Posts

While personally I’m busy trying to learn all the other languages, I loved this clever German ad for learning English. Dedicated to mein grossen schister IW in Wuppertal.

I’m like to think I’m pretty good with goal setting every year. It’s the followup I suck with. Generally, I try and look at the month end tracking on what I want to accomplish in a year and fall off somewhere around September as my life gets crazy.

I just need to get nagged a little more. That’s where HassleMe (dead link) comes in.

It chimes in at irregular intervals you’ve set to bug you about the things you’ve asked it to bother you about. It’s like emailing yourself a nagging at a fuzzy time in the future.

Good experience has a great list of fun online games to play if your brain needs a break from XMas stress and your current boss’s tyranny.

Good Experience Games - good games, fun games

One of my favourites, an online version of Snowcraft (dead link sadly) is on here as well.

A little something for MM. A few things to add to your “Movies to Watch” list. Some of my favourite films of all time are on here so, bon appetit.

The 50 Greatest Indie Films

Some very cool open source news just to round up.

OpenOffice 2.0[http://openoffice.org] with full support for the OpenDocument format and (IMHO) a very worthy replacement for Microsoft Office for the vast majority of people who use Word, Excel and Powerpoint in anything under uber-expert mode.

It now includes a quite cool MS Access database replacement as well as a good drawing package. Sadly, a native OSX port still lags but the Linux and Windows versions should keep everyone happy. Also, it’s free, open source and virtually future proof format-wise.

I mentioned the quick Applescript I hacked together](http://blog.wakatara.com/2005/10/10/vienna-rss-reader-and-news-aggregator-for-osx/ ) the other day to allow the superb and free Vienna rss reader and aggregator by Steve Palmer to work with my fave blogging app, MarsEdit.

Steve posted it up and in no time flat Graeme West tweaked it a bit and made it even better with attribution and block quoting. You can find his tweak here (nicely done Graeme).

I made a super minor mod to them to fit my style and am using it already myself.

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the software ecosystem on OSX, so I’m always surprised when someone points me at a program I’ve never heard about before, particularly when it’s better than what I’m already using.

Vienna 2.0 , the free, open source news aggregator and rss reader from Steve Palmer is fantastic. I’ve said how much I like Ranchero’s NewsGator’s NetNewsWire before, but it has been bogging down with the volume of news I’ve been looking at lately and getting slow, particularly using functions like “Mark All as Read” which sends my hard drive spinning and slows down the rest of the system. It is also commercial, and while reasonably priced for the professional version (particularly when bundled with the MarsEdit blogging program), I still prefer my programs open source and free in principle whenever possible.

I have this great friend who I’ve lost a bit of contact with recently who had this great theory about karmas. That basically, there were three of them: apartment, job and friend karma. You could have 2 of them but virtually never three. I always found it charming but kind of wondered about its applicability to my own situation.

I was chatting with a friend as we watched the sunset off the Boathouse near my apartment and were discussing the idea of the “three” theory and what it was that kept you in a place or made you think someplace or sometime was better than any other in your life. After discussing Viktor Frankl and killing off a bottle of wine, I think we came up with a pretty good list :

I’m really surprised at how few things have broken since moving to Tiger. I was relaly expecting it to be much more jarring and for a lot more things to have problems, but with a few exceptions things have been unbelievably smooth.

Quicksilver, one of my favourite apps seems to be having a bit of trouble and even an update today seems not to have fixed it. MenuCalendar as well though it’s more a nice to have than a need to have.

(posted via a Dashboard widget no less!)

OK, so at this point you could probably slap an i in front of anything with an Apple logo and I’d buy it, but I did go out 15 minutes after it was possible to get a retail version of tiger and plunk down the cash for the install.

Due to family obligations, I didn’t get to install it until late last night (after backing up to my very handy iPod) and Tiger installed things in the usual effortless way that Apple seems to excel in, while I played Monopoly against my nephew.