Music While Writing

I would love to say my writing is affected by the music I listen to. I wish I could put on Bowie and channel his amazing spirit into my work. Or the musical inventiveness of The Magnetic Fields. Or even bring Bach’s contrapuntal patterns into my writing. But I’m shit at listening to music when I work. At least the music I would listen to when I’m not working.

I love music. Putting on some album and jamming, or dancing around my room, especially with one of my girls, is a primal joy. But not when writing.

Maybe it’s the lyrics. There was a great suggestion I saw once that said to use the music for video games for studying. That music is meant to increase focus. I tried that for a bit.

But there is one thing that I’ve found actually useful. It’s a youtube channel called “ChilledCow”, and it’s particularly the video called “Lofi hip hop radio”. There’s a loop of an anime girl on the video area, writing out long hand some notebook. Every once in a while, she looks up, out the window, over her cat on the windowpane, and into the city. Then, back to work.

She’s my sister in the struggle. Always vigilant, always writing. Getting that work done. She and the music are meditative in their repetition. I once tried to listen to the same music on their Spotify playlist, but it wasn’t the same. Maybe it’s the difference between playing a playlist from someone vs. listening to the radio. The mystique of the radio always wins. And seeing her get back to work, I am reminded, I need to get back to work. Or as Mr. Bowie said,

I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision
And I will sing, waiting for the gift of sound and vision

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qap5aO4i9A

creating ideas

Wow. So the Winnie-The-Pooh business continues. Amazingly. We thought the point had been made, but we guess not. Another WTP pic appeared on the company fridge last week. When it was uncermoniously replaced with the building’s new parking lot rules, it took up residence on the lower door. Which we all know is the spot of disgrace for refrigerator art. Alas. But then a brand-new fresh-from-the-printer one appeared on the door to the hallway that leads to the restroom. And that was nice, too. Yes, Winnie the Pooh does oversee everything. And don’t we all feel better for knowing that?

Today we have been loving a movie made by the good people at belief, a studio in Santa Monica, CA. They made a movie about the desk’s relationship to creativity. It is called The Common Desk, and it’s a playful, insightful look at creating a workspace that will help fuel creative ideas.

Perhaps the WTP pranksters should redo their desks.

Ya know what would be a good prank? Free tacos for everyone. With salsa, and guac, but no cheese. That’s what we are all about.

the watchmaker’s notebook

This is one of those things we would like to keep to ourselves, it’s so wonderful. It’s beautifully wonderful, and we love it. It’s Ron DeCorte’s Notebook, a place where he examines the fine art of the tiny timepieces on our wrists. He takes apart finely made watches and explains what is so wonderful about them, what makes them unique, and points out the fine details that the common observer would most likely miss. And in addition to the individual timepieces he examines, he has a more generalized guide to watches called TimeZone’s Watch School. There, you can learn about the mechanics of watches, their pieces, and how they work.

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We are amazed with the rise of social networking software. There is so much of it, and it has really taken over as the BigApp of the day. No real big surprise there: humans are made to connect with each other. Even the early BBSes were about connecting with other people and sharing lives. The current category killer is MySpace, which took Friendster by surprise (though for those of us who were on Friendster at the time, not much of a surprise with it’s “who is going to buy it?” and “why the heck is it so slow?” discussions that were rampant). With MySpace, you know who owns it: Fox. It’s already a sell-out.

For millions of teens, that doesn’t matter. They are creating their identity through and with MySpace. Danah Boyd has an interesting article that discusses identity on MySpace.

The First Season of Grey’s Anatomy has a MySpace page. We think it’s disengenuous that it would try to friend us.

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And speaking of things that aren’t there, lifehacker (*heart*)  had a download of the day recently that was all about Microsoft’s Virtual PC. The Virtual PC allows one to run instances of applications without, theorhetically, messing up one’s own system. Joy.

Some software, of course, you don’t even have to install on your own machine. Richard MacManus just wrote an article of “best of breed” online office apps (that is not to say they are all “free”). We are willing to give writerly the old college try.

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And then there is productivity. At our company, we go to a lot of meetings. A lot. And they aren’t always wonderful sparkly good ones where information is generated and passed on. Of course not. Not every one is golden. But 43 folders has a nice article about 9 tips for making your meetings for productive. We know we need it. Because we Americans are working more, but getting less done. Ouch.

thumb(driving) our way

Over the weekend, we got one of those portable USB Flash Drives that the cool kids have. And sure, we love the idea of quick portable media, but we got to wondering what else could one do with it?

The big dream of the thumbdrive world is booting from it. Of the installs we’ve driven by, Damn Small Linux looks the most promising. (On a sidenote, a few weeks ago, we tried downloading Knoppix on the promise that one could boot from CD, but it took up so much media — at least 3 CDs — that we feared our ability to boot easily from the disc.) Granted, we don’t know much about Linux, so we would rather screw up a tiny portable drive than our home drive.

2 “must have” apps are portable OpenOffice and portable Firefox. We once had OO exclusively on our home machine, but we admit we installed MSOffice once when a Word doc absolutely had to look a specific way when we translated it to PDF. That was with an earlier version of OO, and if they have gotten better at exporting, then we would be more than happy to return to the fold. As for FF, we might be one of the few people who like being able to differentiate between our home and work browsing.

There are some other apps we are looking forward to using: ReNamer — we seem to always need to do mass renaming of files at some point. We remember having some app at some work computer once that did this very cleanly and neatly…. But it would be nice to be able to carry this app around, to have it when we need it. WinMerge — another thing we need to do a lot of is comparing files, to see what is different in them across versions. Sure, we know Unix has some great tool we saw someone use once that made us green with envy, but we are not Unix wonks. So a small app like this we can easily use is key. Rainmeter — We mentioned before how we once tried Norton Systemworks. One of the nice things about it was its little meters reporting on how things are going. Rainmeter does all that and more without the Symantec overhead. NeoMem — this looked to be the best of the information management systems (and believe us, there are a lot, even for thumbdrives). It claims to be a cross between a word processor and a database, which sounds promising for storing lists, book titles, and phone numbers.

Then there are a few “nice to try” apps we are not sure we need, but they might be nice. DM2 — this one promises nice Windows enhancements, including floating icons and WinRoll’s great feature, roll up to titlebar. Imagenomic says it will clean up noise on pictures. And WhyReboot tells you what will happen when you reboot a system.

There are plenty more apps out there for thumbdrives. AskMetafilter has a great list of them and where to get them. And, as always, Lifehacker has a great collection of anythng you need to find.

Roll your own Windows

No, it’s probably not what you are thinking. We love WindowBlinds for a lot of things. Chief amongst them is that you can change around the metaphor (slightly) of your desktop. But second to the ability to roll up your windows.

Behold, where there’s a will, there is a freeware. WinRoll does an awesome job of rolling up your windows so that you just have the title bar floating in space. This is way better than minimizing them all the time. And you get the added bonus of people coming over and saying “How did you do that?” Just right-click on a title bar and voila! Smack your mama and call her Sally! Cuz that’s just how we roll.
Oh yes. One of the features we always liked in the otherwise destable Nortan SystemWorks is the ability to recall stuff that you might have accidentally lost or thrown out or otherwise cleared out of your recycle bin.

Behold (again): Restoration will scan your files and then make sure you don’t lose them. Plus, it won’t tell you have 250 errors on your machine when in fact your compy is just fine. W00t!

necessary software: the life hacker pack

We are big fans of The Open CD, which is a great collection of open source software for Windows machines. We found plenty of great software thourgh it, and consider much of it required software.

And, in response to the recent release of the Google Pack, our friends at Lifehacker have released their own collection of software they consider necessary, the lifehacker pack. And wouldn’t ya know it, much of it mirrors the Open CD. But we have to hand it to them, that VLC is one bad piece of — shut yo mouth — I’m talkin’ bout VLC, baby. We can dig it.

Audacity is new to us, though we see it pimped in both. We have been traveling with Total Recorder for a few years and have loved the heck out of it. And its 10 dollar price range was none too bad, either! But we will give Audacity a try.

Faststone looks interesting to us, as well. But we wonder if we will love it more than Picasa.

Perhaps the most interesting software there is 7-zip, which would be a good WinZip  replacement. We don’t think we’ve ever bought a WinZip license and have been using their “evaluation versions” for years. It would be nice to go “legal” with someone who doesn’t care if we’re not laying our money down.

gmail: are you deleting how we’re deleting?

2 weeks ago, we wrote about a great Greasemonkey hack for gmail: the delete button. Well, it turns out that Google really does listen and that you can move a sailing ship by a million people blowing on the sails. Today we saw in our own gmail account, gmail’s own delete button.

The sad part of it was that the Greasemonkey script no longer works, so it had to be uninstalled. (On our system it is the darker of the 2 buttons.) The delete button is gone! Long live the delete button.

We got pimped in lifehacker! =D

handy tools

Work Happy (via lifehacker) offers up a nice toolbar tool called foobar from Matrix Software. It’s a handy collection of tools that life down in the toolbar zone. The thing we really like about it is the time tracker.

But, oh! We fawn and we drool for FolderSize, which grants us a long-desired ability to see the size of a folder without hopping down into the folder properties. Swoon!

We have been on the lookout for tools and apps for our new/old Mac. Todayt, the mighty lifehacker gave us a collection of apps, some free some not. Some, then, we shall use and some we shan’t. Essential OS X Applications from MacSpecialist.

A site called Flagrant Disregard offers up a bunch of flickr “toys” which look interesting. Essentially, they are tools to mess with pictures on flickr. Nice.

And lastly today, we have a bunch of parenting hacks from parent hacks.  No, it’s not a site of parents who are hacks, but you know, hacks for, like, your kids… if you were Mr. Smith and your kids were Neo. Or something. Anyway, we like them.

our favorite gmail hacks

Hello, true believers. Today we post 2 gmail hacks (greasemonkey scripts, really) that we have been testing at Taco Labs, Inc. As you know, we aim to test everything we can before recommending (or not) a product to you.

Gmail has been our favorite email client for a while. Let’s face it, their come on with a free gig of space a year and a half back was irresistable. Anyway, there are, of course, some minor flaws with it.

One of the things we never liked about it was that there is no friggin delete button. You can do almost anything you need to do with a message from a handy drop-down menu, but there is no friggin delete button! We delete, damnit, with buttons. It’s just how we are wired. Lo and behold, we are not the only ones wired this way. Arantius to the resuce: this greasemonkey script (we employ the ‘user script’ and not the ‘full extension’) will add a delete button to gmail.

OUr second favorite hack is message preview. We get a kick out of Outlook’s message preview, and we hear that the new and fancy yahoo email (for which we signed up for a beta and yet never quite got onto the ‘must get’ list, harumph) has it as well. Well, gmail’s got ya covered, little soldier. With this greasemonkey script, right click on a message to preview and take action on it (except add labels, that doesn’t work from preview).

We found both of these links from lifehacker.com.

Who stole the email?

No, today’s header is not a snarky re-working of Public Enemy’s masterpiece, “Who Stole the Soul”. Today, we talk about selling email addresses.

We have long been jealous (a wee bit, anyway) of our friends with their fancy domains and multiple email addresses. Why? Because they can set up email addresses for wherever they have to enter one (say, “yahoo@mydomain.com”). Then, when they get email to “yahoo@mydomain.com”, they know it’s yahoo BS spam.

Ah, but be jealous no longer, my boychicks! Gmail (oh, we love gmail), has got your back. Keen user Kevin Gunn figured out a very nice little hack for your gmail account. When you enter an email address, use “username+yahoo@gmail.com”. All your email–for those we-just-want-to-make-sure-this-is-a-real-address emails– will still get to you. However, they are also tagged with “+yahoo”. Set up a filter for those emails with “username+” in the “to” header, and bingo: instant spam filter.

Plus you know who stole your email address.

Once again, this is it
Turn it up
Here we go
But this time the rhyme
Gonna ask who did the crime
Then let’s get down to the nitty-gritty….