Ratsofrass

I’ve been using Gmail for a bit, as a secondary account. Now, Gmail is now available to anyone and their dog. The engineers have made a video, telling you why you might want to use Gmail:
Why Use Gmail? video

Why do I think you might want to use Gmail, outside of what the video suggests?

1) Accessible. Yes, I know, any self-respecting geek has an email account they can get at anywhere, but this is for the rest of you that haven’t clued in that it might be a good thing to have an email account you can access anywhere you have internet.
2)Big. 2.822 GB of storage and increasing. With 5MB video attachments becoming ever more common, you need this kind of space these days.

3)Nested messaging. Yeah, I know the video covers this, but it can’t be over emphasized - grouping messages by thread makes it so much easier to follow a conversation - works more like newsgroups. What I’m not sure about is how well this works when you have multiple people being added/dropped to a thread as a conversation goes on - happens in a work situation when you are trying to move a process forward that requires input from different people as things move forward.

Someday, I’m going to get Trevor to show me how to easily embed Youtube videos into this blog. It’s easy, right?????

Here is something interesting. Go and click somewhere on each of these 8 rectangles. Then view a score showing where you and other people clicked. Go run test now, come back and read rest.

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I’m not normally interested in what’s going on in the gaming console market - I just consider them to be crippled gaming computers - very good gaming computers, but still crippled.

The Playstation with it’s DVD player was the last console that garnered any interest, due to the fact that for slightly more than a DVD player of the day you got a game machine as well.

Now Nintento has the Wii.  I’m hearing good things about this, and from other computer geeks my age, not just ads and <18yrs olds impressed by the latest of anything. What’s interesting here is the motion sensing controller. Things like practicing your golf swing, bowling, baseball, tennis, etc. are possible, where your performance matters somewhat at least on your technique, not just twitch reactions. Whereas everyone else (Xbox 360, PS3) are just doing more of the same (graphics, horsepower, storage), Nintendo is trying something a little different. Good for them - I may actually go try one of these things out in a mall after the Xmas rush is over.

Easiest install ever. Done in 90 seconds. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you how long it took, but it felt short. I’m sitting there running FF2.0, thinking “that’s it? I’m done?!” No reboot. No long download. Okay, I did close my apps like recommended, but that’s it. My bookmarks all look the same. Firefox didn’t try to pester me to change my homepage. My plug in (Flashblock) is still there. Bears repeating: Easiest install ever.
First impressions: I can use RSS feeds in the browser tried it - works. I don’t know what to do with RSS feeds yet, but they work. Spell checker for writing blog posts works - underlines misspells and suggests corrections on right click, has add to dictionary. Nice.

New skin - the look is fine, one minor tweak they made the search bar on the right a bit bigger - maybe  there was a way to change that on 1, but it’s bigger now at any rate.
Firefox was easy. Now I need to figure out what to do with RSS.