Posts from — March 2004

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based format for sharing content from your site. Frontsideback has a RSS feed where you can quickly grab the “headlines” from each entry.

RSS is fast becoming the new way to get news headlines, new blog entries, magazine articles from all your regular sites. The information is distilled and organized in one place for fast review.

With a good reader like Feedreader, your selected content is automatically downloaded and organized. You can scan the headlines from reader and clicking on the link will take you to the site for the full story.

Yahoo! just announced an RSS add-in for it’s My Yahoo! page. I added a few good feeds to my page just now. It was fast and easy. Go there to learn all about RSS and how it can make you more informed.

Answers That Work - The Home of Practical Computing is a good site to visit. They have a comprehensive task list of Windows services. It helps you identify extra services that are loading with Windows that may be unecessary and are actually bogging down your system.

Black Viper has an even better list of all the services that run on your computer and tells you which ones are safe to turn off.

I’m hungry.

Create your own Mondrian picture here. Don’t know what that is? You’ll recognize the style when you create one for yourself.

Why is your phone ringing so loud? You are sitting right next to it. Are you afraid you’ll miss a call? It won’t be the end of the world if you let your voicemail answer it. Do us all a favor and turn the damn thing down.

And remember if I’m at your desk helping, and you answer the phone, I will leave. And not come back you disrespectful putz.

Only one person pissed me off on the way to work this morning. It was a young bimbo talking on her cellphone, slouched way down in the seat, smoking a cigarette and TAILGATING ME. What the hell? People like these cause the accidents that delay me and they should be removed from the roads - permanently.

I’m back after nearly a month of no entries. Sorry.

My new iPod is consuming all my computer time at home. I’ve become obsessed with updated the ID tags for each and every song in my MP3 collection. When the tags are updated correctly, they are well organized on the iPod. I call it my “CrackPod” because I’m so addicted to it. I haven’t listened to the radio in the car since I got the thing. I just plug in my trusty iPod into one of those cassette adapter things and suddenly I have a weeks worth of non-stop music.

I opted for the 15 GB model instead of the newer 5GB iPod mini. With my model, there’s more than enough room for my favorite songs from my collection.

What I like best about the iPod is the simple elegance of it’s user interface. Navigating through the huge number of songs is a breeze with the cool scroll pad. Creating playlists on the fly is fun and even the Apple-centric iTunes program on the computer makes short work of synchronizing my music on the device. I give these things 12 out of 10 stars. If you’re a music lover, stop what you’re doing right now and go buy one of these things.

My other compulsion is with my new company-assigned Blackberry units. More about that later.

Did you know you can now type a zip code into Google and it will bring up a map of the area? You can also type a flight number in and you can check on it’s status. Input a UPC code and you can find out what product is listed in the database. You can even type in Vehicle Identification Number and view the Carfax report on the vehicle. Google keeps getting better and better. I wonder how this will change when they finally go IPO.

My Chinese name is “Fang Mu Shan” after my beauty and charm. What’s yours?

A Home User’s Security Checklist for Windows. Are you protected?

From our lunchroom discussion, here is the archived entry about distributed computing. We were talking about SETI at home and tried to remember the other ones out there. I had some links a long time ago about it here.