Scratch

Here you will find older scratches, musings and other detritus that once were located on the front pages, but have now faded.

Filed away here to collect dust and cobwwwebs in perpetuity, links may break, facts may change and data may corrupt.

On occasion I may come down here to tidy, but for the most, I prefer to leave the past where it lies.

 

Technology Is Getting The Better Of Me

I have inadvertently become old. Well no, perhaps not old in the traditional sense of clinging to the technologies of the past whilst still being technically older, I am either more demanding or just want foir a simple life. Case in point, whilst I can probably program the video recorder and can also probably use my phone to do so albeit at some cost*, I cannot just type something out, hit enter thus simultaneously making my video record at the appropriate time and also send me a reminder of why I cannot watch the program because I am doing something else.

Not only is technology is getting away from me in terms of what I can do in whatever language is best suited, I cannot even settle on the best technology to begin thinking about getting things done.

At home I use Outlook for everything. At work I use Thunderbird for email and Oracle Calendar for my diary and tasks. In between I have my phone which pulls contacts from Outlook with ActiveSync and tasks/diary from Oracle with SyncML. I don't pull tasks/diary from home for fear of inadvertently dumping my personal life into the corporate arena for all and sundry to marvel/laugh at**. I have used** Remember The Milk, in combination with Twitter, and still sporadically do so, but RTM doesn't play well with Outlook and a cursory glance at the Interweb only reveals me needing something like OutTwit to achieve some semblance of compatability for Twitter/Outlook. I also use text files and simple perl to update things either by hand or, at work, dynamically by whatever piece of kit it is that needs my attention. Whilst this data is generally only modifiable on whatever computer is running the script I can, and do, have it send copies via SMS and email to various places which should let me know of problems. Sometimes they even arrive...

I have multiple mail accounts, POP3 and IMAP4, that Outlook can just about deal with including with Google / Windows Live. Both now offer calendars, tasks, contacts and links to their own blogging areas, but IMHO for the benefits of 'ubiquitous' access, there is some tradeoff in security and control, however small. Both of these now offer diaries that are not compatable with all of my home, work or phone as presently stands, but both now offer storage (the latter 25Gb), I probably need something like Gladinet to best make use of the free online storage for backups, which I have currently set up in a piece meal fashion using different technologies to copy certain files somewhere one day, recopy them another day etc etc.

This site, hosted on a machine not three feet behind me rather than a third party host, uses Movable type which has twitter plugins, but only from the backend side, and nothing I can use to dynamically update this site aswell. I have now switched to Digsby for my IM needs from Trillian to maintain an easy interface to facebook and twitter as the former doesn't support command line, and I generally neglect to log into either. I have to do both seperately but at least they are now on the same taskbar. Neither is supported in Tarpipe but its something that might be the way forward.

Is it too much to ask for a simple, secure interface that links chunks of me on the web together and replicates data this way and that? Perhaps I should stick with pen, paper, a photocopier and Royal mail...

Rant over-ish. Going to bed no better than when I was starting to think about all this to increase my productivity some 5 hours ago.

EDIT: 04/12/2008 19:05: Seems like I am not the only one to think about Personal Syndication Overload.

3 Dec 2008 23:51 | (0) comments | Technology | Thoughts | www

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