January, 2002      Diablo Blue     Page 11

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Tell Me About It

Do you need to get some work done? Tired of hassling with Windows and exhausted from installing all those upgrades? Try The Couch, a hot new product from the cool streets of Beverly Hills. Within six hours of using The Couch, you'll be ready to give up your computer and get a life. Features include WAVs with appropriate and supportive responses, dynamic help screens so you can determine your weekly progress, and a handy dialer for those late night crises. Helpful Wizards are also available to guide you--step by step--through those times when you're nagged with insecurities and doubts. And if that's not enough, you get valuable look-up tables with the most common psychiatric disorders, such as Schizophreniform, Paranoid Schizophrenia, Psychogenic Fugue, and the Writers Disorder, also known as Attention Deficit Disorder, to name just a few. The list price for The Couch is $150 an hour but I've seen interns and psych assistants working for as little as $50. The Couch, Psyche International, (800) LAY-DOWN, www.psyintl.com

Just Expense It!

Face it: no one likes the hassle of filling in expense accounts. But there's no getting around it, especially if you want to get reimbursed. Fortunately, there's FillUp 2.0, a handy macro for getting your spreadsheet up to speed, quickly and easily. All you need to do is give FillUp a starting range, say, $150. Within seconds, FillUp works backwards, breaking the amount into your spreadsheet categories, including travel and entertainment, transportation, and lodging, to name just a few. The program's smart, using odd numbers, such as $5.21, $16.63, and $35.17, and the total is never an even number. Don't have a spreadsheet with categories? No problem because FillUp will do it for you, in over seven professional categories including sales rep, attorney, and journalist. What's more, FillUp even prints receipts, from taxi and airline tickets to restaurant stubs and itemized hotel portfolios. Macros available for Excel, Quattro Pro, and Paradox. List Price: $75. FillerUp Corp, (212) 555-fill, www.fillerup.com

Lickity Split Replies

It's a fact of life: In today's economy, many people are out of work. At the same time, busy executives barely have time to read, never mind answer, their electronic mail. But with QuickReply, there's a quick solution for everyone. QuickReply is a remote communication package that actually pays you to log onto an executive's e-mail service, read the messages and respond with bright, business-like repartee. There's more free time for the executive and you get a couple of bucks in your pocket. The program comes complete with a built-in spell checker, thesaurus, and grammar checker, and includes plenty of sample responses. Don't know an executive? It's easy. Just choose from a list of high quality execs supplied by QuickReply. Price includes payment of $1 per message processed. List price: $149. Total Solutions, (415) 555-quik. www.quickreply.com

Give me an A+

Want to help your child get into college? Forget about Encarta. Ignore Comptons. What you need is Make the Grade, an extraordinary CD-ROM based program that actually writes your child's reports and term papers. Here's how it works: From an easy to use menu, you--or your child--answer some simple questions. Start with "What grade do you want?" Then, "What's the subject or topic of the report?" One more. "What grade of school are you in?" Choose from writing styles including casual, terse, convoluted, and scientific, to name just a few. Finally, decide how many pages you'll need. Make the Grade searches through the CD-ROM's 200 gigabytes of highly indexed, compressed data. The program quickly finds the facts and details about the chosen subject, keeping your child's profile in mind. In no time flat, your child has a polished report ready to go. What's more, Make the Grade discovers items even the professor probably doesn't know. The professional version creates theses, dissertations, and newspaper and magazine articles. List price: $79; Professional $249. MG Systems, (213) 555-grad. www.makethegrade.com

 

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