Every now and then I find some awesome new piece of software and I think, "Holy crap, this changes everything!" And then I use it like crazy and eventually figure out the thing it actually does best, and realize it doesn't change everything but rather just one thing and that's OK with me.
So just when I've been obsessing with skitch and taking endless marked up screenshots of things like MindNode
and of course I'm still hooked on Sandy too, and almost never forget even the most ridiculous to-do items that pop into my mind anymore
But then I finally went back and read more about Evernote and immediately lusted for a beta account since I missed the first post on TUAW about it in the middle of my Trying Time of 2008™. (That's its official name now.) I dropped a comment on the blog post begging the masses to take pity on my poor soul, and evernote themselves dropped an invite on me. (Phil maybe? Thanks!)
So I'm tinkering with it and taking pictures of... food labels, and random items around the house, just to test the whole OCR bit. I need a camera in my cell phone now. I did the same thing when I first played with Delicious Library, which fascinated me at the time since it could do barcode scanning via my iSight camera. Then I realized that I am neither 1) in possession of enough media, nor 2) ocd enough, to make it worth scanning the barcodes on all of my books and dvds. But it's nice to know I could if I wanted to.
Despite all my technological exploration, I'm still trapped within the disgusting confines of Lotus Notes at work. It's the pea under my mattress and I hate it. I enjoyed it for a while when I first got my crackberry and was grooving on the integrated mobile calendar, but then I realized that I was responding to work email in the shower on Sunday and I should probably cut that out. Plus I wanted to reformat it so I could use the GPS. And now Lotus Notes is just sad Lotus Notes, unable to offer anything but a clumsy UI and a snappy Mac Classic-inspired color scheme.
I think I might ditch it. I don't really trust our admin to reliably update it anyway and she always asks if I'm free for meetings even though she can see my whole schedule herself, so it might not be any big loss if I abandoned it and entrusted Sandy with my daily comings and goings.
And then Evernote can remember all my goofy thoughts which are currently scattered in notes.txt files on at least 7 different computers and servers. Ooh, I'll bet it'd be good for indexing recipes, too.
I think back to the days when (at least I thought) that nobody in real life read any of the bullshit I put online. Oh so liberating were those days, and I suppose a bit like being a cowboy in The Saloon Days. There ain't no sheriff here, mister! But now that's all turned upside down.
I wouldn't call myself a compulsive twitterer but it's always on somewhere in my peripheral vision. I track a few topics and have impromptu group conversations from time to time. Sometimes people twitter about the place where I work and occasionally I drop a wee hint about getting around some of our more obnoxious features.
But then that managed to wander away. (okay I not-so-secretly wanted it to because I hate that form and want it to die) And then random people in Arizona (I guess?) started following me on twitter for some unknown reason. I ignored them, really, but then today my boss and our ad sales director popped their heads into my office looking to find out any other tricky secrets I might have up my sleeve. Which is pretty hilarious, chortle chortle, until I realized that my twitter stream had a few classy gems like this one right up there at the top.
And then I thought about all those people with careers revolving around social media technology who have thoughtful blogs with interesting ideas about all these things. Sometimes I think I should try to be more like that, but I feel like a lot of these things are either obvious enough for me not to need to repeat them, or hazy enough that acting like I know something is just mental masturbation.
So I'll stick with my tried and true 13-year-old girl format. We don't have clearly defined topics, we don't tag our blog posts, and you're lucky if we bestow paragraph breaks upon you.
@twitter omg I should be asleep by now.
Posted at 4:25 AM