This may be old news to some of you, but I had totally forgotten about my nifty Dropbox account.

The free account allows me to store 2GB’s worth of files on the web. The Dropbox desktop interface handles all the uploading and synchronizing and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The premise is simple:

Have you ever wished that you could access your files from anywhere? We made Dropbox because we were tired of e-mailing files to ourselves or carrying around a USB key.

Your Dropbox account can be accessed from multiple computers. Obviously, that means that you can have access to your project files at work, at home at a client’s site, etc.

Is it secure? According to the folks at Dropbox, “All files are transported over SSL and encrypted using AES-256 (banks use this too).”

All in all, the dozen or so people at Dropbox have done a great job at providing on-the-go file backup & access. What surprised me was to learn that at least three of the Dropbox team members are MIT drop-outs who thought that starting their own company would be more meaningful than finishing their degree (and at least two of the guys only had a year or less to go).

If you’re like me, you like to have some background music while you’re programming, designing, invoicing, etc. In my case, background music helps me tune out distractions — whether I’m in a cubicle at work or in my basement office at home.

That’s why I’m always interested in fidning out about new ways to a) find and b) listen to music. My music, that is. The latest tool to help me find suitable music at a moment‘s notice is called SONGBEAT.

The free download (currently for Windows only) is a search tool and a player all in one. Download and install SONGBEAT, and the rest is quite intuitive. You can search for music by song title, author, album, etc. The search was quite impressive. Searching for tunes from one of my 60’s idols, Donovan (as in Donovan Leitch),  returned a variety of results, including Terri Reid, who did a cover version of Superlungs My Supergirl.

Additionally, you can download songs that SONGBEAT finds for you.

With Songbeat, its not only possible to listen to the results of your search directly from the internet (no need to download before listening) - its also possible, after downloading, to organize and play them in the integrated media player in the Library.

Not bad, eh? Other gems that are hidden in this seemingly simple and quite user-friendly tool are the Mixtape function, the Station (or cassette recorder) function and several other tools (such as transferring to your iPod with one click).

The one thing that wasn’t entirely clear to me — but I’m sure I will find out as time progresses — was the benefit of the $29.99 upgrade. There is some talk about “unlimited downloads” and being able to “download 25 times for free,” but other than that, there was very little persuasive upgrade information available on the web site.

Addendum: Perhaps it’s just me and my Windows XP OS, but after a while, I encountered a bunch of errors when I tried to search for stations.

After dismissing all the debug information and shutting down SONGBEAT, the music was still playing, and only closing the SONGBEAT process, by way of Task Manager, finally made it all go away.

For about two years, I’ve been subscribing to various online job search engines. You know, just to keep an eye out and see what’s in demand.

At any rate, every now and then, I see something awe-inspiring, similar to the following:

Say what? The perfect opportunity for the right candidate! Unlike the perfect opportunity for the wrong candidate. Or any other permutation, involving the words perfect opportunity and right candidate.

Then again, it’s a rough economy, and those twenty-something hot-shots from the recruiting firm are running out of ideas.

What are your favorite phrases from job ads?

It is Friday, and most of us creative types deserve a good diversion every now and then. How’bout Streaming Museum?

Basically, artists and innovators exhibit hip and happening stuff — ranging from music to stories to film excerpts and lectures — that’s going to be displayed in cyberspace and public space on seven (7) continents.

Among the exhibitors are Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, James Nachtwey, John Cage (whom I interviewed back in 1992), Agnes Denes, Buckminster Fuller, Jacob ter Veldhuis, Anni Rapinoja, Brian Mackern and several others.

Currently showing is “Artists and Innovators for the Environment” Part One.

Enjoy your Friday! 

JR.com is currently selling refurbished Wacom graphics tablets for $39.99.

The Wacom UCTE440 Graphire 4×5 Graphics Tablet is a 4×5 inch graphics tablet that includes Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and more. It also includes the Pressure Sensitive Pen & Cordless Mouse, is ideal for drawing & painting and comes in metallic blue.

The graphic pen with eraser has 512 levels of pressure sensitivity for natural brush control. Flip it over and it acts as an eraser in such software programs as MS Word and Photoshop. By the way, the tablet comes with free copies of Color Efex Pro 2 GE, Corel Painter Essentials 2, Evernote Plus and JustWrite Office 4.

According to Jr.com’s web site, This Wacom UCTE440 has been Factory-Refurbished to perform as if it were new. It comes with a 1-Year Warranty from Wacom.

As seen on TV. Extreme PC Garage is giving away free T-shirts. As long as supplies last. Hop on over to their web site and sign up. It’s relatively painless. Enter your name and address, then answer a few questions about the show.

You have seen the show, right? It’s a program made by gamers for gamers. The premise is to build the most “awesomest” gaming PC, using the hottest hardware, the latest accessories and gadgets and matching all of that to a lucky person’s unique gaming style. The show proclaims that their only rule is: There are no rules!

The end result? One lucky gamer (and it could be you) will witness the transformation of lackluster PC into a “killer one-off custom screamin’ hot gaming machine.”