In tonight's showdown in the Australian Open 2012, Roger Federer won against 19 year old Australian Favourite Bernard Tomic in straight sets. However, the question is, are these two tennis players related? Just have a look at the similarities between Tomic’s younger sister and Federer’s wife.

Sara Tomic just looks like a younger version of Mirka Federer, agree?

(Images Via Nj.com, Adelaide Now, Zimbio, Telegraph)

For most of last year I was working on a project with 3 other people developing a web portal for a non-profit organisation as part as my University degree. I was the team leader and today I want to share some of my strategies I used in managing the team, our files, documents, and other project management tasks.

The Project Overview

Before I get started, I will tell you a little about the project so it gives you some information about why I used the below tactics.

As I said above, I was working with three other peers developing a web portal using SharePoint for a non-profit organisation as part of my University degree. The project was a year long, and had a few stakeholders:

• Our Team – which consists of me and three others
• The Client – the non-profit organisation we were building the SharePoint Portal for
• Mentor – is a SharePoint Expert who was hired by the client to become their IT Department and to mentor us and offer help along the way
• CRM Team – A team who was building another system that would interact with SharePoint
• University – Our lectures and teachers who we saw for 4 hours every week

Our SharePoint Portal had four requirements:

• Document and Content Management – to hold thousands of documents in a centralised repository for the organisation
• Help Desk – A central contact spot for employees to get help regarding business enquiries or technical support
• Web Forms – To allow employees to submit their annual reports, lookup datasets (such as contact information for the hundreds of premises and clients). The data will be stored and retrieved from CRM
• Connectivity – successfully integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 data with SharePoint

Therefore, over the year, we had to plan, develop, and implement this system, as well as document everything. We had to produce about 10 pieces of separate documentation – requirements specification, design specification, testing plan, user documentation and a few others.

Keep in mind, that as well as working on this project, I also had another 3-4 subjects that we each were completing, so another 36-48 hours on top of the project.

How I Managed The Team

For those who know me, I like making this as simple and easy as I can possibly can and I hate doing things that I don’t have to do, or I try to find an easier way to do things.

Running Meetings: A 3 Hour Drive or Skype?

One of the things I didn’t like about this project was that the client’s location was a 70km drive away, which was a 2 to 3 hour round trip depending on traffic. Since I was still studying, I didn’t really have 3 hours to drive to the clients place for a 1 hour meeting – it wasn’t worth it. So instead, we setup our meetings using Skype.

Skype was great. We had 5+ people join our Skype meetings, although the quality of being in person compared to on Skype isn’t the same, the time and money it saved travelling was well worth it. Skype actually worked quite well, and there wasn’t many dropouts or lost audio.

Although we did have in person meetings, they were only done when we had to discuss issues with the users of the system.

For our team meetings, we were lucky enough to have a 2 hour timeslot that all four of us were free, and were at Uni, which worked out great.

Emails: Send one email to four people all the time is annoying

Emails can be a bit of a pain to manage and can upset communication between multiple people. Since my team was small, and we were all closely working together, it was very inefficient for the client to be emailing all four of us all the time. It would be a pain to send one email to four different people all the time, and because of the number of emails we would send on a daily basis, we didn’t want to use our personal emails or our University Email account.

So what I did, on the very first day was to buy a domain and setup Google Apps on it. I gave each team member their own email address (they could forward to their personal one if they wanted to, or check it however they want), and setup a group email account which was This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . This allowed internal communications between all four of us very easy as we just had to send an email to the team email address, and it made the clients life easier as they could send an email to one address and it would reach all four of us, and one of us would respond (usually me, because I was the client liaison). Having each person receive a copy of the email is good as everyone knows what is happening, instead of one person receiving it, and forwarding it on to others, which by then, may be too late.

Managing Documents

Since this project required a lot of documentation, which each of us had to contribute to it, it would be inefficient to send email copies around. This will just be a mess with different versions, and it’s easy to lose track on whose turn it is to work on it.

Therefore, we used two systems – Google Docs and DropBox.

We used both of these systems differently. We used Google Docs for collaboration and writing the bulk of the documentation. Google Docs allowed us to all work on the document at the same time. So one of us could be working on the Help Desk specification, and the other on the Forms. It didn’t create any conflict or duplicate documents. The only thing Google Docs wasn’t good at was formatting and creating styles as Microsoft Word was – so this is where DropBox came in handy.

We created a Shared Team folder that all of us had access to and we used it as a central document and file repository. The folder had a section each team member could leave documents that they were currently working on (to help with visibility), and a team folder which held all our final documents, drafts and other team documents.

We would first write a document up in Google Docs and once all the content was done, we’d paste it into our Microsoft Word Template, made it look professional, saved it in DropBox, and sent the PDF version to the client. We would then archive the Google Docs copy.

This process worked really well, as once it went into DropBox, we didn’t really need to edit it again, and if we did, usually only one personal would be editing it at a time. If multiple people did edit the DropBox file, DropBox would create file conflicts, which was a major hassle, especially when it occurred hours before a deadline. We really had to try hard to finish the document in Google Docs first.

We also used this method when writing our meeting minutes. There was a shared document on Google Docs for writing the minutes that everyone could read and contribute too (we all had laptops in our meetings), then at the end of the meeting, it was tidied up, and stored on DropBox.

What About Microsoft Office Web Apps?

Halfway through the project, I investigated Microsoft Office Web Apps to replace Google Docs. As being Microsoft, you would assume it would save all the formatting and styles and be exactly the same whether being opened in Microsoft Word, or in your web browser. Unfortunately, I assumed wrong. I had two issues, the first one covered in my post titled “Be Careful When Using Microsoft Office Web Apps As You May Lose Data”, and the second issue is that the online Editor has an expandable width while editing, so when you preview it, everything get’s squished or is mumbled up – especially if you have tables in the document. So with this, and experience data loss with Office Web Apps, I stuck with Google Apps.

Warning: Know Your Team Mates!

In this team, the above tools and techniques worked incredibly well. It took a few weeks for everyone to get used to using it, but once everyone got the hang of how to work in this team, it was smooth sailing. However, in the second half of the year, I was also working in another team, for another subject writing a business plan. However, when using Google Docs and DropBox, it just did not work with this other team. The first few drafts of the document where emailed to me and some text written on Google Docs, wasn’t in the final version. By the completion of the document, we had multiple Word Documents, Google Docs had content all over the place, and DropBox was a mess. If you follow this guide, you need to ensure every member of the team does it properly AND they do it from the very start, otherwise things will just spiral out of control.

Project Management

Project Management was one thing our team slightly lacked. We didn’t have the time to create fancy schedules and diagrams.

The University required us to use Liquid Planner, which the University got a free licence for us to use. However, this just created more issues than it solved. The first problem was that it was hard to use and learn. They had tutorials, but they were too long. It just wasn’t simple as compared to something like Base Camp or Podio. If we didn’t use Liquid Planner, we would have failed the subject as it was a hurdle, but the majority of the class (100+ students) all had issues with it. Not just issues with learning how to use it, but seeing other groups’ data in our teams – but this problem was more likely due to misconfiguration by the University staff. To add more to the problem, halfway through the project, they completely redesigned Liquid Planner.

One other requirement we were to do was to record the amount of time that we worked on the project. Liquid Planer did this in away, but it was much easier to just list everything in a Google Docs SpreadSheet. I just created a few columns such as date, minutes worked, what I did, task it was for; and that just worked fine. Since then, on a Microsoft's MSDN Blog post, there was this SpreadSheet, which may be suitable for us to use (which you may be interested in using now).

Keeping Track of Time

For those who regularly need to keep track on where there time goes, it can be somewhat hard to calculate how much time you actually spend on something. You may forget the time you start, or you may get distracted midway through with an email. The whole time tracking situation can be somewhat difficult. However, I came across a good program called Chrometa. You can read my in depth review of here. The only downside is that it is quite expensive. When I started using it, they had a free download link, which no longer works unfortunately. If you are a full time student, you could probably fill out this form and get a free account (if it still works). Nevertheless, it was a pretty decent time tracking program.

Conclusion

To sum up, our team used the following technology tools:

• Google Apps
  • Setup Team Email Address
  • Used Google Docs to write documents
• DropBox: Used DropBox to store documents in one central location everyone can access
• Skype: For conducting meetings to save travel time
• Chrometa: To manage timesheets

The good thing about it, everything was free, which is the way I like things. These tools worked for us. They may not work for you, but they are certainly something to look into to help your team.

So this was my experience managing a team of four. What tools and techniques have you used when managing small teams?

Ever wished to track someone down? To find their address, phone numbers, or their name? It can be quite hard, but you’d be surprised on how easy it can be to find out where someone lives or their phone number; and we can thank the Internet for this. So here is my How To guide on tracking people down online

Before we began

Stalking can be a bit dangerous, and is a little bit illegal, so don’t go overboard with this. The point of this post is to tell you how easy it actually is to find someone. You might want to try some of these tips on yourself as well to see how easy it is for other people to track you down. If you do find too much personal information online, you may want to protect your online identity or remove information from Google.

For this tutorial to work, you do need to know something about this person already. The more you know the better. So here are a few tips to find someone.

Tools To Use

Reverse phone number lookups used to be illegal in Australia, however, there are now a few tools that you can now use where you enter in someone’s phone number, and they tell you the address of the phone number and the name of the person who owns it or lives at that address.

Reverse Australia – Find address and name with phone number

Reverse Australia is a really good tool. Having mentioned this on my Facebook Page, people have said it even lists unlisted or silent numbers. However, to get their address, you need to login with Facebook – the site does seem trustworthy.

When entering a phone number, you get the name of the people or company, the address, what telecommunication company owns the number, and comments from other people. So if you know someone’s mobile or landline number, you can find out where they live, and their name.

Person Lookup – Search by last name or phone number to find name, address and phone number

Person Lookup is another similar tool, but as well as doing a search only by phone number, you can do a search by last name. So if you know someone’s last name, and you want to get their phone number and address, you can use Person Lookup. It may be a little hard if they have a common last name, but if you know the area they live in, you can narrow it down.

Person Lookup is also a good tool, especially when you use it with Google where you can actually find the name and telephone number of someone who lives at a particular address. So if you know where someone lives, you can just Google site:http://personlookup.com.au “33 fake st suburb” VIC 3000 and you’ll get their name and phone number. You may have to play around with the quotes and address – leaving out suburb name or postcodes for example, but you should be able to find the results you are looking for.

White Pages

The White Pages is also helpful as they are the “official” records, but you can only find someone’s phone number if you know their full name and suburb. This is why Person Lookup is very handy as you can search for people by address, phone number or name.

Facebook

Facebook can also be a very helpful tool to help find information about someone. If you know their name you can find their profile information and find information like what school they went to, where they live, and all this information can be used to help with your tracking with the above links. If you don’t know their first or last names, you can use Facebook’s Find Friends feature to find people who live in certain areas, or went to a particular school. However, I wish Facebook developed a service like this, as it would be much more useful.

Pipl

If you can’t find someone on Facebook, try Pipl . Pipl allows you to search by name, location (not address), Email, Username, or Phone number. However, this site is US based, so the phone may not work. But it’s very handy to find someone’s social media accounts if you know there email address or their name.

Use These Tools To Collect Your Information

By knowing how to use these above tools correctly, you can likely track down a person who lives in Australia and get their contact information like phone numbers and address. As long as you know at least two things about them, you’ll have a very high chance on tracking someone down.

In summary:

• To find someone’s phone number if you know their address or name, use Person Lookup
• To find someone’s name or address if you know their phone number, use Reverse Australia or Person Lookup
• To find someone’s Facebook account if you know their email address, use Pipl (or Facebook)
• If you know someone’s name, and want to find their address, use Person Lookup or Reverse Australia
• Have a read of this expanded list on How to find someone online

So the question is, how easy is it to stalk you? Did you successfully find out where someone you wanted to stalk lives? Are you now worried about the information you just found? Here are some more tips on how to protect yourself online.

The news that is going around today is whether Airlines should impose a surcharge for those who are heavier fat. However, I don’t understand why companies impose surcharges – it just hurts their brand. Instead, they should twist it around and make their company look more favourable compared to their competitors.

Last year, Telstra added a $2 surcharge (as most other telecommunication companies now do) to receive paper bills and to pay their bills at the post office. They got so much bad publicity and negative feedback; they decided to remove the surcharge.

My problem is, why do companies add these surcharges? Wouldn’t it be better, in Telstra’s example, to give $2 off a customer’s bill if the elect to receive and pay their bill electronically? Think about it – the money Telstra would save by not having to print and post a paper bill will easily compensate giving $2 off their customer’s bill, and at the same time, it will create a positive image for the company. Not only this, it’s encouraging people to switch as they have a reasonable incentive to switch to electronic payments – $2 off their bill!

At the moment, if I had a choice between receiving an electronic bill and a paper bill, I would elect to receive a paper bill. If they decide to enforce a surcharge to receive a paper bill, I’d be outraged (just like Virgin Mobile did, even when my account was in $30 credit). If they said, “Hey, get your bill via email, and you’ll receive $2 off your bill”, I’d be stocked and would elect for the electronic bill.

The only problem with this, companies won’t make any extra money, because if they impose a surcharge, it’s another way to increase their profits; but is it really worth the boycotts and customer backlash like Telstra received? Imagine Telstra’s image if they decided to give $2 off customers bills for electing to receive their bills electronically than to receive paper bills.

So what are your thoughts on this? Do you agree with me, or should companies impose surcharges like they are currently doing? What’s another alternative? Please share your comments below.

CES 2012 starts today and here’s a list of the live video streams to keep you updated throughout the day.

CES 2012 Live Video Streams

• Twit.Tv – http://twit.tv/
• Engadget - http://www.engadget.com/ces (see video link at bottom of page)
• Cnet TV http://cnettv.cnet.com/#live
• Tested.com http://www.tested.com/chat/
• TheTechBuzz http://www.thetechbuzz.net/live/
• Techchop http://www.techchop.com/2012/01/live-coverage-of-ces-2012-from-tech.html
• TechGeek http://techgeek.com.au/2012/01/08/our-ces-2012-live-schedule/

CES 2012 Live Blogging

• Cnet - http://ces.cnet.com/
• Engadget CES - http://www.engadget.com/ces
• The Verge - http://www.theverge.com/ces
• Mashable - http://mashable.com/follow/topics/ces-2012/

If I find anymore, I will be regularly updating this list. Enjoy CES 2012.

If you are watching CES 2012 on another site, please let me know in the comments.

I have covered Google Easter Eggs before and I have also covered Google Translator Easter Eggs, but I think it’s time for an update to cover some new Google Search Easter Eggs. So if you are looking for a list of fun things to do on Google, here's what you should search for on Google which is my list of Google Easter Eggs!

Let it snow

Type let it snow in Google for snow to cover the screen which you can then write all over it before you press the defrost button.

Tilt or Askew

Typing the word tilt or askew will tilt the entire page.

Recursion

So, did you mean recursion? If you click it, it continues to appear.

Anagram

Did you mean Nag A Ram? I don’t really get it, but if you want to nag a ram with an anagram, be my guest.

Hanukkah

Type in Hanukkah and you’ll get a nice decoration.

Christmas

If you type in the word Christmas, you'll be greeted with a Christmas typed page, just like above.

Hexadecimal, Binary, Octal

If you search for one of these words, you will get the equivalent number in Hexadecimal, Binary or Octal for the total number of pages found.

Zerg Rush

Search for Zerg rush, and try and destroy them all the O's before they take over your search results.

Barrel Roll

Search for Do a barrel roll and your search results will, do a barrel roll.

Other Older Tricks

When Google had the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, it would automatically load the first result. So if you typed in “Gravity”, you’d navigate to this page. Although it’s not a Google site, it’s still fun.

If you haven’t checked out my other posts of the Best Google Easter Eggs or the Best Google Translator Easter Eggs, I suggest you do so.

If you have been following me on Facebook, you would have noticed that I have been posting some great resources on my Facebook page, and I plan to keep it up. So from now on, at the end of every month I will post a collection of all the interesting links I have shared on my Facebook Page.

Since this is the first time, I have crawled through to list everything interesting I have posted to date. So instead of waiting every month for a list of great resources on the web, just Like JackCola.org on Facebook.

• Bundleytic – a collection of great software, for a great price, going to a great cause
• The best 100 Apps
• 53 of the best Tech Blogs out there
• What to do when police want to search your digital devices
• YouTube unveils new redesign – which is now live
• Hands on with the new Facebook Timeline – which has just been launched to everyone
• Control multiple PC’s with one keyboard and mouse – there is also Synergy
• Facebook Timeline could wreck your relationship – Yes, I was mentioned on Life Hacker Australia
• The new Facebook feature could embarrass you
• Pipl – search for people on the web by name, email, location, username or phone
• How to get a job in tech
• Network Neutrality -  A guide to the OPEN internet – also covered on Hungry Beast
• 7 reasons Facebook should not be blocked at work
• Take The Lollipop – A scary video personalised with your Facebook information
• YouTube: Life in a day – a video of user submitted content of what happened on July 24th 2010 around the world
• How SMS is changing the world
• Improve your productivity: Windows 7 Keyboard shortcuts (Windows Vista)
• How supermarkets trick you into spending more money
• Aussie hacks Siri to automate home
• 24 of the funniest ways to die
• Party Trick: Suspend water without a cup
• Inside Google search
• Facebook Memology: A Year of talking in 2011
• You have downloaded: Find out what you have torrented
• Street view footage of Japan after floods
• Nearmap – Up to date satellite imagery of Australia
• Google Zeitgeist 2011
• How a Facebook scam works
• What is SOPA and why it will destroy the internet
• A funny female Japanese prank

There will be plenty more great resources, links and humour in 2012. If you have found something worthy of being shared, please let me know.

I started this website back in August 2009 to be an online portfolio to promote myself. Over the years, when I found an interesting topic, I Blogged about it, and currently I have just over 150 articles, and 15 product review posts – which isn’t really much when you think about it. Nevertheless, this is my hobbies, and I enjoy doing this when I have spare time and not studying.

This year, I have joined a few other Blogs that I occasionally write for:

• TechAU.tv – Written mainly by Jason who I’ve been following since it almost began, but has since added more writers (including myself)
• The Daily Buggle – A site owned by one of my co-workers from MakeUseOf.com when I was writing for them, which I have recently joined.

The other achievements I’ve done this year was holding two competition’s to give away 2 BoB2, 2 Wireless Bridges, and a BoB Lite that iiNet kindly gave to me to giveaway to readers. Also surprisingly, this year I setup both a Facebook Page for JackCola.org and a Google+ Page.

2011 In Stats

Since I launched this site in 2009, it wasn't until the end of December 2010 until the traffic to this site took off, which happened after I merged another site of mine to this one. Then in January, I had the biggest day in traffic I have ever had after I live blogged the QLD Floods as it closely affected me. Then in May, I broke my record again by only 24 visits, which was a 14000% increase of traffic from the exact day last year. This time, I got lots of traffic from Google after Skype installed Easy Bits Go on people's PC's. From then on, I've had a slow, but study increase of traffic. From 1st January to December 18th of 2010 and 2011, I have had over 1000% increase of traffic, which is a great achievements. I hope this trend will continue, and that I get a lot more followers.

The Most Popular Articles of 2011

After Google have published the Zeitgeist list, I thought I would publish my most popular articles for this year.

• Who is the mother in How I Met Your Mother – If you follow the TV show, and you want to know who the mother is; have a read of some of the myths on who it could be. This article catered for 14% of total pageviews for the year
• How to delete and start your Facebook account from scratch – If you are concerned about privacy like I was, why don’t you delete your Facebook account and start over like I did – these were the steps I did. This article catered for 10% of total pageviews for the year
• Get 1GB of Free DropBox Space with DropBox Quest – Although the offer is no longer available, this article provided the instructions to get 1GB of free DropBox space. This article catered for 10% of total pageviews for the year
• The best Google Translator Easter Eggs – Easter eggs are hidden gimmicks in software, and Google Translator has a few of them. Translate a particular phrase from one language to another, and see the jokes the software developers had fun with. This article catered for 7% of total pageviews for the year

Other popular articles include:

• Do not buy a Marc Vincent audio sound system
• A collection of funny things to say to Siri
• Skype installing crapware automatically on your PC
• First look at iiNet BoB2 Modem
• How to stop Telemarketers from calling you

What’s planned for 2012?

Well more great articles of course, but what I think is great, and what you think is great could be two completely different things, so let me know what you want to see more of on JackCola.org by providing me with some feedback, or just send me an email.

Apart from that, I hope to expand the “Learn” section of my site by covering more topics and in more depth (so let me know what you wish to learn about). I am also in the process of relaunching my directory that will contain a great list of resources that anyone can edit (Websites, people, and a few other things). I am also creating a FAQ section so you can find answers to general computer tips and other frequently asked questions. One final thing I have planned is that I am going to be introducing an online store selling products and some of my services that I offer.

So quite a lot will happen in the beginning of 2012, so look out for them, and make sure you Like JackCola.org on Facebook for updates, which I will be making most of my announcements from.

So I really hope you’ve enjoyed 2011, and I wish you all the best for 2012.

Have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Regards,

Jack Cola

They’re called Slurls – Domain Names with the wrong, or unintentional meaning. These domain names don’t mean to be wrong, but if you don’t capitalise the correct work in the domain name, your domain name and website could be a laughing stock. My favourite Slurl would have to be the Australian ISP WeBone.com.au which has since been acquired by iiNet.

So I’ve crawled the world wide web, and create a list of domain names with funny, accidental, double meanings. Check them out:

So what’s your favourite domain name in the list? Have you come across a domain that I’ve missed? Share it in the comments and spread the laughter!