Let’s start with an admission. I can’t cook many things, but a few things I can cook and cook them well: Steak, Burgers, Chicken and Rice, and Spaghetti with various sauces (marinara, garlic and butter). So it pains me to say I bought over the weekend a $16 one pound filet mignon. I’ve cooked a lot of steaks in my time, some in the broiler, some in the pan, and some on a grill. Anyway, I heated the pan, threw the steak in, and ran upstairs to boot my computer, and ditch my work clothes. And then I got distracted and suddenly, sniff sniff, what’s that smell? What’s burning? OH! SHIT! It’s dinner. So, I had blackened steak for dinner. It wasn’t very good. I’m an idiot and figured I’d man-up and share that so you could laugh at me.
A special shout out to WJM who right now needs one more than anyone I know. Hang in there, guy.
I’m working on updating my will and am not pleased with the progress of collecting contact information. I suppose I will have to get more motivated. Blech.
Work was boring today though I spent some quality time with Xmarks . Xmarks is a plug-in for Firefox, Safari, and even the lowly Internet Explorer. I didn’t mention it in yesterday’s post because I was skeptical of the performance and usefulness of it. Right. I first installed it on my Mac Pro (home) and PC Desktop (work). I set it up on my Mac and ran it, and it was intriguing. I did some tinkering with settings and such, and finally gave up on it for the night. The next morning (that’s today) I was a bit bored at work and decided to slack off. I installed it at work, clicked ‘synchronise’ and let it do its work. A word to the wise, take all your bookmarks on the second machine and move them to a sub-folder called “machine two” because my sole complaint is that it put stuff all over and it took me forever to find it all and re-organize it. But damn, it worked well. I made some changes, came home and my machine at home was updated. (On Firefox you can synch passwords too but if you do, you make DAMN sure you set Firefox’s master password on all machines.) I then installed it on the work laptop MacBook Pro (my user account) and it worked great. You have the option of storing the synch data on your server instead of theirs, which I fully intend to do this weekend.
When you’re done, on one machine, go through all your bookmarks using CheckPlaces 1.6.3 which I mentioned yesterday, and you’ll find more duplicates and errors than you thought you had. Together, these two utilities are awesome. CheckPlaces only needs to be run on ONE machine because when you do, all the others update when you start the browser (or click synch). Both are free, but I’m sending Xmark a donation since they ask. After one day, I’ve already decided they deserve it. By this weekend it’ll be done unless something blows up. (The first few times you synch, you may find it slow as it has so many changes to make, but that went away after a while. Also moving bookmarks around moves a bit slower, but since I’ve got over 400 that may be the problem.)
I have a small quibble. It would be really, really nice if it could have on each machine an ‘excluded’ folder. I don’t, for instance, really want my personal finance folder on my work machine. That’s something I do only at home. And on my home machine, I really don’t need the link to my customer and vendor websites, and I’m terribly uncomfortable with having my work’s bank URL on my home machine. For some people this may be a deal killer. Some updates on my private blog for those keeping track. Rumours of the GooglePhone continue to swirl. I may or may not care. I like the G1 and keep thinking I might buy it, but this intrigues me. I still dislike the iPhone because of the keyboard issue.