Day In The Life of Baz

Now I know Gmail is supposed to be about functionality. However, I must say, it’s been a long time coming. Gmail is functional to the bone, however the fact that everyone had the same identical theme was a bit bland. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice clean theme, but sometimes some folks want some personality to their email client.

Previously, these folks would have to resort to the Better Gmail Firefox Addon. But, as of late yesterday, Gmail has rolled out Gmail Themes. Now you can give your Gmail the individuality that you so rightfully deserve.

Popularity: 36%

As you guys must know, the iPhone 2.0 came out yesterday (July 11th, 2008). The only new appeal is that 3G network access and the GPS. I didn’t really pay it much mind, because as you know, I’m not an iPhone kinda guy . It’s just more than I need right now. I work a 9 to 5 at a software company, then leave work and come home to my Windows/Ubuntu box. So, I don’t have a real need to be any more connected.

Then, this morning, I got a text message from a friend:

Jesus Phone

Then he called me (he still couldn’t receive calls at the time. Brand new activation and all). Then we started talking about his new iPhone. How it’s changed his life and he loves it so much.

So I started to wonder, Do I want an iPhone? My T-Mobile contract is about to expire in a few months, so I’m seriously considering it.

Popularity: 54%

OK, so I guess I’ve been living under a rock for most of 2007, but I just stumbled onto this guy. I stumbled up Clipperz just this morning from reading a comment on someone’s blog (sorry, the source escapes me).

Here we have a snippet from Clipperz.com

• Clipperz is:

  • a secure and simple password manager
  • an effective single sign-on solution
  • a digital vault for your personal data

• With Clipperz you can:

  • store and manage your passwords and online credentials
  • login to your web services without entering any username or password
  • protect all your sensitive data: codes for burglar alarms, PINs, credit card numbers, …
  • share secrets with family members and associates (coming soon)

• Clipperz benefits:

  • free and completely anonymous
  • access it any time from any computer
  • no software to download and nothing to install
  • avoid keeping secrets on your PC or on paper

Now, in the past, I’ve frowned upon online password management. They seemed like glorified excel list. Yeah, it’s secure, but who cares.

I must say, I’m impressed. I truly am. I’d never imagine that Microsoft would have made such a stride to create such a generic blogging application. The power of this program surpasses everything that I’ve seen before in a desktop blogging client. Windows Live Writer is definitely a winner in my book, but…

Why I Like It

First of all, there’s nothing that can beat the speed of offline editing. There’s not waiting for www.myblog.com/wp-admin. There’s no clicking and waiting for the post page to load. It’s just pure editing, quick and easy. It’s great.

One of the best features I’ve seen is that it has the ability to pull over your blogs CSS style so that you can see exactly what the post looks like like. Hit F12 and there’s a live preview of what the post looks like, as if posted on your blog. That’s cool.

Images Are Awesome

Inserting images into a post is the most insane thing I’ve seen. Of course you can drag an image into your post from your desktop and there you go. There’s a built in drop shadow feature that I’ve come to love. It actually edits the image and sets the drop shadow on the image itself. It’s not an after-market style that’s applied; I guess there are pros and cons to this, but all I can see are pros.

Popularity: 43%

As to what possessed me; it’s any body’s guess really, but I did it.

As if I didn’t have enough work to do this weekend, I noticed that that new version of Ubuntu had been released on the 18th; Ubuntu 7.10. There were a lot of reviews about how it’s so much better and makes life so much simpler than the previous versions.

So like an idiot, I dropped all the projects that I had waiting and decided to poke around Ubuntu. I figured, “how long can this take anyway?”. Well, there’s a process involved.

Understanding My Windows Setup

When I got my new computer, I got a 250 GB SATA drive, which I partitioned down the middle. This is my main drive that I use for Windows XP. The first partition is the operation system and programs and the second partition holds data, music, etc.

I also had my old 120 GB IDE that was also partitioned down the middle. On this drive I have a bunch of stuff (files, downloads, movies, music, etc) that I’ve collected over the last four (4) years. I’m scared to throw out anything, because you never know. I think what I need is one very specific hard drive crash (knock on wood) that would just clear out all that data that I think I need.