So this is Christmas

I'm up and down today. On the one hand I'm happy to be out of the store for a whole day, on the other I'm feeling that all alone on the holiday thing. I went out to breakfast this morning at the Persimmon Cafe. I have eaten at least one meal every Christmas since I moved to the city there. That was an up. I did my journal on my phone while waiting for the food to arrive. Then I read the Talk of the Town and the beginning of a story in the new New Yorker. The story was called Alma and the first paragraph smacked me so hard I was afraid to read the rest of the story in case it was a let down. 

As usual my end of year processes are including updating how I do things on my computer. This last month I've been working on finding a good GTD solution. I was all but typing in the debit card number for OmniFocus when I realized that it I wasn't going to be able to utilize to the fullest any task list that I couldn't use on my phone. I like not having to take anything but my phone out and about with me most of the time. I need something that will work on both my desktop and my iPhone. I thought that Easy Task was the solution and it might have been if it hadn't turned out to be the single buggiest piece of software I've ever paid for. $20 down the toilet. Even if it didn't freak out all the time the online site won't update if you complete a project on your phone. That isn't a bug, that's a feature. Thanks but no thanks. 

So, against my internal misgivings I turned to Web 2.0. For the most part I like applications to be in my applications folder and data stored exactly where I tell it to be stored, but the more I use some of these services the more I like the way they are always up to date and always available. I checked out a number of programs, most only took a glance to show me that they were not what I wanted to be looking at everyday to tell me what to do. The three contenders ended up being Remember the Milk, Nozbe, and Vitalist. I really have nothing bad to say about any of the three. In fact even though I went with Vitalist I was very impressed with Remember the Milk. And it has a pretty cool cow favicon. (I've got a bit of a thing for good favicons.) The bottom line was that I've decided to go with Vitalist. I haven't given them any money and I'm not all that happy about paying them $5 or $10 a month for as long as they want to only charge me $5 or $10 a month but the solution is elegant and works exactly how I want it to either on my iPhone or in my desktop browser. 

This was an easier decision because for the past two weeks I've been looking at purchasing a personal finance program. Ending up using a website to track my money was the real leap of trust for online applications. Once I uploaded my checking account registers for the last year onto Wesabe there was no looking back. 

The third new service is actually a blogging platform that has been out for a year but is new to me. That is the blogs from tumblr. Not to panic. I'm not ending this site. This is still where I'm going to write my daily takes on life. I have, however started a parallel blog on tumblr. Here is a nice little blurb on Lifehacker about tumblelogs. So make a bookmark for a new site from me. 

lacadaz on tumblr

The tumblr blog will always have a link back to the latest postings here as well as more little bits of the the net that I come across in my surfing. I'm going to try to keep up with the originality of this site, using it only for my own work and not so much for links and net-minutia. As usual we'll see how it goes but I like the idea of having something that I can just dump whatever strikes my fancy. I've got my flickr, digg and this blog feeding into it as well so it should be a pretty good aggregator of my web life. Check it out if you like and Merry Christmas. 

Top 10 – Why Blogger Kicks iWeb's Ass

It hasn't yet been a week since I abandoned my previous blog and moved from using iWeb back to blogger. Already though I'm a much happier and productive blogger.

1. Unlike Apple's iWeb, Blogger just works
2. Updating a post on Blogger takes seconds instead of minutes on iWeb.
3. When I forget a period and have to edit a previous post it does not re-create every page I've ever written. (see #2)
4. Moving between my laptop and my mini is effortless because Blogger is accessible from the Internet. Iweb requires the master domain file to be moved between computers in order to use a different computer.
5. If you lose your current domain file you can't recover your site from Apple's servers. Blogger emails me every post including the media automatically which for me means all my posts are saved locally on two machines and remotely on Apple and Google's servers.
   
6. Space is no longer an issue. With .mac I had 1GB to share between my web site, pictures and email. Google is limiting the photos to 1GB and nearly 3GB for email. Of course all of that extra space doesn't come cheap. Apple charges me $100 a year for that 1GB while Google kicks back the 4GB for free.
   
7. I got to use all of the widgets and code I wanted to. I have my flickr badge and my lastFM widget and my del.icio.us tags and feeds on my page and it all took less than a minute to set up. Apple's plug-ins pretty much constitute a counter and a link to Apple.
   
8. Blogger lets me change themes on the fly. If I want to change to way my whole site looks I just change the theme. With iWeb that meant recopying every entry into the new format one by one.
   
9. While five days is not enough time to call Blogger more reliable I do know that every time I do a security update on my computers I'm not going to lose control of my website.
10. Blogger is simply more intuitive to use. Whatever I've wanted to do I've found the tool close by and easy to use. (see #1)
    

The thing is, I didn't want to write this post. I'm a crazy Apple fanboy. I replaced the Brita filter on my kitchen sink with the iWater which only dispenses the Apple cool-aid. I put up with more than a year of frustration with iWeb, wanting it to work, waiting for the cure-all update, waiting for Leopard , waiting for the new iLife. Instead of getting better it got worse. So I got out.

Yes, I guess I Am

Well I made one last attempt to get my iWeb site to publish without giving me errors and spiking the comments. Not only did I fail but I managed to wipe out my keychains on my laptop and now my laptop won't sync back up to .mac. Apple is not on my happy list right now. The problem with that is that for the most part I'm a pretty cynical person. Usually Apple is the only one on my happy list. Now I just have a very long sad list. Wait, there is still Lupica and their day-brightening Earl Grey Renaissance tea that I pretty much drink whenever I'm not sleeping. I'm going to make another glass right now. Ah, yes, that's better.

This week I've decided to revisit del.icio.us. I had played around with the service about a year and a half ago and really didn't get into it. Mostly I think because I hate labeling things. This presents a bit of a problem since I love having things labeled. (Yea, I know, welcome to my world.) I had been struggling with this with my Devon database until I simply stopped using it. (I still use Devon to write and store my stuff but I don't saving all my clippings there anymore) And I wanted a better way to share what I was reading and thinking about. For a little while I had used Newsvine. I like the way Newsvine is set up and it does everything that I would want a social news site to do. The problem is I have with it is similar to my main problem at my job. Randal from Clerks hit the nail on the head when he said "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers." Newsvine would be great if it wasn't for all the people that use it. This goes to two parts of my psychology. Number one, I'm not that much of a people person. Really I don't hate people or anything, it's just that I could really take them or leave them. Number two, I can't stand the flanks of either side of the political spectrum. I'm a moderate because the far left and the far right are completely divorced from reality. It is those people that scream the loudest on the Internet. I just find all that screaming demoralizing.

So that's why I'm liking del.icio.us. Let the content speak for itself. Of course when I tried to integrate my del.icio.us tags into my iWeb site there was no good way to do it, and iWeb had started spitting out errors whenever I tried to publish, and comments were no longer working, and iWeb has always been a pain in the ass to use on more than one computer, and fixing all of this had managed to screw up my laptop. Most importantly this isn't the first time I or a large block of users have had these kind of problems with this program. Well that's it I'm gone. I'm taking my ball (brain) and going home (using a web based tool).

So far so good. I've had to switch back to Firefox from Safari to get the posting form to work correctly but that's fine because there are some very cool extensions for del.icio.us on firefox. Blogger is much better now than the last time I used it. Smooth, flexible, sexy, everything a man looks for in blogging software.

Am I Really Back On Blogger?

After a year of work-arounds and wishing it just worked better I think I'm going to tell iweb to stuff it. My only fear is that I'm going to put my energies into this blog just to leave it when Leopard gets ready to roll around.

Wait I just found out that safari doesn't work nicely with blogger. God I just hate the way that firefox displays fonts on a mac.