Geek-Out

Since I've done nothing (and I do mean nothing) other than work on computers for the last 36 hours, this entry is mainly going to be geek stuff.

I'm oncall and sick, Buddy is sick. This has got to be the most boring-ass week since we've moved into this place.. at least for me.

It was 72 degrees today and I was in the house all day. Man, that just about killed me. I've got to start getting some jobs done around here. The deck, the garage, the yard. Everything that got put on hold in November needs to start again, soon. I don't mind spending spring working, but I want to enjoy summer and fall this year.

Managed to get about 3 solid hours of sleep today after being up all night and not getting to bed until 12:30 this afternoon. Oncall is *hell*. Pages every 20-40 minutes. Just as you start to fall asleep - that semi-conscious dream-like state between awake and asleep BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP, all night long, from 10pm until 8am. There needs to be some serious process re-design here. Granted this is over 1800 jobs on 150 machines running upwards of 400 enterprise level Oracle databases, but damn... let a guy sleep!

Begin long geek ramblings:

I've been watching the desktop search competition very closely as of late, and reading every review I can get my paws on. Tonight I finally broke down and installed two of them. Google's and X1. X1 is the commercial version that Yahoo's desktop search is based on, but it allows for network drive indexing (which none of the free search tools do), among other things.

It is sorely lacking in one area: It will only handle Outlook contact/address book data. Mozilla address book is not an option. Surprisingly, neither is palm desktop; even though it has a free API, conduit, and other tools to make communicating with it nearly effortless. Were it not for this one fatal flaw, I would gladly pay the $75 for this tool. Oh, having a Trillian chat plugin similar to the one Google has would be cool as well.

It is amazing how much time you save having *everything*, even network server files, right at your fingertips. I just type what I'm looking for.. content, file name, whatever.. and it is *instantly* there. I click on the music icon, and all my music files from my entire network are all there in one list. I single-click and that song begins to play. I click the pictures icon, sort by path, navigate to the newsgroups, and it's instant porn slideshow.

Why the hell didn't somebody come out with this stuff years ago? Oh wait, they did. It was part of OS/2. Another 10-15 years and I think Windows will have almost all of the functionality of that (most beautifully crafted, useful, dynamic, customizable, *kiss* *kiss* *kiss*, now-defunct) operating system. Damn I miss it.

Anyway, if you are a PC user, try the Yahoo desktop search, chances are, you will love it. If you need network drive indexing, you'll want the X1 version. The Google one is pretty decent as well, I just don't like having rogue web servers running on my system.

I've found so many cool multi-function tools lately that I could almost get by with an appliance if it had the following: Limewire Pro, FeedDemon, Mozilla (the entire suite known as seamonkey, which btw, is no longer being updated), Trillian Pro, X1, MusicMatch Pro, and gvim (a "vi" clone text editor). Yup, that would do it.

Of course I would still need my normal heavy-duty suite of tools (which I'm not going to get into) for real work, but for day-to-day computer living, that's all I need.

The Mozilla news makes me really sad. For all the great press firefox has got, and the fact that it is more IE compatible than the Mozilla browser, it doesn't have nearly the features. Bookmarking groups of tabs and having them all open with one click is a feature I don't know that I can live without. It was one of those little things that I used in the past with Opera, but the ease of use with Mozilla made it life-altering (in a strictly web-surfing sense of the phrase).

The long awaited Dell 24" flatscreen monitor that I've been drooling over has finally arrived. Now the only questions left for me are "do I buy one or two", and "where the hell is my tax refund?".

For those of you that are already on the news aggregator bandwagon with me: if you haven't checked into podcasting yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. A podcast is really nothing more than an audio attachment to an RSS feed... simple enough, but the power comes in that when using a tool such as FeedDemon's FeedStation, you can schedule these downloads for off-hours and have them transferred to your portable audio device automagically. Even though podcasting is just starting to gain a foothold, the power of this distribution method is staggering.

News junkies such as myself stay away from mainstream media, spend most of our days reading on 100's of different sites. Then along comes a news aggregator that turns a day's worth of reading into something that can be done in less than an hour. Now much of this news is being distributed via audio and is sitting on our little MP3 players when we wake up in the morning so we no longer even have to take the hour to read, but can simply listen to the broadcasts while performing other tasks.

The analogy of the above in real life is going from 'researching in a library and compiling your own notebook of relevant information' to 'having an assembled book of news items waiting for you at your doorstep' and now to 'programming your own version of NPR.. in your sleep'. Awesome!