Perhaps I’m the last to know, but Jott.com is pretty sweet. The premise is “you call from your cell phone, it sends email.” … which, in itself, doesn’t feel that awesome.
They pump up the coolness with direct tunnels to Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, Wordpress, and a whole bunch of others.
So! You call, you say, “google calendar,” then you tell it that you have a meeting tomorrow, and it dutifully contacts Google Calendar and writes that down.
And, suddenly, you have a personal assistant.
A really lazy personal assistant, but nonetheless. Progress!
You can also get it to read you RSS feeds. Boing Boing, stat! (Although getting it to read my bug list might be more productive…)
Took a break and read Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. It’s a breezy read — lots of pictures! — with a few great ideas.
Definitely worth a read, particularly if you’re a “let’s go to the whiteboard!” kind of person (or want to be).
Man. Long time, no post.
I’ve been working on a site for the Navy with the great folks down at db interactive.
I’ve been plowing through Obie Fernandez’s The Rails Way, which is the best Rails book ever. (And heftiest. 912 pages of framework goodness.)
Next up: Deploying Rails Applications (Zygmuntowicz, Tate, Begin).
Finally, after a bump in the road, I’ve been enjoying the new virtual hosting over at Dreamhost. Thanks, fellas!
Firefox 3 is on the way, and looks promising.
Among the improvements:
- Significantly improved memory management which means that it won’t hang as often when it’s been open for long periods of time. (Who closes their browser anymore?)
- Better integration with the base OS’s makes for a smoother ride, both with the u/i and the underlying code.
- “Noticably snappier,” says PC World. It does feel zippy.
- Better guessing in the location bar. You type an url, it suggests you might be getting at. It does this in 2, but now it’s smarter, and prettier. (Image is below.)
- “Zoom page” zooms the whole page, not just the text — images scale up, too. Seems like it’d be useful for designers and developers to zoom out to check the overall layout of a page.
- Perhaps my favorite new feature, Firefox now only asks the user to save the password after they know a login has succeeded.
- … and 900 other or so changes and bug fixes, including a bunch of fun for developers.
A fifth beta is on the way, but beta 4 is available now, if you’re curious. If you’re a developer, Mozilla has a whole mini-site for you.
I’ve been a fairly rabid Boing Boing fan since “zines” were a thing that people talked about, and it was one of the best. (Remember the great covers?)
I was curious about Mark Frauenfelder’s book Rule the Web, but just skeptical enough to wait until it showed up at the Austin public library.
Mostly, I was right. He answers questions well, but the questions are along the lines of, “What’s a wiki?” and “What are some other ways to download videos to my computer?” … Perfect for somebody just pushing their boat in the webbernet waters, but a little light for a grizzled old web developer like me. (Arrr, matey.)
That said, there were a few things that I learned, or was reminded of:
- MetaCritic is a great site. Like RottenTomatoes, but more selective in whom they listen to. (It seems a little speedier to render, and a little less overburdened with marketing, too.)
- JetEye is a really interesting way to manage links, images, and chunks of text, and share them. It might replace del.icio.us for me. Mel and I went shopping for our nephew this weekend, and used a JetPack to share ideas before we came to the final present, and it worked quite well.
- Ebay has really cheap magazine subscriptions. Four years of Rolling Stone for $11. A year of Newsweek for $14. Two years of Wired for $6. A year of Games magazine for $5.
- Opera is a good browser. It completely suffers from not having Firebug, and the other Firefox plug-ins, but it’s fast (and those milliseconds really do add up), and interesting in its feature set. Casual use suggests that it doesn’t hang as often as Firefox, either.
The book is fun, informative, and great if you’re new to the web, and definitely worth a flip-through even if you’ve been surfing a while.
I finally got around to posting the slides for my talk at Refresh Austin a while back. They’re here.
If you didn’t go to the presentation, I’m not sure they’ll mean much…
So. For an introspective geek, I can socialize when I need to, but mid-March in Austin … I think it’d be a challenge for a ‘Director of Marketing’ type — particularly since “other geeks” are a hard target to talk to.
Regardless. Seems important — and fun — to get out and meet the people.
Here’s my current plan. I can tell from looking at it that it’s almost *doomed* to failure — I will likely end up at a bar somewhere, reading the manual.
But you gotta try…
- 3/7-3/8: Austin BarCamp III!
… long-time fan, first-time attendee. They call it “an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.” I’ve seen previous blog entries around that event, and I’m really looking forward to it. If you’re a geek, and you’re headed to SXSW/I, consider coming here instead.
- 3/8: GeekAustin Happy Hour
GeekAustin was my first ‘hey, there really are geeks in Austin!’ — and I still have a soft spot for LinearB and the rest of the crew.
- 3/8: Razorfish party.
My wife is an employee, so there’s that. But, based on their Christmas party, I’m also expecting this to be a solid good time.
- 3/9: Gawker media party
I’m a fan of the Lifehacker people, and I’m curious what they’re up to.
- 3/9: People-powered party
Likewise, fan of the Threadless and the Moo people.
- 3/10: Austin Rails happy hour.
Local Rails geeks throwin’ it down at Buffalo Billiards. We’ll be gettin’ it on with the chunky bacon like nobody’s business.
- 3/10: Austin Tech happy hour.
“Latest hot Austin startups,” it says. No idea what this is, but I’m curious.
- 3/10: Nuclear Tacos
Geeks, beer, and super-hot tacos. What could go wrong?
- 3/10: 20×2
“20×2 is an ongoing project that exists to showcase the creativity that lurks in each of us. Writers, musicians, filmmakers, web geeks and other bon vivants are asked to take two minutes each to answer the question of the day. The results can be as varied as the emotions and reactions they evoke.”
- 3/12: My birthday!
Mel and I are headed to Ruth’s Chris to sit in a big leather chair, drink whisky, and consider the beauty of the charred ribeye.
- Rest of that week:
SXSW music — 1500 bands, and those are just the official ones. So. Uh. Yeah.
Here’s the rest of the list.
Visit their animated catalog page. Warning: it’s noisy.
I’m giving a short talk on Rails tonight at the Austin Refresh meeting. It’s at 7pm, up at Texpresso (next to the Drafthouse on Anderson).
