In looking for a paper shredder to buy, I’ve been doing a little bit of online research. I am not looking for anything fancy, just a very basic paper shredder that gets the job done for under $100.
I went to Staples online and they have a bunch to choose from. Great! So how do I decide which one to get? Well, the product pages include a “See the demo!” link, so maybe that will help me decide.
Check out their demo. Is this for real? I mean, the 360 twirl is allright, but the “CD to bits” and “Junk be gone” have to be a joke!
That’s a great logo! Simple yet perfect.
There’s been a lot of buzz around Facebook lately, so I’ve been getting the dust off my account there and using it more these days to see what it’s all about.
Facebook is very well put together, from an interface point of view – it’s consistent and predictable. The one thing I really dislike about it though is that it’s a completely closed network. Maybe back when it was essentially a college student network, blocking outside access was a good idea. Doing that now just seems a bit backwards, a bit AOL-ish, as some have said. Others disagree.
Anyways, one of the cool things about Facebook is that you install little applications for your account. I found out about one that I thought was particularly cool. It’s called Socialistics and lets you look at stats associated with your friends within the system, such as where they were born, their age, where they live now, etc.
Not surprisingly, Socialistics is not too unlike another app that I spend a lot of time using and working on.
I like T-Mobile and may as well become one of their customers in the future. But today, what I am wondering is who’s the marketing banana over there who decided that it would be a good idea to brand a new phone as “The official phone of fun”. Come on, that has to be a joke. And then people wonder why the iPhone is so successful and why Apple is such a genius when it comes to marketing.
There are lots of GTD (Getting Things Done) apps out there, from iGTD to OmniFocus (btw, when is that finally coming out?). It’s interesting to see how different in UI and complexity these apps are, considering that they all try to model and streamline the same “system”.
Up to now, I’ve been using OmniOutliner to keep all my GTD lists, with mixed success. OmninOutliner is a very general purpose tool, so it doesn’t offer any GTD bells and whistles right off the bat. But you can make it work.
This week though, I discovered a new tool called TaskPaper and from my initial observations, I think it’s the app that best matches my GTD needs. It seems to provide the perfect affordance level for my style of GTD-ness. I am starting to realize that OmniOutliner let me do too much. Keeping a separate project and task lists in OmniOutliner required a lot of manual work to keep both in sync.
TaskPaper is simple. If I were to describe it with a one-liner, it would be “it provides an interface to lists organized in a text document”. I am still trying it out, but I am liking it more and more every day.
This is going to be one of those weekends I wish I was in NYC.
Tomorrow is the Olympic marathon time trial around Central Park, and the very best American marathoners will be trying to qualify to Beijing. In this race, time doesn’t matter. Finish in the top 3 and you are in! It’s going to be extremely competitive. I am hoping one of the Hansons guys make it.
At first I thought I wasn’t going to be able to watch this live, but then I found out that there will be a live webcast. Excellent! I have a feeling I won’t have trouble connecting to the stream. Who else would be interested in this race at 7:30AM on a Saturday morning? I think I might be one of the few souls hanging in there.
And then on Sunday, the New York Marathon, with the top international marathoners. This weekend, NYC is the epicenter of the running world!