miscellaneous, etc.

I’ve been using Flock for a couple of days now, and it is far more useful than I expected. I haven’t looked at it since the first couple of betas and it was mostly broken on Mac OS X. Their newest beta seems fully functional to me and very slick.

All of your bookmarks are stored in del.icio.us or Shadows, every time something is bookmarked you can have Flock prompt your for a description and tags. It’s handy, I bookmark a crazy amount of pages and my bookmark menu is always way too long to manipulate. With Flock, I can bookmark at will and, if I tag them, they practically organize themselves.

Flock has a built in photo browsing component that is pretty handy, it will pulll pictures right out of Flickr or Photobucket and has a handy interface for uploading new pictures. It also has a functional (if austere) blogging component.

Lastly, the integrated search is pretty nice. As you type in a search string, Flock will fill in the drop down list with hits from Google and Yahoo! as well as matches from your bookmarks.

You should try it out! :)

technorati tags:flock, web-browser, mozilla

Blogged with Flock

After the third straight day of rain, I start to have trouble working. Everytime, the first two days are no problem and then on the third, all I want to do is watch TV or play Nintendo. Today I managed to blow most of my afternoon cleaning out my address book.

Plaxo is one of these corporate networking applications. It’s like MySpace for the up-tight, type-A personality. In my line of work I meet a lot of these people and all of the business card swapping inevitably leads to address book bloat and the need to cull dead e-mail addresses. In this space, Plaxo really shines.

Here’s the rub: I don’t collect business cards. I smile and swap them with the interested party but I typically forget them in my pants or jacket and, eventually, they are reduced to a dry and crumbling lint ball in the filter of the clothes dryer. On the off chance they make it to my desk, after a couple of weeks I’m picking up the card and find myself saying something like “Corporate Rolfer? What the fuck is that?” and then tossing it in the bin. When I ran Plaxo, it wanted to delete old friends.

That’s probably exagerating because if we were friends, I’d have a good e-mail address and not this abandoned one, an address with nothing left to give except cryptic bounce-messages with 21st century riddles like “Account no longer receiving mail” or “User could not be found on this system”. As usual, I made another tired resolution to keep in touch better and fought back the nostalgia. To my credit, we’re talking maybe five addresses out of a hundred or so, but it still makes me uneasy. “Am I the same person,” I wonder to myself, “or have I turned into a huge douchebag?”

I may never know the one, true, answer. For now, I’m blaming the weather.