So I was bored and came across a whole slew of useful "Web 2.0"-ish tools that I found interesting: (and please excuse me for not coming across these things years ago when everyone else probably did)
- Twitter: I know I'm way behind the times on this one, but it seemed like a pretty silly idea to me for the longest time. Now I actually like the idea, although it relies heavily on me knowing other people that want to receive twitters from me and would want to send me theirs, which I currently do not have.
- Sandy: I discovered Sandy and immediately realized this would be perfect for me. I forget stuff all the time, and this is the perfect way to keep track of those little snippets of info. Basically you send it or cc it emails or text messages with a plain text line like "remember Racquetball game tuesday 4pm with john" and it will parse that away for you and remind you if you'd like. The only problem I have with it so far is that it doesn't integrate with Google Calendars yet, but more on that later. Also, all the more easier is the fact that along with Jott you can send Sandy voice messages from your phone that are automatically transcribed to text for you, which is pretty smooth. More on that below
- Jott: I discovered Jott through Sandy. It takes notes from your verbal phone messages and transcribes them to text. You can either just save the messages for yourself (with reminders for appointments, etc.) or send them to various contacts such as other people you know (as email or SMS), Sandy, Twitter, Blogger, and a lot of other places. The transcription is pretty impressive, and the service is pretty slick.
- Gmail: I've always liked the interface, but never took the time to get to use it. Also I was pretty entrenched in Fastmail for some years, which was a fantastic service before Gmail came along, although pay-to-play. They were incredibly fast and reliable, and the interface was above and beyond most other web-based email services. I stuck with them for several reasons:
- I didn't think Gmail was all that much better.
- Gmail did not offer IMAP access at the time.
- I had a huge archive of sent and received emails that I did not want to lose.
Besides the whole hassle of changing your primary email. Well I started messing around with Gmail after having an account for something like 2 years and realized that hey, this interface is pretty great. I'm not one for just blindly following the masses (I was a LATE adopter of even using just the Google search engine) but I was actually pretty happy once I learned how to use it. I decided that Gmail WAS a lot better simply because of its integration with all the other services that Google offers. Again I'm not one to go for something because it is the most popular, but you can't beat that. I use Picasa, Blogger (obviously) and now Google Calendars so it turns out it would be really beneficial to change over to Gmail.
And hey, it turns out they even just added IMAP access a couple of weeks ago! However it turns out I don't really need it anyway. I was a dogged advocate of using Thunderbird rather than be tied down to a web interface for the longest time, but with all the fancy new AJAX stuff out there, and the centralization that doing everything in your browser brings, I can no longer stick to that way of thinking.
Several times I tried to start using a calendar on a regular basis, using Sunbird. I tried to figure out a way to sync it across the internet, and use it from any computer by carrying that (and many other "portable" versions of applications) around on a USB drive. At my previous and current jobs I do a lot of going between a bunch of quasi-public terminals and then using my own computers at home. Well I finally figured out that why the heck is that convenient when I can just base everything on the web? So I started using Google Calendars as well. And hey it turns out that its all hooked up to Gmail, so that's pretty cool. I briefly checked out 30boxes.com which looks pretty great too, but for reasons like Twitter I don't really have a use for the social aspects of it, and the integration is a no-brainer with Google Calendars.
As for retaining my archive of emails, well with IMAP access and also using Gmail's POP retrieval feature, that was not that much of a problem. I can even retain my old address and have Gmail retrieve anything that goes to there and label it as coming from the old account. So basically, problems solved, and I am happy with my new setup.
Dvorak? Well I thought I may as well give it a try. (Not using it at the moment, definitely need some more work before that) The hurdles I have to overcome with that are mainly related to it being a QWERTY world. Sure, Dvorak is available on any modern computer, but who wants to have to load that up any time you get on a new PC? I go between a ton of PC's all day long and that would just suck. Also some applications don't listen to Windows when you switch to Dvorak apparently, and I am going to have a hard time relearning all the keyboard shortcuts with it. Well, we'll see how it goes.
Well you can probably tell I am bored, but there we are. I am definitely happy with being a lot more organized with myself now.
