My Product Advisor - PDA and Smartphone Advisor

My Product Advisor's PDA and Smartphone recommendation is pretty cool. I'm sure they're paid to leave certain smartphones out of the mix and pop others to the top of the queue, but it's a good starting point if you're looking to get a new cell phone/PDA/smartphone hybrid-thingie.

Donny calls out Ted Kennedy

Donny Ferguson fires a parting shot at Ted Kennedy's call for immediate pullout from Iraq.:

But, hey, if anyone knows when to flee the scene, it's Ted Kennedy.

All I can say to that is DAAAAAY-YUM, Donny just bitch-slapped a Kennedy!

Why Your Pointy Haired Boss Is A Mathematical Certainty

Probably old news by now, but for the two of you who haven't seen it, you should understand why your pointy haired boss is a mathematical certainty. via [del.icio.us]

i n s i p i d . c o m

Awesome letter to Dubya on insipid.com. via [sciatica]

Local H - Toxic

Check out Local H's cover of Britney's "Toxic" (and disturbing photo as well).

EmacsWikiMode: redux

I've found a new fringe benefit to EmacsWikiMode, the emacs wiki I talked about a little in an earlier post. Since the wiki is essentially individual text files stored in single directory, it becomes extremely easy to keep two separate wikis located on separate machines in sync. You can simply email individual text files back and forth, or zip the whole directory and dump it into the appropriate location on the second machine. No tweaking of config settings, or updating hyperlinks for the admin. Since each WikiWord has a separate filename you don't have to worry about new words getting wiped out, only edits to words that exist on both machines.

Best of all, since emacs has a built in email utility, you can just fire off an email of a file once your done writing it without ever leaving emacs. Extremely low-tech, but I think that's part of the appeal to me.

Update: you know, after thinking about it for all of 10 seconds I realized that it wouldn't be that hard to write a script that would simply append data for WikiWords that already existed so that you wouldn't even have to worry about the data loss from that. I should put that on my ToDoList. :)

Join the Suicidal Army

I suppose it's a sign that I'm getting older, but I just can't get into any of the music they play on the radio these days. I was never a big radio listener to begin with, but I have yet to hear a recent band that really grabs me. I've heard a few good singles in the last few years, but nothing that makes me want to go out and buy the album.

That's changed a little since I've been listening to last.fm, I've found a few new bands that I like. But I still find myself weeding out most of the modern stuff.

The main benefit of last.fm for me has been the rediscovery of bands that I had really forgotten that I liked. A few days ago, I was listening to last.fm, when a Suicidal Tendencies song came on. For some reason, Suicidal Tendencies, and their side project, Infectious Grooves, were two bands that I absolutely loved in high school, but really lost track of after I went to college. The last few days I've been on a tear, listening to ST non-stop. If you've never given them a listen and like heavy music at all, you should give them a try. The best part is, they're apparently still touring, so I might get a chance to check them out live if I'm lucky!

Thank you internet, for reuniting me with a long-lost love!

May the Schwartz be with you!

To paraphrase Yoda, "Begun, this Internet meme has."

JibJab.com

New JibJab has been released. Not as good as the other two in my opinion, but hey, it beats doing real work :) via [joi ito]

emacs-wiki screenie

emacs-wiki
Originally uploaded by egoodwin.

Cote wanted some screenshots of EmacsWikiMode in action so here you go. There's not a whole lot going on in this wiki, cuz this is the one I use simply for work-related stuff. I've got another setup at home which has my core brain-dump and a lot more data in it.

There's also a planner mode which builds on top of EmacsWikiMode, but I haven't tried that out since I like my current planning system just fine (Palm Pilot, and Outlook/Thunderbird).

Who's the Emacs-daddy?

I've recently rediscovered emacs in a big way. I was never what you would call an emacs power-user, and I know just enough emacs-lisp to get myself in trouble. Since I no longer do any programming (unless you count the occassional SQL query or python script) I really haven't had any need for a robust development environment.

So what's responsible for this? I don't really know. I think it's my new push towards becoming hyper-organized. With school, and work, and home concerns, as well as a few other private projects I've got going on, I was noticing things starting to fall through the cracks. I've pushed through it over the holidays and regrouped and become caught up and found that emacs was extremely useful in that capacity.

One of the little "power tips" that I've implemented in the last month has been to transfer notes from meetings to a "meeting template" that has a list of people attending, date and purpose, along with the more general notes, action items, etc. When I'm done filling it out, I put it in my general file system for reference, sorted by topic and then date. Emacs made it a snap to automate most of this, it was free (both beer and speechwise), and it allowed me to just open up one app at the beginning of the day and forget about it until I needed it.

So what started as a one off use has slowly morphed into more general use of the mother-of-all-editors. I installed EmacsWikiMode and started transferring my WikidPad notes over to it. The tighter printer integration, and flexible output format made it a no-brainer. I've even toyed around with the idea of using the emacs calendar and diary as a sort of personal development journal to complement my blog and calendar. I don't think I'm going to transfer my email to emacs, because I'm not a masochist, but I'm doing pretty much everything else in it.

The interesting thing about emacs is that my time away from it really didn't slow me down. It's amazing how quickly I picked it up, configured it and even debugged some issues I was having with a package that I wanted to use. Of course, having the O'Reilly Emacs book helped out quite a bit.

lagwagon

Lagwagon's Live Album comes out February 8th. Rockin'. Excellent performance of "Razor Burn" available for free download on the site.

Netflix

Over the holidays Audrey and I subscribed to Netflix. So far I like the service, though I still have some fears that I'm going to up my movie watching rate now since new movies just seem to arrive all the time. Still, it cuts down on late fees and DVD purchases so it's a net-positive so far.

It's fun to set up the queue and check and see what's going to arrive next. And the movies typically arrive within a day or two, which is nice.

The other cool thing (and the real point of this post) is the "Friends" feature, where you can see what other movies your friends are watching, etc. If anyone wants to be added to my Friends list (and is a Netflix subscriber) leave a comment and I'll add you.

dropload

The Dropload service looks kind of interesting. It solves one of those unique internet problems that sometimes arises.

Happy New Years

Oh yeah, and Happy New Years to the rest of you too!

Happy Birthday Cote!

Cote, the man who might be considered responsible for getting me started on this whole blogging thing, turned a year older today! You should drop on by his blog and leave him comments!