In this golden internet age of disruptive technologies, there are very few products that actually deliver on their promises. Software, and technology in general, is supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, it seems like we consistently find novel ways to waste time. No matter how much I love twitter, it isn’t a productivity booster. All of the GTD apps, and philosophies take more work to get started than they typically save.
I have found at least 2 tools that I use all day, that I love, and they actually do boost productivity. Oddly enough they both bring better “search” experiences to the desktop.
The first is Launchy (mac users have Quicksilver). I have been using this tool for a little over a year. If I am on a PC without it, it really pisses me off. Launchy is a great keyboard based app launcher. Set a hot key, and it finds all of your apps, folders, and files with the touch of a key.
The second is brand new to me, but I have seen other people in the office using it. Xobni is an awesome email search app that plugs into Outlook. They just announced their public beta, so anyone can download the client and give it a try. They give you a unique view of your email that you never had, and make searching it easy. Forget the built in search in Outlook, or Google Desktop. They look like suckers when you see what xobni is capable of.
If you can’t tell already,I have a serious crush on xobni right now.
Anyone out there have any other apps that you can’t live without???—drop it in the comments.
We made it back from the US Virgin Islands despite all of the hard work from American Airlines. If anyone ever questions why the airline industry has problems, simply get on an American Airlines flight( or 4 like we had to do). They were consistent in only 3 areas:
Poor Customer Service. Some family who was traveling with us were bumped from their flight with no warning, and had to fight to get on another flight.
Rude, Rude, Rude. Each time any of the flight attendants was confronted with their bad customer service, they went on the attack. Really unprofessional. It’s not the customers fault you hate your job, or had a bad day.
No Water. My wife was told to get water from the tap in the bathroom(she opted for club soda). I also heard other people asking for water, and the answer was “we ran out” . This was the 3rd of 4 flights where I heard them say customers couldn’t have water because they ran out. How hard is it to stock a plane with the right supplies. They fly thousands of flights a month, and couldn’t figure this out?
I know it sounds like I’m bitching, but I have never had such a bad experience with an airline(and I traveled for work for for 3 years).
In the end, it was nice to get a few days rest, and get used to traveling with a newborn. We also got to try out our new camera, and loved it.
We made it to the other island late in the evening, and I was greeted with a lot of family, and a glass of scotch. Not a bad way to end a long day of traveling.
Day 2 involved getting our bearings in the daylight, and looking for the basics (beer and food). The condo we are in is very nice, but the nearest store is a 20 minute walk, so we had to get a taxi to transport our food and booze.
The Condo has high speed wireless, and Sprint has full voice and data service here, so it is kind of nice to be on “vacation” but not totally disconnected from my day to day life.
Here are a few pics from our morning/afternoon thus far. Time to rest and look for a good beach.
Lucas and I at the Red Hook Ferry station - Carib in hand:
Mary, Lucas and I just started a short vacation to the US Virgin Islands for my brother-in-law’s wedding.
This was Lucas’s first time on an airplane, and he did great.
I will blog more pics once we get there depending on the internet access.
Miami airport has no free Wi-Fi (wtf), so I am using the data connection on my crackberry.
Mary and I on Plane:
(That lady behind us wore a cool mask through the whole flight. She probably didn’t want to get any baby germs on her.)
I totally agree with him regarding the meteoric rise in popularity of Rails buoying scripting languages such as python. I believe more and more businesses are choosing, or are open enough, to implement Rails and Django solutions for their webapps. On top of other MVC frameworks, both Django and Rails allow for fast and sometimes cheap development (the non-cheap comes in if you have to hire an over-priced rails consultant). The visibility is definitely changing the way businesses view scripting languages and allow them to be seen as a viable alternative to Java and other enterprise adopted technologies.
I have had a man-crush on python for quit some time, and try to spout off about it’s benefits whenever I can.
I have been so close to starting a series of blog posts surrounding Python and the ease of adoption for the non-programmer. As soon as I have more time…
This is almost too cool to describe. Put on some headphones for the full experience. The concept is really simple, but turns out some really cool results.
That’s right. This is now the fastest blog in the entire world. Maybe…
Regardless, this is the new and improved techniQal support . I have finally made the giant leap from hosting my blog on an old webserver in the guest bedroom, which was served by my residential dsl, to an actual external VPS host.
After months of looking, and deciding what I really wanted out of a host, I decided on Linode .
The price point for what you get is really pretty good, and I get to have the flexibility of having my own server, with the performance that I can’t get by having my own server(at home).
Thus far, everything about their product is easy to use, and you can even choose to be part of their Xen beta when signing up.
So if you are looking for flexibility for your hosting, I highly recommend them.
ps.
checkout the list of distro’s they support out of the box:
I hope everyone saw that we released two new wijits at lijit that I think are really cool.
Look to your right, then down a bit, and you should see our new map and list statistics widgets.
The map highlights the global locations of all of my recent page views, direct searches, and external search engine searches.
(Hover over the dots on the map to see the data related to that visit).
The list does the same thing, but displays in a more readable format.
Due to this new knowledge, I can happily say:
“Hey” to my reader from Pennsauken, New Jersey
“Willkommen und Hallo” to my reader from Bremen, Germany
“Willkumm” to my reader from Zurich, Switzerland
“Hola” to my reader from Buenos Aires, Argentina
To install this on your blog, follow the succinct and accurate instructions at my co-worker Tara’s blog.
