The latest version of Parallels is now out of beta and available for download. There are some great new features in this version and is definitely worth the free upgrade! If you don’t already own Parallels, it is fantastic software that is worth a purchase.

For the first time in my working career, I find myself unemployed! I currently have a couple of job offers on the table and have put my name in the hat for an amazing position at an incredible company! So until I figure out which opporunity is going to work out for me, I am available for short-term contract/freelance work.

I have close to 10 years experience in the web development industry. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably have a good idea about the technologies I like to work with.  If you would like more information about my skills, please check out my profile on LinkedIn.

What type of project would get me excited?  Well anything involving Flex 2.0 (preferred), Ruby on Rails or PHP/MySQL would do the trick!  If you have a project of between 2 to 3 weeks in duration, drop me a quick email at jim.rutherford@digitalmediaminute.com.

Stan Schroeder from Frantic Industries recently listed the Services he’d keep using if they weren’t free. His list was in response to Google’s announcement that Google Apps Premier Edition was being provided as a paid service. So it got me thinking about some free apps that I use on a regular basis that I would pay for if they were no longer free.

In the category of web-based services…

1. Wordpress - I’ve been a Wordpress user for almost two years now, and in my opinion it is the best of the three blogging tools I have used.
2. Google Reader - helps me manage and keep up-to-date with the 300+ feeds that I subscribe to. Being web based, I can check my feeds from any one of the three computers I use.
3. Pageflakes - My custom homepage/widget service. I find it easy to use and has a good selection of widgets that I find useful.
4. Feedburner - Serves all the feeds from this site and hundreds of thousands of others. On top of serving your feeds, they offer other great services like analytics, feed promotion and optimization.
5. Techmeme - One of the only sites I visit multiple times per day, it constantly satisfies my need for the latest and greatest technology related news.
6. PopUrls - An aggregator that lists top items from most of the popular content aggregation services like digg.com, del.icio.us and slashdot.
7. MXNA - Adobe has a great news aggregator that aggregates 1273 feeds from user’s of Adobe’s software. If you develop or design with Adobe software you can monitor specific products like Apollo, Flex and PhotoShop. Note - Adobe has a newer product called myFeedz. I haven’t used it too much yet, but find it to be not quite as targeted towards development as MXNA.
8. Text Link Ads - although technically not a free service, I have found that this service is the easiest service to help monetize a blog. In fact this service works so well, I wish I had started using it long ago!

In the category of free desktop software…

1. Aduim - (OSX only) I love this IM client! Handles most IM protocols and has some nice features for logging chats.
2. Firefox - (cross platform) Well I would probably never pay for a web browser, but if I really had to, Firefox would be my choice!
3. VLC Media Player - (cross platform) Even on the Mac, I have yet to find a video it couldn’t handle.
4. Aptana - (cross platform) If you do any AJAX development, you must check out this Eclipse based editor. Take a quick peek at their screencasts to quickly discover why this tool is so great.
5. Jungle Disk - (cross platform) A great client for backing up your data to Amazon’s S3 storage service (note - S3 is not free but is relatively inexpensive for online backup).
6. MediaFork - (cross platform) A simple tool for ripping DVD’s to MPEG-4. Ripped files can be played on your laptop or iPod.
   
7. MySQL GUI Tools - (cross platform) Very capable suite of cross-platform tools for working with MySQL databases.
8. The UnArchiver - (OSX only) My favorite free file compression tool. Has great integration with Finder and handles every compression format I have ever thrown at it.

So what would make your list? Please leave yours in the comments.

Simon Willison offers a list of Six cool things you can build with OpenID. There sure is a lot of real positive buzz with regards to OpenID. I am really looking forward to being able to use my OpenID account with more and more services. I currently have way to many proprietary accounts and way to many web sites. Having a unified identity that I can use at multiple sites is very appealing.

Man am I ever glad somebody finally hacked together a solution for How to Make Square Corners with CSS. I’ve been trying to figure this technique out for around 7 years! ;-)

Intype is a new project that seems to be picking up a lot of steam recently. It is a Window multi-purpose text editor that is very similar to Textmate for the Mac. Although still in alpha, it is a project that definitely worth a look.

Jonathan Snook has a great post on Making a Good Favicon. Favicons are those small icons that appear in your browsers address bar, tab bar and next to bookmarked web pages.

Keyboard Cleaner is a simple freeware application that disables your keyboard so you can give it a good cleaning!

Badger uses Yahoo! Pipes and JavaScript to create Web badges out of any RSS feed. One of the neat features of Pipes is its ability to sent output in JSON format. This allows you to use Pipes as a proxy for any type of data or mashup you can think of.

My very good friend Todd Jones has just put in his entry for a new reality TV show called “On the Lot”. The show is being developed by the producer of Survivor and Steven Spielberg. They are looking for the “next” film maker and the winner will walk away with a million dollar funding for a film project.

Todd is hoping to be one of 12 chosen to participate in the new show (there are over 250,000 entries)! So I ask that you take 3 and a half minutes to check out his entry - Sports City - and if you like it please give him a favorable rating!