GLife? May not be so far fetched.

Yesterday, as I was doing my normal browsing of the interwebs, I noticed that I hardly was using the Bookmarks menu in Firefox. Normally, I just type in sites I have memorized or use the ones remembered in the Firefox location bar. However, the location bar has a maximum number of sites it can remember, and all of those are lost if at any time I need/am forced to clear my browsing history. The thing was, I am not too fond of Firefox’s Bookmark interface (specifically, organizing). And that’s when I remember that Google has a Bookmarking interface, which stores your bookmarks in your Google account so they can be accessed and recovered from any computer. So I navigated over to the Google Bookmark start page, and for the next 30 minutes, after installing the add-on “Gmarks” for Firefox, I imported, edited, purged, and organized my bookmarks and most often visited sites. When I finished, I had a nice GMarks menu, replacing Firefox’s Bookmarks menu, cleanly organized into labels, and easily editable either through the addon’s options menu or through the Google Bookmarks’ web interface. It was then that I came to a somewhat alarming realization: Just about everything I did internet-related was going through Google’s servers. EVERYTHING. I use Google for search (and that history is logged in my Google History), the Google Toolbar, two GMail accounts (1 of the normal variety and 1 of the custom-domain affiliate kind), Google Reader, Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google Web Accelerator, Google Picasa, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google News, Google Webmaster Central, and now, Google Bookmarks. And the problem is, I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing. On one hand, it’s nice having all my feeds, bookmarks, and emails going through one service and one account, especially one as secure as Google’s (for those who don’t know, Google Reader and Bookmarks can be accessed via a secure https:// protocol, in addition to Gmail, which is already secure). But do I really want all of this personal (and sensitive, in the case of Adsense) information being stored on one site? We are in an age where privacy is becoming less and less certain, and there are always people looking to hack into servers such as Facebook and Google because of how much sensitive information there is. As much as I like (and possibly want to work for) Google, this realization of sorts has made me stop and think to consider just how much of my personal life I’m putting on their servers. Slowly, we are more and more relying on sites such and Google and Facebook to organize and direct what we do on a daily basis, from getting directions to the theatre, to emailing our boss, to getting the latest news headlines, to creating a group so our friends can send us their phone numbers after we dropped our cell phone in the lake. Is it really necessary to have our personal lives stored on some server in California? Maybe. Just something to ponder next time you bookmark that interesting article from Digg.

-J

So every so often people ask me what programs I would recommend for doing such and such task, or what programs I use on a day to day basis. So here’s a list of my most used programs that I would recommend:

I was an IE user for a long time. But once I discovered how helpful and useful the plugin system was, I switched. If you are using any version of IE (esp. < 7.0 (yikes!)), you need to give Firefox a try.

The Firefox of email. ‘Nuff said.

When I began using MSN and Yahoo in addition to AIM, I found it incredibly frustrating (and resource consuming) to open three chat programs at once. Trillian solves that problem, as it supports all of those clients and many more, in one program, without having to have those programs open (or even installed). Version 4, named Astra, is currently in alpha, which has tons of new features and a slick new look.

Not only is Skype a powerful audio/video chat and VoIP client, but it also uses encryption for audio, video, and IM chat, making it one of the most secure chat clients available. Plus, webcams are funz.

Winamp supports dozens of audio and video formats, and has powerful plugin and skinning engines, making it one the most flexable and customizable media players available. A major plus is it uses a considerable less amount of system resources and is more stable on PC’s than iTunes.

With tons of features and great GUI, why would you use another client?

Want to make your XP look like Vista? Or even Mac OSX (God forbid)? Chose from hundreds of different skins to transform the look and feel of XP (and Vista). And it’s not as much of a resource hog as you would expect.

Do you hate desktop icons like I do? Then clear your desktop and throw your favorite programs onto a dock to give your cool wallpaper some justice, giving your desktop a slick look without all the clutter. Check out my desktops in the Gallery to see it in action.

The “Swiss army knife of audioâ„¢” is the most powerful audio converter I have used. It supports dozens of formats, and many features that you won’t find in any other music converter.

The DBPAMC of CD ripping.

So everyone always ask what programs I use to stream rip. Well, here is the backbone: Nettransport is a download manager that supports HTTP, MMS, & RTSP, has tons of features, and is easy to use once you get the hang of it. Having up to 10 threads makes downloading that 150 MB file lightening quick.

-J

Coolest. Video. Ever.
Human Tetris. Played by real people.

-J

I wonder if anyone actually falls for MySpam. I have been getting a message everyday on MySpace that is some variant of the following:

whats up cutie… i know this message is super random but.. im moving in a few days to right near you actually and I dont know ANYONE there at all.. so thought id hit u up to say hi since u live there.. if u dont think im a total weirdo for contacting u… Anyways my contact info is right on my profile so contact me soon… MWA chat ya soon hunnie

Do the people who write these actually think someone is going to fall for it, especially when there are thousands of these dummy accounts sending dozens of these messages to the same fuckin person?

For the last couple months, we have had a weird issue with our home connection timing out every 15 minutes or so, which was not only very annoying, especially on wireless, but made it nearly impossible to play Xbox Live without getting lagged out. But today that was finally fixed! Comcast came today, nice and early (8 am), and replaced our router. The cool part though was the Comcast guy also played Halo 3, so we had a good 10 minute talk about matchmaking, and how your internet setup (using a router, wireless, etc) affects gameplay. Plus, he wasn’t just some noob; a level 40 like myself. Anyways, now my internet is “screaming!” (as he put it):

Yesterday I completed my switch to using all Gmail acccounts, after months of using the LPP server & Hotmail. Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »