Show us your best pet photo.
Submitted by 8gurl.
If you could eat only 3 foods for the rest of your life, what would they be?
Submitted by formance.Three? Ha! I laugh at you foolish and wasteful gluttons! I need but two foods to make me happy. Beer and Cheese. Mind you, I may resort to some mashupification and cook me up some beer cheese, but at the end of the day it is still goddamned beer and cheese.
How many email addresses do you have? What are they for?
I have a bit of an issue with email addresses and recently set about assigning uses to them. I still have no ability to stick to these ascribed uses because the addresses are in the hands of various people who are unfamiliar with my rules and, ergo, are involuntarily violated. My accounts are as follows:
There you have it. Seven email accounts. Three of which get very little use and should be put out of their misery. I have the feeling this is not an uncommon problem and would love to know how people address this kind of issue. Many of the best email power-users I know use a single account despite receiving many magnitudes more email than the average user. It is the power of smart folders, tags, and filters along with some freaky mojo that makes this possible. It is something that I cannot grasp.
- Work email - This is straight forward, it is given t me by my company and it is where my co-workers and customers send me email. Unfortunately work also assigned me a Dell Laptop and I do 95% of my work on my own Mac laptop. That means that basically, the work email address is simply a forwarding intermediary to my personal email account that is assigned to work.
- My Personal Work email address (see above). This is also used for other personal activities that I deem to be work that are not part of my job. Maybe it is better described a s my Professional Personal Email, but that seems oxymoronic.
- My Personal Personal Email address. This is the one that I use for personal activities and fun. It is where my friends should contact me.
- My joke address - Basically, this is a throw away account that I use for nefarious purposes. It is frequently laden with spam to the extent that it cannot be used for much else. It also appears with the alias 'Cooter' when received, so it is not business appropriate (learned that the hard way).
- My Spam address - I use this when signing up for anything on the web (software betas, newsletters, services, e.g.) where there is a good chance of spam. If I do not know a company's full background and their ethics, I use this address. Ironically, it gets no spam.
- My website address - this is the address associated with my main website. It appears on the Whois record and in all of the "mail" links on the site. This is basically a maintenance account that is used for convenience to other people. It gets little use.
- My secondary website address - See above. It is used for web business, but has a better alias, and is easy to use on the go. For some reason it is not fond of email clients and again gets little use.
What are your top 10 most-played songs currently?
Show us your pens and pencils.
Audio: Show us the best album (new or old) that you've bought this year.
Every now and again, I revert into being a complete and utter computer dork and start trying every app that I can. The Applications folder begins to burst at the seams and I frequently awaken in the morning in a pool of my own spittle in front of my keyboard. When the dust settles, it seems wise to take a little inventory of the experience and see what has stuck, lest it all be in vain. So without further ado, here is a run down of my current favs:
1. Quicksilver - [Yawn], I know, like everyone doesn't know about this and doesn't already use it and it's like on every list ever. Okay, I get it, that being said, this little app is so powerful and so useful that it is not infrequent that I forget about just what all it can do. It takes a bit of effort to buckle down and become a power user, but when you do, I guarantee that you will not cease marveling at it's power. It tops this list simply because it has hooks into pretty much everything else on this list or could replace everything else on this list. Oh and it may have fathered your children; I am just saying, it is that good.
2. Growl - Yeah, yeah, it tells me what is going on on my computer. Big deal, since I am generally the person doing the things on my computer, I should be pretty much keyed in enough to not need notifications, right? Wrong, slap some Quicksilver and iTunes and any other app that this uses and you can become a keyboard shortcut wizard bouncing from app to app, changing songs, adding appointments, adding tasks, doing whatever you darned well please and Growl let's you know just what is working and when. It is like the ding on the microwave, no more staring at the spinning plate of mush wondering just when you can throw it down your gullet. Simple and elegant, yummy.
3. iGTD - I have in times past been a devotee to kGTD. If you don't know GTD, it stands for Getting Things Done, that is the book by David Allen and is the reason why dorks are able to get out of bed in the morning and achieve such complex tasks as flossing and taking the trash out (I kid you knot, these are in my task list). kGTD is destined to become OmniFocus and until today when a beta was announced, it was vaporware. In the meantime, I started kicking the tires on iGTD a competitor that pretty much picks up where kGTD left off, It has a lovely interface and pretty much fills the needs of this GTDer. The development cycle is such that if you even think of a feature you would like to see, it appears (pretty darned creepy), if you encounter a bug, click that handy "Check for Updates" menu item and there you go: new version with bug fix. Throw in some kickass Growl and Quicksilver integration and you can see a trend here.
4. Tumblr - Speaking of rapid development cycle, Tumblr is like a microblog where all of the fluff that used to appear on blogs can live. It is where lolcats and videos of water skiing squirrels can find a home. Tumblr is so easy top update that I am lucky that I haven't added the entire web to my tumblelog plus, you can now add feeds from last.fm, vox, del.icio.us, flickr and numerous other sites. Oh and friends! You can make friends - or a least pretend friends - since you won't make any real ones with a time sink like this. Now if it only had Quicksilver and Growl integration...
5. Salling Clicker - Okay, I have to admit that I am only just playing with Salling Clicker because I am yet to pny up the cash for the full version. That being said, I am loving this simple app. It lives on both your Mac (or apparently PC) and you mobile phone. You can then use the Bluetooth or WiFi connectivity on your phone to control your Mac. It essentially provides the functionality of the Apple Remote to those of us who have old skool Macs plus it adds a lot more functionality like accessing iPhoto slide shows, presentations, news and media, and all kinds of other good stuff. Since I use the Bluetooth version, it saves me at most the thirty paces to my computer, but when you aspire to sloth of epic proportions, those are invaluable strides!
So there you have it, the latest in my time wasting posing a efficient and effective work. Please let me know if there are new, different, and/or better ways to spend my life, I am always looking for suggestions.
Which band or artist which is no longer performing or alive would you have loved to have seen?
Submitted by Rev Stan.
I completely and totally regret not having seen Nirvana. I had tickets at the Rosemont in Chicago for 1994, but chickened out because, having just moved there, I had no idea how to get to the venue and had heard that it was in a bad neighborhood. A few weeks later Kurt Cobain killed himself, on the day before my 19th birthday no less. I was devastated and went into some weird teenage funk. Nowadays, I can't believe I missed such a great opportunity.
Audio: Show us your favorite movie soundtrack.
Submitted by miyagawa.
Runner-ups: Less than Zero (Bring the Noise remains one of the single best hip hop songs to this day) and I have never even seen the movie.
Reservoir Dogs: Like this one won't be a million people's choices, only Tarantino could pair such cheery music to such a violent film.
Show us what wakes you up in the morning.
Submitted by Rob.
Ahhh. Nothing rings in a springtime morn like the chirping of birds and the maniacal howl of a puppy that feels it is her duty to patrol the house with a mighty fury to be envied by someone much more capable of enforcing their verbal threats. A 5 am wake-up call has become the norm, generally triggered by the sound of a neighboring cat's collar, a bird chirping, a dog barking, or the thought of any of the above. If nothing stirs her, then it is simply Moto's need to join the rest of the family in a warm bed that causes me to bolt upright and curse the coming day.
