I saw this post on Lifehacker today, which is a great site for finding tools and ideas to simplify your life. It was titled “Automatically Download and Install your Favorite Software”, which got my attention.

They’re talking about InstallPad, a tool that will allow you to set a list of software and will go out download those applications and install them while you go on about your life. This could be very useful in setting up a new machine, or in setting up security apps on a machine you’re cleaning up for someone. For example, I could have had Ad-Aware, AVG, etc. in an InstallPad list, and this tool could have grabbed those and installed them while I watched TV or something equally productive like that. *L*

Anyhow, I think I’m going to grab this and give it a go the next time I’m setting up a new machine or something like that. It could proof helpful!

Speaking of helpful tools, I posted over on the Friends in Tech blog about the Vmware Converter Beta, which also seems like it could be a very exciting tool!

Gee there’s a whole little Firefox extension that changes styles based on website, etc. that I didn’t even know about until I came across this post about adding attachment icons to Gmail on Download Squad. Why didn’t someone tell me about Stylish?

Or did someone tell me and I just forgot?

Either way, I’m enjoying the icons in Gmail, and am looking forward to seeing what other styles are available.

Angela took a break from vacation photos on Flickr to post a few pictures of our Halloween costumes, Elvis and Priscilla. I have to admit, stopping for fast food on the way home after the party in full Elvis outfit was fun. I may just have to take that mask and outfit for our next trip to Vegas. *L*

The photos from the latest vacation adventure are up. I’ve done some reconfiguring in the galleries, so the photos from both trips to Las Vegas are in one gallery, while the Grand Canyon pictures from the previous trip have been moved to their own gallery, and our day trip out to Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks are in yet another gallery.

As always, Angela does things the easy way and is putting hers up on her Flickr account. My own Flickr account doesn’t get left out completely though, it gets the handful of extraneous odd photos, like Pete Rose signing autographs in Vegas:

It’s the second annual edition of the Server Room of Horrors from Friends in Tech.

I was impressed with last year’s special, but having had the opportunity to record a few lines for this one and see how much hard work goes into putting all of this together, I have a whole new respect for how difficult it is to do a show like this, but also how much fun it is to be part of it, as small as my part was.

See if you can find my voice, and be sure to listen all the way through the credits, m’kay?

It really has. There’s just been so much going on at work, and outside work with doctor visits (nothing serious, no worries), board meetings, website updates, etc. But now we’re off the Vegas for 5 days of forgetting that I even have a job! I’m taking the laptop though, taking lots of photos, and I might even post a thing or two here even something really strikes my fancy, but mostly, we’re going to enjoy the break before we come back to weeks of more packed schedules.

Hope you enjoy your weekend!

It’s one of the areas of working in IT, specifically on the helpdesk, that no one ever prepares you for. They don’t cover it in the tech magazines, they don’t talk about it on tech podcasts, and you don’t hear much about it when you’re training for your career, but at some point, you will have to do it. You will be asked to look into something, and figure out why something doesn’t work, and you’ll discover what it is, and then you’ll have to fix it.

Fixing it will involve taking that information and presenting it to the one person you don’t want to. You will have to go talk to a coworker, one you like and get along with, one who works as hard as anyone you’ve ever known, and you will have to tell them that they made a mistake.

You will have to look someone dead in the eye, who has poured their heart and soul into a project, and tell them they did it wrong.

It sucks.

But then, you get to help them correct the problem, you get to work side by side with them, guiding them to learning how not to make the same mistake again, and if you’re really good, you get to help turn their mistake into a minor problem and a thing of the past, quickly.

That doesn’t suck.

I got an email over the weekend from Jacob Rheuban, one of the founders of a new news aggregation site called Newgie. The site promises to be a smarter news portal and RSS feed directory. From their press release:

Newgie co-founders Jason Windebank (29) and Jacob Rheuban (29) began work on the new product six months ago after recognizing a large gap in the emerging world of Web 2.0 newsreaders. “On one side you have tech oriented websites like Digg and Slashdot that rely exclusively on user-recommendations and are tightly focused around technology topics, and on the other side you have the slew of robotic news aggregators that harvest anything they are instructed to grab, but ignore user input entirely,” said Windebank, “and in the middle of these two extremes you have a hole the size of the Grand Canyon”.

As interesting as it sounds, I don’t think I’m going to have time to really dig into it and do it justice. Anyone else want to? I’ll gladly host your comments on it, either in the comments here, or if you send them to me, I’ll post them to the blog. Or you can always post them on your own blog and I’ll do some linking.

I’m going to be a bit busy, traveling to Vegas at the end of this week, and working on a number of other personal projects, so I’m delegating this one to my readers. How ’bout it?

There’s one less laptop in our pool this week, at least for now. It seems this particular laptop was a victim of a miracle. It was in a padded laptop case, just stuck in a car, and somehow the front of it (all the way across the base) got cracked and the touchpad doesn’t work. It’s truly amazing how that could happen just sitting in the car, isn’t it? But that must be what happened, since it was fine when it got packed up..

Anyway, Dell is sending out a field rep later this week to take a look at it. I hope they can get it working, because the hours I spent doing a full reinstall of Windows on that very laptop a couple of weeks ago seems like such a waste now!

Update: Dell rep had it fixed in 10 minutes. I didn’t even get to see him. Nice.

On the new Google Reader, Jason Clarke says:

“It also solves the biggest knock against Bloglines, which is that clicking on a feed doesn’t immediately mark every post in that feed as read – they’re only marked read as you scroll past them.”

While Steve Matthews, in a post talking about the 5 things he hates about the new Google Reader says:

“I have to manually mark everything I read by scrolling over it. A big waste of time.”

So which is accurate Google Reader users? For the record, I’ve been a Bloglines user for years and have never, ever seen the behavior Jason describes as a Bloglines “knock”. In fact, one of the reasons I chose not to use Google Reader way back when was because, as Steve points out, you can’t click on a category folder and load everything in those feeds and have it all marked read.