Desultory Thoughts

My friend John showed me some pictures that he took in his backyard of flowers and nature and I was amazed that he was the photographer responsible! The photos were stunning, up-close pictures of beautiful, detailed flowers and plants. When I asked what his secret was, he pointed out the “macro” setting on his camera which is indicated on most digital cameras by the flower icon. Suddenly I remembered seeing that icon on my cameras, but had never thought to use it. A whole new world was opened up to me.

I’m by no means a photographer, although I think still photography has a way of invoking thought and inspiration in a way that video can’t. For that reason, I have always wanted to be a photographer and capture inspiring moments in time. I took a photography class in ninth grade and entered a photo in a contest that won a prize. I think that’s the last time I ever tried to take a photograph that was stunning or impressive. In light of my new found macro setting that was always there but never used, I’m inspired to try and capture some of those moments in time.

How would it be to be able to tell someone that one of your favorite songs is “Dreaming in Colour” by The Art of Noise and then they could tell you that you’d likely also like tracks that feature mellow rock instrumentation, electronica influences, new age influences, a vocal-centric aesthetic and a clear focus on recording studio production. Then they would play things with that focus in mind and you could say, “Yea, I like that” or “No, that’s not exactly what I like.” Pretty soon you have an entire radio station customized to the style of music you like and you’re discovering new artists that you never knew existed!

That’s what the folks at the Music Genome Project have done. They’ve created a service called Pandora that will allow you to create multiple radio stations based on a favorite artist or even just a song. Give it a shot! You’ll be surprised how fun it is to listen to new music and expand your music experiences!

Recently Lifehacker posted a story about a freeware portal with a comprehensive list of primarily Windows freeware; compiled by eConsultant. The problem I find with lists of these sorts is that you still have to try them to know if they’re worth having on your computer. I’d rather not junk up my computer with freeware that’s useless, and believe me, I’ve installed many a useless freeware or trial software on my computer. Most of the time it’s the only way to tell if it’s good or not.

I guess I could assume that the software is good if eConsultant put it there, but the list is so huge that I doubt that’s the case. It would be nice if we could all “digg it” as they do on digg.com and thereby have a little bit more knowledge about how good it is before we waste our time with the download and install. Such a freeware list that only lists freeware that is used and approved by the list author exists at Yalin’s Freeware Collection. It’s a much smaller list, but that’s likely because he’s tried much of the freeware on the eConsultant freeware portal and found that it doesn’t suit his needs or that it isn’t that great. These things are good to know and it’s nice to find freeware that comes reccomended.

I stumbled upon a Firefox extension whilst reading a Slashdot article today that makes reading Slashdot so much easier; specifically when you want to jump into a sub-conversation that is beneath your threshhold. I set my threshold to 3 and above, so a lot of the sub-conversations get modded down because they’re technically off-topic, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested.

Slashdotter 1.5 makes the “9 replies beneath your current threshold” into an expanded tree within the same page without having to navigate away from the page. Then you can quickly read the off-topic stuff without leaving the story. This is all made possible by Ajax. I just love what people are doing with it!

Other Firefox extensions that I’m using and really like a lot are:

• Google Toolbar for Firefox (recently updated to 2.0)
• IE Tab
• FireFTP
• All-in-One Gestures (Mimics Opera’s Mouse Gestures which is why I switched to Opera years ago to begin with. I’m still sad that I had to jump the Opera ship after being such a devoted fan for so many years. This extension is to blame.)
• del.icio.us
• Adblock & Adblock Filterset.G Updater (You don’t realize how annoying all those flash ads are until the page finally loads without them for once!)
• Tab Mix Plus (Again, mimics some of Opera’s great feauture sets, such as saved sessions)

Some that I’ve installed, but hardly ever use are:

• Viamatic foXpose
• Blogger Web Comments (used to use this all the time when my blog was hosted on Blogger.com, but ever since I started hosting it on my own server with WordPress, I don’t use it anymore.)

I came across Pageflakes.com today (primarily because somebody came to my site from there) and found the site very cool! The familiar Ajax loading icon that I use for my comments on this blog told me right away that it was made with Ajax. Pageflakes.com is a customizable web portal like unto Google’s Personalized Home that I’ve been using for quite some time now.

I’ll be giving this a try over the next few weeks and sooner or later I’ll make a desicion between this new option and what I’ve been using in the past. I’ll report on my decision at a later date. Things that I like already are the ability to create multiple pages, a feauture I was just wishing for tonight as I added yet another module to my Google Page. Things are starting to get crowded.

Windows Live is yet another “Ajax Desktop” but it looks cruddy comparatively to both Google and Pageflakes.  It won’t be long before Yahoo turns out their version as well.  Come to think of it, they may already be doing that with “My Yahoo”.

A quick search revealed some more options that are out there!  In fact, there are too many to choose from (listed alphabetically in addition to the three mentioned above):

• Eskobo
• Favoor
• HomePortals
• Netvibes
• Protopage
• Zoozio (most recently known as Zimbio)

If you’ve used one or more and you have a preference or opinion, please post a comment.