I am a tentative home owner.
“Tentative”, as I’m not yet sitting in my new shack of a condo, looking out at the faux waterfall and enjoying the audio cacophony of SFO flights above. Seems like all I’m doing nowadays is waiting and stressing out about waiting; I see why they build a lot of padding into the entire home purchasing process. Of course, when the elements gather, there’s a 2-3 hour flurry as agents and brokers scramble to save the deal, all poetically puncutuated by fifty copies of my signature.
I’ve spent years reading and listening to the Mac experience. I’ve never actually bought a Mac, but I was interested in some of its software and how cool it looked. The exercise was mostly academic; I didn’t care for paying for the privilege of Mac ownership, and the Windows alternatives worked well enough despite the clunkier interface.
When I jumped over to LOLapps, I figured it may be time to try my hand on the supposedly superior system (). I almost bought one for myself, but abruptly realized that I don’t need multiple personal computers in addition to a work laptop. Plus, my gaming needs still demand more-flexible PC-compatiable hardware.
Engineers suck at communication.
Really, for all the smart people who can read a core dump and juggle twenty pieces of information in their head while debugging driver code, the ability to talk to the common user (bah, who needs users?) is surprisingly rare. Sure, engineers can, for the most part, communicate with each other with usual lingo and acronym symphony, but “dumbing it down” to the understanding of a normal person seems to almost be beneath some developers.
Yea, it’s not a criticism unique to the software world; every hobby or industry has its own terms and linguistic barriers of entry which, if put into song, resemble an international music festival.
My latest obsession in efficiency are wikis.
You’ve probably heard of ‘em: besides running Wikipedia, you’ve probably contributed to or consulted a corporate wiki if you ever held a desk job. For those who haven’t, they’re a system of documents, easily editable with specialized markup for organizing data (usually via tables and lists), easily linkable between pages (e.g., Wikipedia articles), and easily editable by multiple writers (via keeping a history of changes). They’re a step up from random text files and lengthy email exchanges, at least in a collaborative environment.
An hour of my Sundays are reserved for comings and goings of money; the weekly ritual includes a scouring of online banking, credit card, and investment websites, plus a review of my expenditures for the week. Besides the occasional curse at the bear market draining my retirement funds, the process is tedious and about as interesting as this sentence.
Imagine the wildest adventure possible with a copy of Microsoft Money, a directory of Firefox bookmarks, and a handful of receipts, bank statements, and bills. Tone down the explosions a bit and you’ve got my manual transaction machine of an evening.
I’ve been slowly moving my finances online, though, with pleasant results once I got past the fear of entrusting an unknown entity with my numbers. Research and due diligence helps alleviate some of those fears; my experience with these sites has been surreal and I’d recommend anyone looking to clarify or define their financial landscape to check out some of the free tools available online.
In my quest for a good MP3 media player, I checked out the combination that Jeff recommended a few weeks back: Foobar2000 and MP3tag, the former being a Windows-based customizable media player for all sorts of audio formats and the latter being a database-like MP3 tag editor. After a week and a half of use and a substantial amount of time spent in customization, my verdict is that I’m crazy for spending my time doing this.
MP3tag is for for people who like their songs to conform to one naming convention and embed pointless information within, including artist, contributing artist(s), producer, distributor, first time heard, awards received, and popularity-if-played-at-a-junior-high-prom. Most of its utility is available in modern media players, but I suppose the dedicated interface to tagging makes mass tagging songs (like my current project to re-tag all my songs in their native language as opposed to funky translations and adding genre and album info) more efficient. I doubt most people will go through the trouble of re-tagging their songs, so this app is hard to recommend for everyone.
