Wouldn’t it be nice sometimes while sitting at your cubicle to send people directly to a call-holding hell of your own design? Or maybe you’d just like to make your small outfit sound like a Fortune 100 heavyweight on the phone.
Enter On-Hold Plus 4000, a $250 gadget that hooks into the digital PBX-type phones at most workplaces and lets the owner produce up to 32 minutes of audio programming that plays while a customer or other victim is on hold.
The device is designed primarily to plug into workplace phones, and it comes with software that lets you create custom messages. At 32 minutes, this is far more than the brief greetings that bosses usually dole out to workers:
“Press 1 if you are neurotic; press 2 if you are depressed; press 1 and 2 if you have bipolar disorder; if you are paranoid, we already know what you are going to press. …” (www.onholdplus.com)
SOLOVISION SECURITY SCREEN
Holographic covering prevents prying eyes from leering at your naked PDA
Relief comes at last for those of us who want to keep hidden from prying eyes the innermost secrets that we keep on our Palms, Handspring Visors and Pocket PC hand-held personal digital assistants.
In a crowded waiting room or a row of airplane seats, taking out one’s Palm gives anybody within eyeshot a look at the screen.
And with nothing else to do, that’s what your seatmates mainly do–check out your Palm.
Nobody will ever again read your Palm if you paste on an $8 Solovision Security Screen, a square of sticky-backed plastic ingeniously inscribed with a holographic design. The screen cloaks your device when viewed from the side better than a Klingon space cruiser.
They come in sets of two for $16 at www.ttools.com.
EMEDIA BASS METHOD
Daddy sang bass; Mama played CD
Peter Frampton calls it “the ultimate way to learn how to play guitar.” Even this lead-footed, tin-eared, rhythm-challenged oldster was turning out meaningful riffs not more than an hour after firing up eMedia Bass Method, a $60 Mac/PC CD tutorial just issued by eMedia Music Corp. in Seattle.
The CD uses an included sound generator to handle tuning of one’s bass guitar, and then displays a virtual neck to show fingering and synchronized music notation. You imitate what’s on the screen and, with the help of a built-in metronome, the notes and rhythms flow from your untutored fingers as though you actually could play the danged thing.
The package walks users through the bass parts for 200 pieces ranging from Dylan to Dvorak, and playing along becomes a real toot. Make that a real strum.
After all, the hardest part of playing the bass is remembering that somebody else gets the melody parts. (www.emediamusic.com)
