbox puts a shortcut to its folder on your task bar. If I want to share a file all I do is drop it in that folder and Dropbox does the rest. Really, it couldn’t be easier. Here’s the kicker though, it AUTOMATICALLY updates the other computers that I have Dropbox installed and configured for my account. How cool is that?

For example, I work on two computers here at home. My desktop and my laptop. Sometimes I need to move files from one to the other. All I do is drag the file into my Dropbox folder and I’m done. By the time I get up and move to the other computer, the file is already there waiting for me. That right there is worth it for me. Oh, and it’s also there on my work computer too. Like I said, it updates ALL the computers you have configured for the same account.

There have been a few times where I’m working on a project that has multiple files…and these can be rather large files like audio clips for podcasts or video clips. I can drag all the files into my Dropbox, drive to work, and there they are. I don’t need to log on to an FTP site and download them or open my email and save them someplace…they’re already downloaded to that computer and ready to go.

Also, I can send large files to clients instantly. And they don’t need to sign up for Dropbox to get the files either, which is huge. I can’t tell you how many times a client has been impressed with the fact I can send them files that other people would have to FedEx to them on CD.

So if you’re looking for a kick ass app that will allow you to share anything from a text document to very large files I suggest you check out Dropbox. If you’re like me and you need to share files across multiple computers, or maybe you need to send large files to clients you definately need to check this out. It will make your life so much easier.

Have you tried Dropbox? Post a comment here and let me know your thoughts! Try Dropbox

post by Terry Smith, contributor

1000 Wildcat Canyon Rd
Lakeside, CA, 92040
619-387-7018

Barona Golf Course

This course is located on the Barona Indian reservation approximately 40 minutes from downtown San Diego.

Barona is a “links” style layout with very few trees and has native grasses between holes that can eat errant shots quickly. In our opinion, this is one of only a few courses in San Diego that can be considered as being able to hold a PGA Tour event. Indeed, the Nationwide Tour finals was held here in 2007. At over 7000 yards from the tips, sand everywhere, no adjacent holes, and multiple water hazards, this is an absolute brute of a course. For the less than accomplished golfer, there are 5 sets of tees to shorten things up a bit. Don’t let pride get in your way here, choose the proper tee box for your abilities and you will enjoy the day much more.

Because the layout is located on an Indian reservation, it doesn’t suffer from houses crowding the course at every turn. Indeed, there isn’t one located on the course. The scenery is outstanding with nearby mountains surrounding the entire area. The course itself is moderately flat with some elevation changes thrown in to make things interesting. About the only reason we don’t play here more often is the price. Saturday rates can be as high as $150 with weekday rates running about $100. Play in the afternoon and the price is more moderate. For the money, you get an outstanding experience. Service is excellent, the course is almost always in good condition and management throws in those special extras like range balls, a bag of tees, a divot tool and a ball marker that make you feel special.

Other options at the course include a full size hotel, a large casino and a day spa. You truly can make a long weekend out of this resort and not be bored. If you’re looking for a golf experience that isn’t often found in Southern California (wide open spaces, no residential encroachment, quiet scenery) and don’t mind paying for it, you should treat yourself to this course.

Update (4/5/2009): We played this course today and yes, it’s still in great shape. However, since it’s not mentioned above, I felt compelled to mention the green’s. In a word: Brutial. The greens are so fast and so hard, keeping a shot on them is almost impossible. Pair that with pin placements near slopes and humps and these greens are almost unplayable. Several very easy putts had the ball rolling 40 feet past the hole (and no, that’s not something we do often). The green conditions easily added 10 strokes on to each score (if not more). We’re not saying don’t play the course…just saying to take the greens with a grain of salt.

This week the PGA Tour is in “sunny” San Diego for the Buick Invitational. I have “sunny” in quotes because it’s actually raining Anyway, the Buick Invitational isn’t typically a huge tournament on tour and that goes double this year since Tiger is still rehabbing his knee.

For us here in San Diego though, it is a big deal. It’s the one time each year the PGA comes to town and plays on a course that I play on all the time. Torrey Pines is a public golf course and while getting on isn’t the easiest thing to do, it’s not impossible.

Following The Buick on Thursday and Friday can be a bit of a challenge though since I’m at work all day. Unfortunately, my work frowns upon me watching tv at my desk all day instead of clicking away at my mouse. Lucky for me, the PGA has thought about people like me and created “Shot Tracker“.

Shot Tracker is a flash application that runs from the pgatour.com website. There are a few different ways to interact with it. You can see the full leaderboard, individual groups on the course or your own “custom picks” of players that you choose.

Several views are available to watch

The full leaderboard view is pretty cool because it’s more than your standard list leaderboard. You can see where each player is and how they’re doing. They even have color and texture tiles for each shot so you can easily tell at a quick glance if the player is in the fairway, rough, bunker or green. It’s perfect for getting a quick check on the leaderboard as you switch between applications on your workstation.

Drill down player by player for all the in depth stats

The real awesomeness comes when viewing an individual player. You can drill down to each player and see their shot-by-shot round. You get key stats like how far the shot was, how far to the hole, as well as overall stats like Driving distance, driving accuracy, greens in regulation and a whole host of other stats. Every aspect of the game is detailed and displayed in several conveinant outputs.

I was able to keep up with the whole tournament throughout the day, and even got more than those watching on TV since the coverage didn’t begin until 3 hours in. 

There were only a couple of negatives for me. The connection was interrupted a few times and gave me a “notice” that really didn’t tell me much as a user. A quick refresh of the page and I was up and running again. Oh, and even though it was a flash app, it remembered my view so I didn’t have to go clicking down to it after a refresh. The other odd part was that I couldn’t see the entire leaderboard when I loaded it up in FireFox, but it worked fine in IE. Not a huge deal, but it’s worth noting.

So if you’re stuck at work on a computer all day and want to keep track of your favorite PGA Tour players… fire up the Shot Tracker and enjoy! It’s the next best thing to being at the course instead of work

Google released their atest version of Google Earth today. The big buzz? Oceans. You can now watch videos of under water adventures inside of Google Earth. Everyone seemed to be excited about this aspect of the new version today. While that’s all well and good… personally, I’m excited about the historical photos. You can now take a section and roll back time to see what it looked like at various intervals. 

My first stop was the campus of San Diego State University. I graduated SDSU in 1999 and in 2002 moved to Denver. When I moved back to San Diego in December of 2006 and drove by the old place… I didn’t even recognize it. The construction around the campus was massave! Now, thanks to Google Earth, I can see exactly when it all happened… as well as some buildings and structures that were built before I got there. Awesome.

If you’re in to historical imagery like I am, you’re going to love the new Google Earth. One word of caution though… it’s still a bit clunky. There’s a lot of “extra” data you can choose to include or not (user notes, 3D buildings, etc.). Just remember that the more data you include, the slower the overall experience will be for you. If it boggs down your system and you seem to be waiting, start checking off those options for a smoother ride.

Next I’ll be checking out the ocean layer aspect of it… but there’s a lot more time traveling I’ll be doing first. Enjoy!

post by Terry Smith, contributor

5201A Village Drive
Oceanside, CA, 92057
(760) 967-8400

Located in the city of Oceanside in northern San Diego county, this relative newcomer to the area has garnered plenty of attention-and rightfully so. This course is truly a gem. We loved it’s varied terrain and overall scenery that changes on every hole. While it’s in a residential area, it’s also adjacent to a protected habitat meaning houses are limited (in most cases) to only one side of the fairway. Furthermore, these houses do not intrude onto the course itself. There’s nothing more we dislike more than houses on a golf course.

The facility is owned by a company called JC Resorts that specializes in more upscale courses. For your money, you get a good layout, outstanding service and excellent conditions. This is not a muni type course, but it’s certainly not the most expensive in the region.

This is not a true beginners course so make sure you bring your game. While relatively short (about 6700 yards), the slope rating can be as high as 140 from the tips. That being said, there are plenty of tee options and a novice (not beginner) can feel at home here.

About the only downfall of this course is it’s location. It’s somewhat away from the traditional metropolitan centers in southern California and can be a bit of a challenge to reach. Plan on about an hour from either San Diego or Orange County. Still, for the extra few minutes it will take you to get to this course, we recommend you do so if you’re in the area.

post by Terry Smith, contributor

2600 Golf Course Dr
San Diego, CA, 92102
619-239-1660

For those traveling to San Diego, this is the closest course to the airport and downtown. It’s located on the eastern edge of famous Balboa Park. The course and clubhouse were both built in 1915, but the course has had some redesign to keep pace with today’s technology.

A look at the 1st hole at Balboa Golf Course

The front nine of this course winds it’s way down into narrow canyons and then moves upward onto a mesa that overlooks the city. The backside offers some outstanding views of downtown and the ocean beyond before winding back toward the clubhouse.

Don’t let the length, slope/rating lull you into thinking this is an overly easy course. Balboa is an excellent example of where these ratings prove they are based mostly on length. There are very few “bail out” areas, not a lot of adjacent fairways, and canyon walls that seem to close in on you from every direction. If you’re a beginner, consider the adjacent 9 hole executive course to hone your skills prior to playing the regulation course.

We do enjoy Balboa and play it often, but it is still a municipal course that can sometimes suffer from lack of perfect conditioning. Unfortunately for Balboa, it’s sister course is Torrey Pines whom it seems garners more money from the city and thus better conditions. That being said, Balboa is close enough to the water that it doesn’t get too scorched in the summer and stays in moderate shape year round. Typically, the greens are in excellent shape.

If you’re looking for a fun day of golf and are up for a bit of a challenge, this is a good choice for the average golfer. Make sure you enjoy a bite to eat or a brew on the patio for some outstanding views of the 18th hole and downtown.

post by Terry Smith, contributor

Mission Trails Golf Course
7380 Golfcrest Pl
San Diego, CA, 92119
619-460-5400

Mission Trails is located approximately 20 minutes east of downtown San Diego and the airport. Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde would be a more appropriate name for this track. This course has some uniqueness to it and has a lot of potential. It offers a little bit of everything like some blind tee shots, drivable par 4’s and some difficult par 3’s. It’s not a particularly hard course, but it can rear up and bite you if you’re not careful.

Mission Trails Golf Course

Unfortunately, this course can suffer from a lack of tender loving care. In the prolonged summer months of San Diego, management can’t seem to get enough water on the course and brown fairways and hard pan become the norm. It’s particularly disappointing as the course could really be a nice track if some money were put into it. If ever there was a course in San Diego that could use a partial makeover, this would be a prime choice. There are some great views of nearby Lake Murray and Cowles Mountain, houses are only on about a third of the holes, and the course is very conveniently located near the center of the county. We’d like to see some water hazards put into play, some lengthening of some par 4’s and possibly a shortening of par 3’s to make room. We also wouldn’t mind seeing a better restaurant put in place to take advantage of the patio that overlooks the 18th hole. Currently only bar food and drinks are available.

Now the good news. The price is fairly reasonable for a full length course. It can be a good choice for a novice golfer making the transition to a more difficult course who is not overly concerned about conditioning. Mission Trails while priced like a muni, is not your standard up and back track and is by no means boring. We really do enjoy this course when there is enough rain to supplement the normal watering.

If you are in San Diego during the winter months from about January through May, the course can be an excellent value and worth your time. From June through December, there are other choices in the area for about the same price that put more emphasis on conditioning and can be more enjoyable.

Everyone likes to travel, and there are tons of sites out there that will help you book and plan ahead for where you’re going. But what about where you’ve been? That’s where FlightMemory.com comes in. A friend of mine (and a pilot) introduced me to FlightMemory.com. It’s a simple idea really–where have I been?

Joining FlightMemory is easy and free (although they have premium options we’ll discuss later). You start by entering in your first flight. The first step is to enter in Airport codes (they have a lookup for those that don’t know them), the date and time of your travel. On the next screen you can enter all your detailed information such as: flight number, airline, aircraft type and even your seat number. There are even places to enter the registration number and aircraft name if you have that information. Convenient drop down menus for airline and aircraft that you’ve recently entered help so that you don’t have to sort through the big list every time. You have to enter flights one at a time, however, they do have an import feature if you want to go that way (for a fee).

One of the cool features they’ve implemented into the data entry portion is the rating system. You can rate your overall impression of the trip as well as your impression of the airport, airline and even the aircraft itself in a zero to five star format. It’s interesting to go back and look at that information in your list.

First step of entering in a flight.

Detailed flight entry

After you’ve entered in a few flights and have enough data for the system to digest, the statistics screen starts to get interesting. On this screen you can see all sorts of qualitative data mashed together such as total distances, total time, and the airports you frequent. They also give you two maps, one of the U.S. and one of the World that show all your flights. There are some fun stats on this page as well such as Earth Circumnavigation and distances to the Moon and the Sun. After just 4 round trips entered, I had almost enough miles to have circled the Earth once (0.78 x). Kinda cool.

Some stats after entering in a few flights.

FlightMemory has a few premium services too. The most prominent being that you can order a full color poster of all of your flights. For frequent flyers, this would be a cool piece to display. You can get a poster showing all your flights you’ve ever taken or maybe just in a single year, complete with some of the same numbers on your statistics screen. The posters range from $32 for a 12×18″ poster to $142 for a 32×48″ poster (plus S/H). Not bad considering the detail you get with it.

They also have a premium membership with a yearly fee of $39. With this membership you get upgraded features such as more detailed statistical information, a journeys tool for you to add in additional information such as rental car, trains, buses, etc., access to the mobile version of the site as well as other features like being able to send personal messages to other FlightMemory users, copy reoccurring trips and create PDF’s of your trips. Oh, and they remove all the ads for premium members too.

So far from my experience, FlightMemory.com is a pretty decent site. It has a ton of functionality for free and the premium plan they offer has enough extra features to warrant the price. The data it gives you is pretty cool and seeing how far you’ve gone all on one screen can be a bit overwhelming. One knock I have on the site though is that it stands alone as an application. As social media is booming, this site has no sharing tools at all. How cool would it be to be able to post your traveled miles this year or that you’ve almost made it half way to the moon on your Facebook or other social media profiles? I’m sure they’d get more traffic to the site and a hell of a lot of exposure that way.

Still, it is a cool site and I can’t wait to see how far I’ve traveled once I get all my flights in there. If you’re a user of the site, or try it out… come back here and post a comment to let me know. I’d love to see what others think of the site. Show of all your cool stats too!

My U.S. map after entering in four trips.

In these days of micro-blogging, status updates, life streaming and sites that let you post messages of 140 characters or less, the next step (now that I’ve been introduced to it ) is an obvious one–video. Recently I was able to get an invite to a new micro-blogging/status update site: 12seconds.tv (currently in alpha).

12seconds.tv picks up where other micro-blogging sites leave off. You still have an avatar to represent yourself, you can still type text, but the main content is 12 seconds of video you post on the site. 12 seconds, no more–no less.

My initial thought when I signed on was that it’s a cool site, but can it translate? After all, some status updates and posts don’t take 12 seconds to digest. Nor do they require you to have a sound card to get the meaning. For example, on my twitter page I can quickly scan a dozen posts for content. If there’s any in particular that catch my eye I can read intently and even respond if I like… all without leaving that particular page. It’s all there in a tight package for me. Efficient use of space.

On my 12seconds home page, I can see the most recent 12 (get the theme here? ) videos of my friends, and if I rollover the thumbnails, I can see the title of that post and the location where it was taken. To actually digest the post I have to click each individual one. On that page, you can then make comments (a form of reply I guess) on the post if you wish.

It’s not exactly the same thing, but then again, I don’t think it’s meant to be. I’m finding that most of the videos I see on 12seconds are much less ‘random’ thoughts as they are entertaining snippets. It’s not a place for to post “I’m eating a hot dog right now” or “I’m watching the Olympics” (which incidentally, I’m doing ). 12seconds posts take a bit more thought and planning, which is where I think the beauty of the service lies.

Since joining, I’ve noticed that the makers of the site are adding things all the time. My favorite of which is the “challenges”. They issue a particular challenge to the audience and ask them to post. The “winner” gets their video featured on the front page. While I haven’t posted anything to the “challenges” yet, I do enjoy watching them a lot.

I’ve also noticed that people are using the service to tell a longer story 12 seconds at a time. Kind of like mini episodes of a series. In a space like Twitter (or similar service) such posts get mixed in with the clutter and can get lost in the shuffle, especially if there are long periods of time between each post. With 12seconds though, once you click on a post, they make it very easy to view any previous or later videos from the same person.

Overall I’m really enjoying the service. When I was first told of it as being “Twitter but with video” I was kind of skeptical, that is until I realized that it’s not really like Twitter at all. The video’s that get posted by my friends have made them seem closer now. More ‘real’. Not only can I see them (yeah Twitter has Twitpic), but I can hear them too… and that makes the service pretty powerful. Keep up the good work guys! Sorry this post will take longer than 12seconds to read

Social Media is great. There are tons of web sites for you to share every aspect of your life in every possible way. However, it can be a bit confusing to keep up with all those web sites. If you spend too much time on one, will you be neglecting the others? Sure there are plug-ins for FireFox and some for IE, but what if your browser itself actually catered to all your social networking needs? Enter the Flock web browser.

Flock is a fairly new browser to the market. Though it’s young, Flock has already received some rave reviews with awards from SXSW, CNet and The Webby Awards.

It’s just another browser right? Wrong. Instead of using plug-ins or addons for connecting with your social networks, they’re integrated into the flow of using the Internet.

Right away you’ll notice some buttons below the typical navigation area. Clicking a button in this area will bring up a side bar to scratch your social itch. Want to know what all your friends are up to? Click the “People” button and you’ll see status updates from all your friends on Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Pownce, YouTube and a many others. You can change your status right from the side bar too!

It doesn’t just stop at status though. Say one of your friends posted some photos (or video). The “Media” link next to their profile pic will be highlighted. Click that and the photos will load in a media bar directly above the web page you have open. That’s pretty slick! Oh, and see a photo in that media bar that you want to share with another friend? Click and drag that photo to any profile box in the side bar and done… shared!

That’s not all Flock offers either. They have a web mail notify tool and one-click link to your email, an RSS reader built in, Favorites, Web clipboard, photo uploader (that will resize and rename photos on the fly), you can even write and publish to your blog all from the browser interface.

Maybe you’re thinking at this point, “Sounds pretty good, but I’m a FireFox user and I can’t live without my FireFox addons.” Well, if that’s you then you’re in for a treat. Since Flock is written with the Mozilla engine, most of the addons for FireFox will work perfectly in the Flock browser.

Flock is the first browser to take the social network arena and fully integrate it into the UI. There are some things I think it could do better (support for a few more sites) and some things that I’m still loyal to “the brand” for (I don’t think I’ll be leaving Google Reader any time soon, sorry), but I’ve been using Flock for about 6 weeks now and already it’s become a favorite over FireFox and definitely Internet Explorer.

With IE8 on the horizon and FireFox3 just being released, it will be interesting to see what affect Flock will have on the browser wars. Social media isn’t going away anytime soon, so the big dogs might take a peek over their shoulder or they could get left in the dust.

Head over here to download Flock and try it for yourself, then post a comment and tell me what you think.