By Joe Granese
September 27, 2006

Paying a good deed forward

There are still Good Samaritans in this world. I know that to be true, and I’ll tell you how. Right after the Labor Day weekend, when the area received a good soaking from Ernesto, I chose the first reasonably nice day to take a little jaunt into the country.

Regular readers know that two of my favorite pastimes are geocaching and birding, and both of these were on the day’s itinerary. Our search for shorebirds and a new geocache led us to Faunce Landing in Absecon, where we found ourselves driving on an unpaved road along a little channel.

I probably could have been paying more attention. When I went to turn the car around to follow the GPS signal, I wound up driving into a soft spot and sinking my car up to the frame. My companion works on the information technology staff of a major metropolitan hospital, and spent most of the adventure on the phone walking a user through a lapse of talent.

While I was pondering my situation, a young man arrived in a big 4-by-4 truck. He said he’d be able to get me out and left to get a shovel. While he was gone, another young man arrived in a similar truck. When the first fellow returned, they put their heads together. Working as a team, with me sitting in the car like an empty kiddie seat, they hooked a rope to my tow hook and yanked me out of the mud with a pop.

One fellow left before I could even thank him. The other accepted my thanks and rode off into the sunset. I was thrilled with their generous assistance, and saved from a truly ruined day. One in a Ford and one in a Chevy, they worked together to help two strangers in a jackpot. Muddy but happy, we returned to our scheduled activities unfazed.

That, in case you missed it, is a good deed. I’ve been itching to return the favor somehow since it happened, and I’m going to take the opportunity right now. Here are a couple of websites that can save you some money, some time, and maybe even your precious data.

www.aol.com 

I’m sure you didn’t expect to find this URL on the list. Follow me, and maybe we’ll be able to put a few bucks in your pocket. America Online is still one of the largest Internet destinations on the planet. For years and years, millions of users paid $21.95 per month for access to the AOL network. Many of them still do.

Things haven’t been all that robust for them lately, though, and that’s where the savings comes in. On Aug. 2, 2006, in an effort to save AOL, parent company Time Warner announced that it would begin to give away the AOL e-mail and Web services for free.

That does not include dial-up service, but it can still save you a pocketful of money. If, like so many users, you got broadband connectivity from a source other than AOL, say the telephone company or an exorbitant cable provider, you may never have changed your AOL account. That means you could still be paying that $21.95 per month instead of either the lower cost bring-your-own-connection account or the currently available freebie.

Pick up the phone or contact AOL online. If you’re using cable or DSL to connect to them, ask the company to stop billing you, and they’ll actually do it. You will be able to keep your existing e-mail address and not even have to change your online settings. It’s a great deal, and the best thing that AOL has ever done. It may not be around in a year, but for today, www.aol.com is the proud owner of five free Good Samaritan spiders.

www.smartpctools.com

Here’s a common crisis. Say you’ve been working at your computer for 12 hours completing an important document. Maybe you’ve been working on your family genealogy project or building an album of irreplaceable photos. Tired and unsure, you accidentally delete the document, blasting away all your work and any chance you have of recovering it.

What to do? Many, many people spend an enormous amount of money paying professional file recovery services to bring back their work. Others just take the loss. Some buy expensive data recovery tools and muddle through it themselves. Now is the time to prepare for just such a crisis, by downloading Smart Data Recovery, an absolutely free file recovery program.

The trick is to get it now. Once you’ve deleted a file accidentally it is absolutely imperative that you do NOT write to the drive again until your file is recovered. That means that you cannot download the program when the problem occurs; you must do it in advance. Then, when disaster strikes, just run the program and tell it where to look for the deleted files. That includes your digital camera’s memory card, too!

This program can be a true blessing to someone who has just deleted his or her entire thesis, or a child’s homework, or a few dozen MP3s. It’s less than 1 MB in size, infinitely easy to use, and works on any modern Windows system. Go get it now. For making file recovery free and easy, www.smartpctools.com grabs five Good Samaritan spiders.

www.junkfax.org 

We all hate spam. In fact, the one thing I hate more than e-mail spam is fax spam. I have addressed this problem several times in the past with great results, but the game is always changing. Old removal tactics don’t always work today, and we all know that calling those remove lines just verifies you as a live mark and gets your number put on a more expensive list.

The folks at JunkFax are dedicated spam haters. The site offers the most complete collection of anti-fax spam techniques on the Internet, and is a constantly updated resource generated by people who really, really want to stop fax spam. Think about this the next time you spend $40 to put a new cartridge into your plain paper fax machine.

They tell you how to find out who is spamming you and how to get them to stop. They have a library of sample faxes that you can match with the ones you receive to help you get removed. They even do their own undercover work to get directly to the individuals doing the spamming. These people are truly dedicated.

Best of all, they can get you in contact with the two biggest fax spam senders in the country. With a couple of simple calls, I can assure you that the volume of fax spam in your machine will drop appreciably. Don’t take my word for it. Visit the site now and check it out. It will ask for your e-mail address before letting you in on the best method, but it’s a price I gladly paid. For helping to defeat the fax spam demon, www.junkfax.org gets on the list for five Good Samaritan spiders.

This is my good deed. These three sites can save you $22 per month, help recover a critical lost file, and free up your fax line. Check them out, and tell your friends. What goes around comes around. Ask a good friend of mine who, after being assessed $75 in cash to have his car pulled out of a New England snow bank, found a large, expensive tow chain still attached to his bumper when he got home. It probably cost the towing guy about $75 to replace it. Too bad my Ford- and Chevy-driving Good Samaritans were not in the neighborhood. If you’ve got a good deed to share, send it to me at Granese@juno.com. Remember, what goes around comes around.