William Reardon’s Blog

Having three computers that I use fairly regularly (Linux desktop at work, PC Desktop at home, Mac powerbook at both), one of my biggest frustrations was keeping my bookmarks in sync between them all. Especially as I grew to use keywords more & more, I would grow frustrated if I was on the wrong box and would type “yp pizza” and not get the Yahoo! yellow page results of pizza in my area, or type “add” and have it automatically add the current webpage to my del.icio.us account.

Then I discovered Bookmarks Synchronizer. I could upload or download my bookmarks on any computer I used few just a few clicks. After a while, I grew to trust it enough to have it automatically sync my bookmarks on browser startup or shutdown.

Sweet.

Only the other day, something mysterious happened.

The bookmarks on the central server became corrupt or whatnot, resulting in me losing my bookmarks on my home desktop and my laptop. Fuck!

It actually curtailed my browsing habits quite a bit last night, as I had no desire to manually type in each site. There was brief moment of self-reflection at this point, wondering if this was a sign that I was really lazy, but decided it was too much effort to think about it, and watched TV instead.

Luckily, it seems the poison had not spread to my linux desktop at work. I was able to upload them from there & download them to powerbook. A few seconds latter, my bookmarks filled my toolbar and joy filled my heart. I immediately backed up the local bookmark file on my laptop, as well as the valid XML file on the server.

It’s crazy how important bookmarks have become in my day-to-day life.

You don’t realize how important bookmarks are until you lose ‘em.

The fabulous Diana has joined the world of bloggers! Welcome Diana!

Back from Vegas. Arrving at 9:30pm on Friday and leaving at 8:15am this morning, we where there for just over 34 hours. A great time overall and had a great time hanging out with Chris, Vin, Mike & Sang (plus Chris’ buddies). Thanks guys!

On the gambling side of things, I did okay. I was down several hundred multiple times, but managed to climb my way out of the hole each time. I’m pretty comfortable with basic strategy now, save some uncommon cases with low cards (e..g, 4,4 v. 7, A,2 v. 4) but should be able to round those out for the next trip.

My blogroll has grown to over 200 subscriptions. My general mode of operation would be to add any blog that once-upon-a-time had something interesting, but in general, I’ve learned that one interesting post does not a good RSS feed make. (I was about to say something to effect of “as anyone who’s subscribed to my blog would have discovered”, but that would presuppose that I actually had an interesting post once upon a time. ;-)

With that, I’ve begun the slow, long process of widdling down my subscriptions. My general goal is to unsubscribe from one or two blogs each day until I find only the ones I’m really interested in remain.

A little bit of deja vu — I went through almost this exact same experience when first introduced to Usenet back in college.

In other news, am I only the one developing a total schoolboy crush on Survivor’s Stephanie? This is one tough chick with a helluva lot of heart.

Bravo, well said!

(via Jimmy)

Maybe I’m missing something incredibly obvious, but in OS X how the hell do you change what application launches when you double-click a file??

For some completely idiotic reason, it seems TextEdit has decided it owns my .txt files. Completely idiotic because every time I try to save the damn thing it tells me it can’t write the fucking format! (And these are simple text files!!!)

Update: Ah ha! Selected one of the files -> Get Info -> Expand “Open With”, Select application, click “Change All. Not obvious, but yeah, not that bad. I still think whoever did TextEdit deserves a cock-punching for their idiocy.

My brother, who just bought a townhouse in Seattle, IM’ed this to me today:

http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/

It places real estate listings from Craigslist onto Google Maps, making it quick & easy to see what’s available where & for what price. This is awesome. In the past when looking for places to rent — and now looking for a place to buy — this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. (If only they incorporate MLS listings to boot!)

The cool thing is you can get all of this data from Craiglist via XML. I’m not sure there’s a web services API for Google Maps, but it’s a great example of how one could be used. It’s even better example of why open apis and letting your customers innovate is freaking brilliant idea.

paulrademacher I don’t know you, but thank you! (Now can we get one with MLS data? Pretty please? :-)

For the record I am not Michael Moore.