I’m trying to work out a way to post these links faster, in the meantime my link-queue has over 40 links in it. That’s pathetic. So, as they say, all good things come in unordered lists.^*^
* ??NPR??: “Freud’s Nephew and the Origins of Public Relations”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4612464. There are levers in your head that can be triggered to make you believe whatever the PR firms want you to believe. This is scary stuff.
* ??RiskGlossary??: “The Enron Debacle”:http://www.riskglossary.com/link/enron.htm. Sarah and I saw the _Smartest Guys in the Room_ documentary when it opened in NYC and Houston. It was good, but light on details about Enron’s crimes. This helped fill in some of those gaps. Also, “here’s more”:http://www.fortune.com/fortune/specials/2003/1027/enron.html from ??Fortune Magazine??.
* “Enron commercials”:http://www.rtmark.com/enron/: anyone know how to get these playing on a Mac?
* “What it’s like to work at Pixar”:http://aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=19658#1
* ??Curt Hibbs??: “Rolling with Ruby on Rails”:http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html. Rails is a new MVC-based design framework for a programming language called Ruby that’s gaining a lot of ground thanks to brilliant web applications like “Basecamp”:http://www.basecamphq.com.
* “Backpack brings Ajax to Rails”:http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/05/04/backpack-brings-ajax-into-rails/. Speaking of Ruby on Rails, 37signals has come out with an intriguing product called Backpack. No kidding: you need to go get an account to Backpack (takes 2 minutes) and check this application out. At first, it may not immediately be clear how Backpack is useful–this is because it’s actually useful for almost anything. I’ll be writing more extensively on how I’m using my Backpack account, but, if I had to boil it down to a few words, I’d say that Backpack combines linking ability of hypertext with the flexibility and simplicity of a notebook. “Check it out”:http://www.backpackit.com/.
* “Google’s corporate philosophy”:http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html
* “MIT threw a time-travelling convention.”:http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/ Of course, this information would only be relevant to you _now_ if you _were_ a time traveller.
* ??Forbes??: “It’s No Party”:http://www.forbes.com/personaltech/2005/05/02/cx_ah_0502aapl.html?partner=yahootix. The recent release of OS X 10.4 Tiger has done little for the stock in the past few months, but why is this analyst looking for the cheap thrill of a price spike? As ??Steve Jobs?? notes in his “recent keynote”:http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc05/ (which is excellent, by the way), Apple has released a new version of Mac OS X _every year_ for the _last five years_. A much more helpful analysis would look at these releases and stock performance over the long haul. If you want to see how the stock performs relative to these releases, “this chart”:http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y&l=off&z=m&q=l would be a much more helpful indicator of how investors respond. Apparently, they’re much more interested in the iPod phenonmenon than they are in Apple’s OS innovations.
* ??Slashdot??: “Apple switches to Intel”:http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/06/06/1752234.shtml?tid=118&tid=179&tid=3. Apple continues to innovate their product line even in high times. Was I bummed to buy a Powerbook just weeks before this announcement? Not really. As ??John Gruber?? “points out”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/bombs_away, anything I would have bought this year would have been obsoleted by next years’ product anyway.
* To wit: “Macrumors Buyers’ Guide”:http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/. See where each Apple product is in its release cycle in order to minimize your buyers’ remorse. Indispensable: this site is almost expressly why we bought my Powerbook when we did and why we haven’t purchased Sarah’s future iBook yet.
* ??John Gruber??: “Together We Can Rule the Galaxy”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/rule_the_galaxy. There is a certain contingent of Mac nerd for whom this is depressing.
That made me laugh out loud in Starbucks. 
* ??Apple??: “Dashboard Widget Downloads”:http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/. I actually find I’m not using Dashboard too often. What are your favorite widgets? Have you found anything really useful out there?
* ??Wikipedia??: “The history of the Pulaski Skyway”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulaski_Skyway. We take this roadway every time we head into New York City.
* ??Fast Company??: “The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/02/meetings.html. I’ve been conducting a lot of meetings in my new job. Even after having led Bible studies and being in the corporate world for several years now, my meeting-leadership chops could still stand lots of improvement. This article helped. I’ve actually found Fast Company to be a great all-around resource for all things corporate–they really _get_ a lot of what it means to be doing information work in the 21^st^ century.
* “An interview with ??Chris Thile??”:http://www.nickelcreek.co.uk/reading_articles_us_05-02.htm. As a young songwriter, it’s unflattering to try and act like you know something.
Chris came out with a “new album”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002ZDX2K/ref=pd_art_ftr_1/002-1666968-3446454?v=glance&s=music this year that’s very experimental. It took a while, but I’ve been digging it a lot lately.
^*^Okay, nobody actually says that.
In responce to your dashboard question:
I was really trying to force myself to get used to dashboard and use it a lot … but found that it was more of a hassle than just opening up another tab in my web browser and navigating to what i need.
Fedex tracking is nice, but i can just type it into the google search bar in my browser.
Wikipedia is nice, but i can just search it via my home page (well the version in development has a wikipedia serach box on it).
Stickies are nice, but the normal sticky app is better/has more features. Just use expose to keep them out of your way.
The RSS feeds for news sources are nice … except its not in my normal rss reader (mail.app via rss2email) …
Favorite Widgets:
Calculator: Its easier to get at than the normal app unless you keep the normal app open all the time.
Hula Dancer (mine is set to homer)
Magic 8 ball
Thats about all I use.
There isn’t any widget, other than calculator, that has all the features that the normal one has. And other than calulator i haven’t found one that is more convienant as a widget than a normal app. and honestly, if i just kept the normal calculator open and exposed to it, it would work just as well.
Mike–you may not want to miss the very excellent SysStat:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/sysstat.html
I totally agree with you that there’s a lot of redundancy between a lot of these widgets and my browser. Stuff like SysStat — that incorporates other bits of information that might not be together in one place — seems to be a lot more of what a “Dashboard” would be about.
Sysstat actaully does not work for me. It used to, but on both my systems it mysterously stopped working about 13 days ago. Rebooting doesn’t even fix the problem. It always shows Zero usage of everything now.
At home I updated to 10.4.1, which i thought killed it but it is still doing it at work where i haven’t updated because of a new bug in mail.app in 10.4.1
I’m actually thinking about downgrading to Panther at work. Tiger doesn’t have anything i use that panther didn’t. Tiger, IMO is basically a failure. Panther was ground breaking for me. It is what made me switch from being on linux full time to MacOS X full time. Tiger, honestly, doesn’t really have anything worth upgrading for.
Mike — wow! A failure? Doesn’t Tiger give you any performance improvements? Surely Spotlight is a decent feature — I’ve used it quite a few times since I’ve had the Mac, and it’s come in quite handy.
I haven’t noticed any performance increases at all. I was really hoping for better performance from SMB shares too, but that seems to only be a marginal improvement which is probably due to the Samba upgrade. Apple’s OpenGL leaves a lot to be desired as well.
I used spotlight a lot the first weekend or so that I had it. But other than in Mail.app (where it is the default search tool) i haven’t used it at all. And honestly, spotlight has caused more problems for people with big mail boxes than it has solved. My mailbox is over Gig in size, and with all the default settings it takes 3 to 4 hours to check my mail because it indexes each time imap syncs (there are some settings you can change to fix this, but it left me and many other people without email for a weekend; Also, mail.app imap is still broken with the same bugs it has been broken with since 10.1 and despite how many people complain Apple doesn’t seem to care).
I spent years perfecting a system of folders to store all my files and can very quickly navigate my file system to find what I want. Most of what I do is in emacs, working with perl, python, xhtml, css, c and other source-code text files. When i’m working on a project i just open the finder to folder that i have all the source in, double click the file i want to work with, and it opens up in Emacs buffer. Any documenation i’ve written in Word files is in the same directory tree and easy to find.
But the biggest flaw with spotlight is that it doesn’t search network drives. At work 95% of everything i work with is in my home directory on the network and 100% of all the people not in the systems office is on the network. If spotlight would index those smb volumes it would really shine and save me a lot of time/work.
So, in short, yes spotlight is a decent feature. but its not the ground breaking, earth shattering feature that I was excited about and hoping for. I bought Tiger when it was announced because I was so excited about Spotlight, it was the one feature that I really wanted. But in practice it didn’t deliver and isn’t better than the system I was already using.
People go on and on about not needing to be orginized with folders anymore, etc … But I just don’t see that being the case at all.
If I have an “index.html” file. And its part of a project for work, how do i not put it in a folder of its own? If i drop it in the same folder as another index.html (of which, i have hundreds) it will overwrite the old one. I can come up with many, many examples (both in programming and ‘average user land’) that break the single folder model.
Until the OS takes over naming files for you and completely uses meta data to find what you are looking for, a folderless system isn’t going to work. And since it isn’t going to work, why not just put some thought into how to orginize everything to begin with?
Hey Mike — Yeah, people who say we don’t need folders anymore are pretty dumb. Of course we need folders: not having them would be like putting the entire content of the internet at http://internet/. But we also need good, smart search functionality like Google and Spotlight. Information architecture hasn’t advanced much beyond these two very basic tools for information retrieval, which is why librarians have given us systems like the Dewey Decimal system to organize data into one meta-schema.
Totally off topic: have you seen Ryan around? I’m surprised he’s been able to withstand geeking out over Mac OS X with us.
I am a force of sheer will.
I have nothing interesting to say about Tiger. I bought it as a loyal apple citizen. It’s no big thing. It’s got some cool stuff, but I use none of it. I’m waiting for the apps to take advantage of the new API stuff, and really impress me.
Plus, I’ve been board gaming a lot in real life.
I’m also thinking about getting the blog thing going again. Installed wordpress, but haven’t gotten around to configuring it. I think it may be overkill for what I want.
If i can get the gmail->flickr->moblog going from my treo650, I’ll probably get hooked.
Ryan, I’m proud of you for spending time in the real world.
Let me know if the blog cranks back up. I’m suprised you’re finding WP a bit overkill: I was able to get my blog up and running in a few minutes. Plugins, etc, can turn WP into a lean, green, content-serving machine, but the basics should be pretty, um, basic.
Either of you guys planning on being in town this summer?
Ken…
It’s not really overkill. It’s just that what I want is very simple, wordpresses themeing setup sucks, and it doesnt do the stuff i would want.
I doubt i’ll code my own, but the idea is tempting (as usual)
and I only spend time in the real world when I have stuff to do… recently that has been a lot, but most of the time I’m still in Azeroth or Vana’diel or whatever mmo of the day has my interest. Though I think that’s going to stop shortly.