New toys are fun.

I finished the work that had me most stressed about getting into
school today, and all I have left are a few odds and ends to tie up on
campus. However, seeing as how it is hotter even satan himself could
stand outside, I've opted to sit inside and play with some new toys on
my computer.

First among the new toys is the writing program that I've always
wanted but never knew actually existed. Surprise surprise, I'm even
using it now. Heres what it is: A super simple vanilla text editor
that blackens the whole screen giving you a completely
distraction-free writing environment. By blackens the screen I mean
completely blackens it, leaving you with the really old style
green-on-black text that always reminds me of Pre-Color monitors and
DOS. But I like it, because I learned from experience that when
staring at a screen for hours writing a paper, the glaring white of
the background begins to hurt your eyes, making the words blur
together and my usual 8 point font virtually impossible to read. It
also offers the only other feature that I use during 98% of the
writing process- A spell checker. Actually, It just uses the
computer's built in spell checker, but the point is that it's there.

Another toy that I have been tinkering with is OnSync. Basically, what
this does is let me move information between my phone and address book
on my computer the way I want it moved. I tried using Apple's syncing
program a couple of times, and ended up with a flood of numbers and
email addresses that I didn't want sitting in my phone. After all, do
I really need the email address of that person I talked to once in a
telephone? NO! The other thing it does is let me pull numbers that I
saved on my phone (oh, thanks for calling, let me save your number)
and put them on my computer, where i can back them up. Or email them.
Or do whatever. It was a shareware program, but I have to say, it
turned out to be well worth it.

Another thing that I'm playing with is consolidating my blogs. After
all, who has time to keep track of 5 different blogs floating around
the web?
There were problems that led to me abandoning all of them at different
times, and I decided that I had better centralize them. And that quest
for standardization has got me doing all kinds of things: figuring out
a good photo hosting site (Flickr) figuring out how to mass import get
my 380 or so posts into Blogger, and other odds and ends. With luck,
There will be handy tools for all that stuff, and after a few hours of
tinkering i will have all my online history in one convenient
blackmail-able place.

In other news, I still have the sniffles, and slept till 11 this
morning. So much for the 7:30 yoga. I'm going to try to go to bed at
like 8 tonight to be up early tomorrow, but goodness knows if that
will actually happen.

UPDATE: In trying out cool stuff, I ran into this ultimate wiki program. If you don't know what a wiki is, check out WikiPedia. WikiPedia was the first famous wiki. The thing with wikis is that they usually exist in two forms: On a big, expensive web server somewhere far away, or as a stand-alone application on one computer. TiddlyWiki is the coolest thing on earth, because it is made to be a fully functional wiki within a single web page- making it tiny, cross-platform, and personal-computer or web-server ready. I'm hoping to use it for class notes/project collaboration.

Check it out here. To download and play with it, simply save that page as a html file.
Even more useful is the Getting Things Done version here. Same download rules apply, but this one can print directly onto 3x5 index cards for the Hipster PDA.

The only thing bad about it (because I know dad will have problems) is some apps don't have full functionality- it is well documented, though. So dad, tinker with it in firefox.


Its AWESOME!