Technology Goodies

I have to unburden myself of new technological tricks I'm enjoying. I know I'm pretty slow on the uptake here, but then none of those cheapskate bastards is paying me to be an early adopter.

First, Elise - in one of her last prepartum acts - send me the URL to Google Calendar, a not-yet-announced service from the company that will rule us all. I recommend it highly. After looking through the customarily well-done overview and seeing that it can handle iCal imports, I gave it a shot, setting up a private calendar for myself. Within a week, I had the calendar open all day at work and all night at home, proof positive of its grand and glorious utility. The "Quick Add" tool is genius. And since you can also create (a la Yahoo! Calendar, I hear) public calendars which can be shared with some or all of the rest of the world, I also created a calendar for the 2006-2007 World Cup cross-country skiing season (accessible here via an XML feed). Don't everyone click all at once. Nerdiness aside, this is a pretty cool bit of technology.

Second, also cool, and even older, is deli.cio.us, which is hyped endlessly as a social-networking service like Flickr but has markedly fewer boobies. I'm not using it (deli.cio.us, not a boobie) like that yet, but I did set up a web-side list of all the bookmarks I can't keep synched between my home Mac (running Safari mostly, but Explorer and Firefox for a few things) and work Gateway (mostly Firefox but also Explorer). Now I can get to my bookmarks from any internet-linked computer. That's the big plus for me, and the reason I'm Mr. A.P. Ostle about deli.cio.us right now. A smaller plus is the tagging feature, which is pretty handy - though it could be easier to set up "bundles" of tagged sites. A big minus for me right now is the apparent inability to arrange tagged "posts" (i.e. bookmarks) in either true alphabetical order or in some other order I think is best. But that's a trifle right now. Deli.cio.us is otherwise highly recommended.

Third, my wife gave me an all-time great birthday present: the Complete New Yorker. It's very well done, and the collection is fantastic. I read a piece or two by John McPhee right away, we both read "Brokeback Mountain," tracked down the first post-9/11 cover, and now I'm wading through the entirety of "In Cold Blood," having just finally just seen Capote. It's going to be fun to read 80 years of excellent writing (and elitism!). The ads alone are entertaining and illuminating: the four 1965 issues in which "In Cold Blood" appeared (over hundreds of pages!) are full of ads for whiskey and gin (not vodka!) and silverware, of all things. Great fun to see. My only quibble is that it the application is very "heavy," eating up lots of processor power and virtual memory. But hell - that just means you can't do other stuff while reading the articles. No big whoop.

Since I'm apparently a big tech whore right now, I'd love to hear about other neat stuff that A.S.S. readers are using...