bigcat

In yet another attempt to great a post despite my lack of inspiration, I’m linking to Lisa’s post of great out-of-the-office messages.

Sample: “You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn’t have received anything at all.”

1. Posting a link to something that’s been posted many times before, but making it sound like you are the first person to discover it (lots of people get accused of on Slashdot, but what do you call it?) (and yes, my last post was a much posted link, although I did admit that it was, at least).
2. Quoting very old information in an online article, without checking to see if it is still correct. (You can do this in print too, but it is worse online not only because you should be easily able to recheck the info, and at least correct something after it is found to be wrong).
3. Blogs that are almost entirely del.icio.us links (as opposed to this blog, which has almost no content of any kind).

This has already been linked a great deal but if you have not seen it, check out this Google Maps application that can track running/walking distance for a given course:

Gmaps Pedometer.

I get a little tired of folks going gaga over Google stuff but this is just plain impressive.

One of the entries from the FAQ on the new parking passes at Logan Airport:

question 8.

Well, Frequently Asked Questions don’t necessary have to be Frequently Answered Questions.

Hopefully by the time you read this, they’ll have fixed it …

The Spotlight search in Mac OS X just quickly found some files that took me hours to prepare, and which I had somehow dragged into the Applications folder instead of the drive share where I meant to put them.

Desktop search is fast moving from a feature to an essential, I think.

Yesterday I installed Mac OS X “tiger” (insert millions of URLs about it here) and so far I think it is pretty impressive.

Spotlight is exactly the kind of search tool I’ve wanted. On Windows I’ve tried Google Desktop Search — it is good, but the integration of course is far less smooth. We’ll see what Microsoft does in Longhorn. But for now Apple has clearly shown how it should be done.

Safari’s RSS abilities are also just as good as you’ve heard — I have tried various RSS readers and never been totally happy. Safari’s version appeals to the non-geek in me; it automatically finds the RSS feed for most Web sites when you browse there, and simply dragging that into the News folder is all you need to do. (EDIT: Actually, you have to switch to the RSS feed and then you can drag the “feed:” URL; why not do it it one step?) And I like the way you can go back and forth from Web pages to feeds. Firefox is good here too, and IE is looking really old now.

After that I’m still exploring — I’ve tried Automator a little but it seems a little sluggish to me and has hung a couple of times. Seems more work may be needed here, but it is too soon for me to tell.

The Dashboard — I am divided on it. It looks cool and a lot of the widgets are very handy, but I’m not sure I like the way it interacts with the rest of my desktop. I can’t say exactly how it should work either. So far I think it is most useful if you only have a small number of widgets on it. The more there are, the slower it comes up and the more cluttered it seems. I think the killer use for it may be to have the one special tool you use a button click away. But others may differ on that. One thing is for sure: dropping a new widget in creates a cool ripple effect that’s fun all by itself.

Caution: Tiger does break some things, such as Cisco VPN and CodeTek Virtual Desktop Pro (which already didn’t work with Firefox and Thunderbird, and the folks there don’t seem to have posted anything about when they plan to fix it). Fortunately most other people seem to be fixing their apps pretty fast if needed.

More later when I get more familiar with Tiger.

I saw this at j-mo’s.

Considering I live in the Northeast this shows I’m pretty stay-at-home. In fairness, however, Guatamala City wasn’t a choice.

But a big reason for us not getting to very many places is that my wife hates to fly, and I’m not a big fan of it either.

A quick entry to test how my blog looks in RSS on Mac OS X Tiger.

And yes, I badly do need a life….

I am trying to get myself motivated now to do yet another snow clearing job. This better be the last one this year (but it probably won’t be). At least our investment in an almost-new snowblower a couple of years ago is paying off.

I’ve had comment spam, trackback spam, referer spam. I am really tired of this junk. I think it is starting to take much of the interactive fun out of blogging, if it hasn’t already.

I am at least glad to have had, and visited, blogs in the not-so-distant days before this kind of stuff. I was hardly an early adopter of the blog, but I do remember when it seemed more fun.