Rui CarmoEarly start to the day. Real early. Spent lots of time collating inputs for an internal technology roadmap and churning out slideware. FreeMind has definitely become my "To Do" and bookmark manager of choice, and has been invaluable in fleshing out presentation structure and flow. I now carry a couple of mind maps in my USB keychain, along with the usual stuff.
Before I forget, let me just say that the latest Dilbert cartoon was hilariously popular at the office today. There are some things that you can only truly understand if you worked in Engineering for any length of time, and this one seemed made to order for us. As an encore, I sent around a link to the Apple IT Pro portal.
Less Business for Apple Here
A lot of people were curious about tomorrow's keynote, especially a couple of folk on my floor who are planning to get new laptops. Following up on my ongoing odyssey, at least one of them has already decided to get a new PowerBook from the US. The difference in price is scandalous, and I can't really account for it in terms of taxes alone - after all, I have a pretty good notion of what it costs to import equipment in bulk.
RSS via Jabber
Lobbied by Melo, I've been using Mimir since Friday. Today (with the increased news traffic) I went in and removed those feeds that were being a nag, and it's turned out to be an acceptable way to keep abreast of major news, although I still prefer getting most of my feeds via newspipe (which for some reason sent me tripled entries today - I really should check why).
I find it best to concentrate on whatever I'm doing and get it done without any sort of interruption, and even if Mimir is aware of my Jabber status, I seldom have the time or presence of mind to set myself as "away".
Using it with Gaim on Windows is tolerable, but Adium and Growl make it shine. I haven't tried the new Fire version yet (it's supposed to support Growl too). We'll see.
News
- So, Life is Random. Yeah, and distribution channels, too. Okay, okay, I'll stop griping about my iMac G5 order.
- A reminder of different mobile cultures. So, let me see if I get this straight: in the US, you get charged by receiving things you have absolutely no control over. Oh yeah, real clever strategy, and it is so wrong I can't even begin to grasp the notion that some people think it's OK, even if you're aware of the charges. Dilbert's pointy-haired boss has nothing on those guys, but then, what do you expect from a country where people sell advertising space on their foreheads?
- Just picked up Karrigell and am playing around with it. It's no Medusa, but has a nice concept demo made with the FCKeditor WYSIWYG editor (which doesn't work on Safari, by the way - not by a long shot) and a fairly nice debugger. I'm trying to get it to do gzip encoding and tweaking the HTML here and there. Together with pysvn, it might be just the thing I'm looking for to get my NewWikiMigration off the ground. I will need to get rid of all those ugly filename extensions, though.
- Finally - neon storage cards. Just what I always wanted, to go with my fluorescent 5 1/4" diskettes. I like these wireless USB disks much better.
- It had to happen, I suppose - some idiot figured out how to post spam comments on Haloscan. If this becomes a habit, comments will go the way of the Referrers page.