Changelog » Geek

BSG DVD ASAP

jackson — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 18:55:57 +0000

Holy crap, you can get the first part of Battlestar Galactica season 2 on DVD already?! Didn’t they show these episodes like two months ago? I can now watch BSG on Sci-Fi, then download the episode on iTunes, and then buy the DVD on Amazon within weeks of each other. Oh, I do so love technology.

Too damn many

jackson — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 01:17:06 +0000

I have too many accounts. I can’t keep track of them anymore. I sign-up and try virtually every online service I find. Particularly weblogs, email offerings and feed readers. Is there a self-help group for people who have 15 email addresses?

A sampling:

MySpace
Facebook
LiveJournal
WordPress.com
Tabulas
TypePad
GMail, Google Talk
MyRealBox
Hotmail, MSN IM
Yahoo! Mail, IM, etc
AOL IM, AIM Mail
And more!

Update: In the past two days I have signed up for (1) a todo list application (2) a hosted wiki (3) an emusic trial (4) another todo list application.

iPod nano

jackson — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 01:04:25 +0000

Stopped by the Apple store today. Yes, the iPod nano is that small. It’s insane. The demo models at the store were pretty scratched up, but they still looked pretty nice.

Bloglines borked

jackson — Mon, 02 May 2005 12:14:47 +0000

Oops. I’ve trying to reorganize my RSS subscriptions in Bloglines so I’m better about staying up-to-date. Well, in the process I accidentally deleted a group of feeds. Fortunately, I have a backup of my blogroll, so I imported it back into Bloglines. This created a bunch of duplicate subscriptions. So I deleted everything and tried again. Well, it worked — mostly. Unfortunately now all the items in all 250 feeds I read are marked as unread. This about 20,000 items I think. I guess I’m going to just mark everything as read and learn to leave well enough alone.

del.icio.us Bundles

jackson — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 21:09:26 +0000

del.icio.us (I ♥ delicious) has added the ability to group tags (called bundles). You can’t actually create namespaces or heirarchies or anything like that, they’re more like labels for sets of tags. Still, it’s a nice way to break up the big list o’tags, and you can do some pseudo faceted classification now. See bundles in action or make your own bundles (if you use delicious that is) http://del.icio.us/settings/USERNAME/bundle.

Michael Jackson

jackson — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 19:27:46 +0000

The post wherein I whine about my Google juice.

update: Ah ha! Yahoo likes me better.

If you did a search for Jackson Fox a few months ago this page was right near the top. It was the top for a long time. Not anymore. Thanks to Fox News and Michael Jackson my Google position has dropped like a stone. Another interesting trend is that my websites have dissapeared completely from the first few result pages. I’m still there (usually after a generous list of Michael Jackson stories), but my websites aren’t. So what is there?

Heck, a recent post shows up before either site does (and on page 29). This site is on page 32.

Dashboard

jackson — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 06:25:20 +0000

So after a night playing with Magpie RSS I give you Dashboard. An up-to-date look at all the (mostly meaningless) information I contribute to the global interweb.

I (heart) bandwidth

jackson — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 23:12:12 +0000

Just the thought that FIOS is a reality is enough to set my geeky heart aflutter.

Fallout 3 Cometh

jackson — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 19:54:25 +0000

This is very good news indeed: Bethesda is going to make Fallout 3.

via Penny Arcade

Attention Management Notes

jackson — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 05:03:27 +0000

Esther Dyson, the future of mail – and other topics via Michael Sippey.

More fundeamentally, as the world becomes more real-time and connected, the virtual and increasingly the actual configuration of the system is changing. There’s a rich, complex, shared data store in the cloud, and mail is simply the passing of notifications and alerts that tell you to pay attention to/download specific items in the cloud that are new or changed or that someone wants to share with you. this creates huge challenges in version control, updating and permission management.

Mark Hurst, Managing Incoming Email

In other words, clear out incoming e-mails before they pile up too high in the inbox. Delete most of them, file some of them (in mail folders or elsewhere), but most importantly, get them all out of the inbox before they really begin to pile up. Keep the inbox empty.

Esther makes more sense to me that Mark. But I like the idea of having a space where I keep things of immediate importance. I use email flags to do this instead of keeping my inbox empty (Thunderbird’s search function is a nice way to find things in my email, and works best when I keep things together) and use Thunderbird’s views to filter my messages to those I need to see.

I feel like gmail style tagging is the way to go for really making email useful. Thunderbird and other programs have simple versions of this, but most only allow 5 tags. Make it infinite. Let me tag things like I can in del.icio.us. Then let me filter on these tags quickly and easily.

Better yet, do like Esther says (and like Spotlight and Dashboard) and put it all (programs, documents, email, RSS feeds, etc) in a big pile and let me tag it as it passes by. That way I can come back later and filter out the good stuff when I need it.

Like Esther said, this is about attention management. Information passes by me very wuickly. It’s hard to keep up with it all. Let me quickly assign places to things (with tags) without having to establish fancy hierarchies.