benrobb
thoughts that don't fit in
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CD Lookup Fail!
My wife bought me a bunch of Foo Fighter’s CDs for my birthday. When I get CD’s I promptly rip them to mp3 and throw them in a box, never to see them again, but for some reason I still would rather have the actual CD instead of buying it on iTunes. Anyway, this one threw me for a loop when I popped it in:
Obviously it’s not a Michael Bolton CD, so I chose the Foo Fighters and then was greeted by this screen:
It all looked fine until I got to Track 7, and then I started to get a little worried. Fortunately, this CD was not a mix of Foo Fighters and Michael Bolton and all I had to do was manually rename the tracks. CD Lookup Fail!
The Real Digg Effect
“The Digg Effect” refers to the massive amounts of traffic that Digg would send to the sites hosting it’s front page articles.
For those in the crowd, Digg is a social news aggregation site where articles are submitted and then the general populous “Diggs” them up or down. The algorithms are unknown and changing, but the general idea is that enough people Digg your stuff fast enough, you end up on the front page of Digg and thousands/millions of people visit the site in a short time.
This sudden increase in traffic often causes servers to crash when people visit sites that don’t have the architecture to support the huge quantity of requests. This is the Digg Effect.
I used to follow the technology category on Digg, but stopped after a few months, when I couldn’t stand the ridiculous (and often vulgar) comments left by Diggers when they would Digg up and down. There seemed to be a few intelligent voices in the crowd, but for the most part, it’s just stupid people saying even stupider things.
So I’ve started calling it the Real Digg Effect. The real effect is that the world fills up with anonymous comments made by people who didn’t think twice before typing and submitting. This is what Seth Godin referred to in a recent post called Monkeys With Megaphones. Seth’s point is valid, but it assumes that you’ve got the time to sift through all the trash. Do you have the time?
Plaxo = Buyer’s Remorse
A while ago, I wrote about gSyncIt which syncs your Outlook Calendars to Google Calendar. After playing with the free/trial version, I ran into a few problems. I worked with it for 1 week or so, but when syncing (which was quite slow) constantly ran into problems with object references pointing to null objects.
It was the same calendar item each time and even though I had my settings to continue syncing on failure, that didn’t happen, so I couldn’t get my whole calendar to sync anymore. A friend at work has been using SyncMyCal quite successfully for awhile, so I finally went that route. Even though it is $15 more than the $10 gSyncIt, I figured the price was still nice to get my calendars synched without having to deal with errors all the time. I want my technology to work and get out of my way.
Not 20 minutes after making my purchase and registering SyncMyCal, I talked to another friend here at work who has been using Plaxo to sync his contacts and calendars with Google. Plaxo is Free. Buyer’s Remorse sets in.
In addition to syncing your calendars and contacts between every conceivable operating system and program, Plaxo is also integrated with a number of web applications most notably for me, Last.fm, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc.
After waiting for 4 weeks to make my purchase, why couldn’t I have waited for another 30 minutes? Buyer’s Remorse.
Desktop Application for Blogging on a Mac?
I know that there are a few applications that do this. I seem to recall looking at a few several months ago, but didn’t feel like I had a big enough need that I wanted to pay for one. Now that I’m looking to increase the frequency of my blogging, I thought it might be nice to give them another look.
Problem now is that I can’t seem to remember any of the ones I looked at before, and I’m really drawing a Google Blank. Any help from the masses?