365 Moments In A Year

I am starting a personal growth project today, nothing fancy mind you. My aim is to post a photo a day for a year. Why? Because it will be fun, it will give me a chance to see how my photography skillz have improved over the year and I could also use the photos as a diary of sorts to find out what I was doing that day. I will probably take multiple photos over the course of each day and post one lucky photo on Flickr. It will be posted on Flickr and linked over here. If you are bored on lunch break at work and want to browse my photos you should be able to find a link to my Flickr photos all over this blog, if not, there is always a link on top of the page.

 

Woolaroc, Oklahoma’s Heritage

I got a chance to visit Woolaroc this Thanksgiving holiday and it was well worth the trip. The weather was amazing, batteries were charged for my camera and I was ready to snap to my hearts content. Since I was alone, I took my time trying to compose each and every picture. How can I describe the pictures? You will have to see for yourself how much fun it was taking the pictures as it is looking at them. You can see some of them here.

 

Writely Is Open

Writely was open today for registration when I checked this morning so get your account now. It might be just for a little while as I have seen them do before. Of course it comes with a big seal of Beta as with many other Google products.

 

Google’s Writely

Yesterday I was surprised to see an email from writely.com to create an account,

Hello kash,

Thanks for signing up on the waitlist to use Writely — you may now register to use it. Just click the link below to get started

I don’t remember signing up to be on their waitlist and I hate waiting but I guess I am glad I did. I jumped on my seat and had an account ready to play with in about 30 seconds. Now, I didn’t stick around after the account was created to see what all I could do but I was glad to have an one. For all of you out there who doesn’t have an account on writely.com, booooo! *snicker*

 

Weekend Fun

Hello World, my weekend was nice but I got a little sick. I think I am coming down with flu or something. I feel like I got sick not because I caught a virus somewhere but because I played for a long time on the weekend. I haven’t played any games for a while and suddenly on Friday I figured why not play some for old time’s sake. I am glad I did, it was fun. I picked up a copy of Tomb Raider: Legend from the local store and played like there is no tomorrow. I finished the game in twelve hours, needless to say I thought the game could have used more playtime.

 

My Little Friends

Here’s a new craze that is all over the Internet right now. It’s called Tilt-Shift effect and you need expensive lens for your camera to do it. Ahh, who’s got that sort of money. Or you can just use Photoshop CS. If done right, this effect make things appear miniature compared to their surroundings.

 

Say “No” to GM Foods

Get your food at a local farmer's market this summer. Why be a victim of genetically modified foods when you have a choice not to? It doesn't get easier than this where you have local farmers right in your city.

Here's something to help you find that friendly local farmer.

When you buy from them you not only keep away from GM foods but also help our local farmers to stay in business and keep that good food coming.

 

Jump on the RSS Bandwagon!

So I find myself visiting too many websites almost daily when I am not at work to get the low down on new gadgets, free productivity software, utilities, reviews and what have you. I spend too much time visiting sites like inquirer, lifehacker, 43folders, del.icio.us. Today I was thinking why not get and RSS aggregator? I have always known about it but never thought I really needed it until I stop and think about it. So I finally experiment with a couple including Google's personal homepage and a couple others and finally decide on Bloglines and it is really good. Now that all my news is in one place I can stop wasting time visiting all the different websites, sometimes I even find myself clicking on the links from those websites to other websites that aren't even related to what I am reading about and on and on I go into the abyss. With Bloglines I find myself a little more organized, I and RSS are in harmony.

 

Google Chat

Whoa! if you haven’t checked out the new Google Chat inside your Gmail you best get to it. I always liked Google Talk but never really used it because I barely know anyone who uses it. I was hoping Google would integrate MSN Messenger into Google Talk so I could get rid of MSN Messenger but that’s probably asking for too much. If I didn’t have about 50 contacts in MSN Messenger I would’ve gotten rid of it long time ago but alas I can’t get 50 people to switch from MSN Messenger to Google Talk. Back to the original topic what Google did by integrating chat inside Gmail is just too good. I asked my friend to check it out but he doesn’t have it yet. Gmail’s chat features are currently available to a limited set of users. From what it looks like Google has it in all the relatively older accounts which were registered a while back. But if you have it you don’t need to install Google Talk or do anything, it shows up when you sign-in to your Gmail account. You can chat right through your Gmail account and the best part is Google saves your chat in your Gmail, which is searchable like regular email. Of course you can opt not to save your chat in “Settings”. This is just a quick intro of what I saw in my inbox this morning and I had to share it with the masses.

On another note, I don’t understand why Gmail is still in Beta. It’s just too good to be out of Beta phase already. C’mon Google, you can do it!

 

Sharing and syncing files

Tired of sharing files between two computers using either CD’s or flash drives? Than you might wanna give FolderShare a shot. It lets you share and sync files between multiple computers. There are two parts to the program, yes you guessed it; sharing and syncing. Syncing is the big one where you can sync files from your computer with your friends, family, colleagues, and any number of them. The program is pretty easy to setup on your computer and whoever you want to invite will have to download and install the program on their computer. For example, you work on a word document or a database on your computer all weekend long and some friends of yours need the updated files. The files will automatically be synced on their computer provided they are running the FolderShare software. They have the updated files and voila! You can have as many people synced to that file as you want.

By default, the software is setup for automatic syncing, i.e. the files will automatically be updated on all the systems on your sync network. Or you can change the settings for on-demand syncing, which means it will be synced when you say so. The source computer will have to be online for other systems to sync the files and this is done around the clock.

Another cool feature is that you can download files from your computer using a web browser if you are on a trip and need files for example. Remember all those public computers where you don’t have the permission to install any software? Well you won’t have to. You login to your FolderShare account and download whatever file you want from your computer. Above all your data is authenticated with RSA and encrypted with SSL so that’s a relief. This works much better than an FTP server on your computer. For one thing you might not even have a static IP address to install an FTP server on your computer. Plus your usual Windows FTP server is not even secure.

The program works as a peer-to-peer program and you have to note that the files are not really sitting on the FolderShare server but instead on your computer. So your computer have to be online running the FoldShare software for syncing and sharing purposes. Needless to say a high speed connection is recommended for this and did I mention it’s Free? the software, not a high speed connection