Tag: technology

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Inbox Zero, LiveJournal, and Google Reader

I’ve mentioned Inbox Zero before and how I aspired to reach that goal. Today I’m proud to announce that my primary inbox is empty.

I’m also proud to announce that I’ve finally caught up with a month and a half of LiveJournal reading. I took an unintentional vacation from LJ reading starting in mid-November when I returned to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, mostly because I put off packing to the last minute. After removing enough communities so that the essentials remain, I find myself wondering if anything else can be cut. This is where Google Reader comes in.

If a community is primarily public, I’ll add the feed to Google Reader, taking advantage of the subject line (though most LiveJournal users don’t use descriptive subject lines) and the ability to read just the subject line and the first few words of a post to help me decide whether to expand the post to read it. This will help me scroll past my friends list much more quickly. If after a reasonable period I find that I’m not opening most of the posts in Google Reader, I’ll go ahead and remove the feed altogether.

Maybe this will lead to a more streamlined Internet expreience. One can only hope.

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Debian: The beginning of a new era

Windows users are in three camps: those who love it (my father falls in this camp), those who despise it but use it anyway, and those who are indifferent. I was in the second camp.

Then Debian came along.

Sure, the installation and the tweakings to get everything just the way I want it took a day, another person, and lots of groaning. Most of that was because Debian wouldn’t recognize my Internet connection. Groan.

A review will come after actually using it properly. I will say this: Debian has Windows beaten in the pre-installed games, and I haven’t even touched those yet.

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Review: Google Wave

I received a Google Wave invite a few days ago and decided to try it out. I watched the goofy video from Doctor Wave, which lagged to the point that five minutes later, I had watched one minute of video. My Internet connection may be less than excellent, but it isn’t that terrible either despite the flickering.

The video was a good test of Wave’s plugins, though. After that I opened a wave for NaNoWriMo participants created by another Wrimo. This was a huge Wave with at least 300 blips, and I couldn’t even scroll through the entire Wave at first. The scroll button was nearly impossible to grab, it kept taking me to parts of the Wave that I had already read or far ahead of where I wanted to read, and it was overall very hard to control. While the feature of being able to click and reply exactly where you want to is handy, replacing that with a reply button on the wave you want to reply to will suffice, and I’d be happy, if not happier, with that. The keystrokes lag, which is unfortunate for fast typists like me. Typing my first blip of two sentences in the NaNoWriMo wave took at least five minutes.

Google really needs to address the lag before this product can be as influential as people say it will be. If it isn’t, my invite may have been acquired in vain.

And before you ask, I don’t know if I have any invites. The answer is probably no since I received an invite in the past week. The site interface was too slow for me to navigate in a reasonable period of time, and I gave up out of frustration, choosing to do something where I could type freely. This something involved my NaNo novel.

One day when I’m less easily frustrated by the lag, there will be a more substantial review.