The Occupational Adventure (sm): Why DID you take that job, anyway?

I like the company
I have the potential to do very well at this type of work
Stepping stone in career path
I like this type of work
It would be challenging work
I’ll have an opportunity to be recognized as a high performance achiever
It would be fun work
I always wanted to do this kind of work
This was my dream job

Over time my reasons for working there have changed but not overly so. Where do I work? Give a guess, it’s one of these

I use tinderbox for writing little snippets of text under a title (or sometimes no title at all). It’s nice having a place to store small random ideas (or bits and pieces of ideas) and see the juxtaposition of these ideas next to each other.

When I’m ready to make a post, I can combine these notes to come up with a post or sometimes post a complete note. Like this one for example.

I like Six Apart as a company. They offer services I like. TypePad being one of them. They appear to listen to their customers and are willing to make changes.

With these licensing changes to MovableType, I considered paying $100 to get an unlimited personal edition license then getting it hosted somewhere (I’ve heard good things abouth Prohosters). Pricewise, it’ll come to about the same amount but I’ll have greater control over my weblog. On the other hand, I like that the day to day administration of my weblog is handled by someone. That leaves me to spend precious free time focusing on more interesting things.

On the subject of weblog software, Drupal, Plone and Wordpress appear good alternatives to MovableType. All are available under free (as in libre and beer) licenses. I tempted to get my Linux box running and having a bakeoff between the 4.

Since getting myself a GMail account, I’ve been amused by the extent people will go to get one. Google will eventually release GMail to the general public so why the rush to get one. While reading about the furor over GMail, I found Oddpost. It looks really interesting except they require IE 5.5 for Windows. That is a real pity because I don’t have a Windows machine readily available to me when I’m at home.

A new version of Firefox, 0.9 is out. I use OmniWeb 5 and Firefox interchangebly though I feel that Firefox is the best damn browser out there, despite the cool new ideas that OmniWeb has originated. Also check out Thunderbird, a companion email client to Firefox.

The sound on my TV has gone kaput. I’m half heartedly looking around for a replacement. Why half heartedly? Whenever I come home, I always have a bad habit of switching on the TV even when I don’t watch it. This always distracts from doing other stuff, listening to music, reading, writing. It’s been nice to have some peace and quiet for the last two days.

Jun 6th was the 60th anniversary of D Day. All I ever learnt about that period in history was mostly from reading books by Stephen Ambrose. I’ve read D Day, Band of Brothers and intend to read Citizen Soldiers sometime soon. Dramatic, heart breaking, gut wrenching stuff. The history channel is currently showing the Band of Brothers mini-series which does a better job than the book. When I watched it last summer, I was moved by the sacrifices those soldiers made and in the process the tightly knit bonds they formed with one another.

Thanks to my friend Dave, I managed to get a gmail account. I’ve not used it much but I can understand why people would be impressed with it. Besides its oft advertised 1GB of storage, it offers a very clean simple webmail interface. Its aggregation of emails in a thread was pretty impressive. I can see it being useful especially when lots of emails are flying around in a thread. I suspect that other email clients will be incorporating this feature in their next release.

My Tinderbox care package arrived this week. A collection of the various presentations and materials used for the recent Tinderbox weekend in Boston. I’ve glanced through a couple of the tinderbox files on the CD and was just blown away by what people have been doing with it. Mark Bernstein’s draft provided me a short but interesting read this afternoon. I’m looking forward to the completed work.

I would give my left nut to get all that cool gear Apple has released this last weekend. Can somebody tell them to stop having so many great products?

Be careful of how you post stories even if you’re trying to promote your subject.

Recently I saw that OmniGroup released a beta of OmniWeb 5. My experiences with OmniWeb 4 had been great until other browsers, namely FireFox and Safari, started to overtake it in terms of features and stability. Anyway had to try it out. Initially it seemed a little buggy (constant crashes, somes pages would take forever to load, the stop button was unresponsive). The last couple of days though, it has been running really smoothly for me. The things that have impressed me so far:

1) For whatever unknown reason, OmniWeb has always rendered text beautifully (the best between IE, Safari or FireFox)

2) Their “tab” implementation is just brilliant. On the sidebar, they have little thumbnail images of webpages. I would describe it as “expose for browser tabs”.

3) Default setup blocks most ads and pop-ups.

4) Per-site preferences.

Can’t wait for OmniWeb 5 to be released!

Tinderbox is an application that I’ve been experimenting with on and off for the last two years. They have a couple of templates and now provide a wizard to help beginners build a weblog with. However, it is more of a extensible note-taking/making tool that is able to generate weblogs. It’s also able to do a whole lot more. Part of the learning curve that beginners have to get over is because of this. If I could use personal equipment at work, I would use Tinderbox to organize the various emails, tasks, issues, bugs and ideas that I go through. One thing it’s lacking is any form of comment feature which makes it slightly less superior as a collabrative tool. Tinderbox can be combined with MovableType, WordPress, Blogger or Radio Userland to get over this limitation though.

The Seattle International Film Festival is going on right now (till Jun 13). A bunch of friends wanted to watch all three of the Infernal Affairs movies in an afternoon. 7 hours is a long time to be in a cinema and I think my focus waned a little at the end. The best of the three was the first one. Tight, tense with a interesting plot. The second had a godfather-esque plot that was not entirely bad. The third one had good ideas but was let down by bad editing (it had a problem with not knowing when to end). Overall not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

If somebody were to ask my recommendations for a weblog, I would point them to Blogger. It definitely seems to have gotten a whole lot better since I tried it out last summer. They have done a lot of work to orientate themselves to newbies. Lots of features, fairly intuitive interface, photo hosting and lots of help here and here. Of course, free doesn’t hurt either.

Just upgraded to the latest Tinderbox version. Experimenting with using it together along with Typepad

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