Web 2.0 Mobile

I've always been a geek. I'm geekier than most geeks, but I'm a man's geek. Lately though I've been ashamed of my geekiness. I'm lagging behind in the mobile world. I had mobile internet before there was mobile internet. I'd hook my old Palm 3C up to my Nokia 8210 via infrared, have the palm dial up some numbers and viola... mobile internet on my Palm 3C! A few phones later, I have a Palm Treo 680. This thing is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but because I'm a loser lately, I haven't done any customization.
Now that I'm moving my life to Google, I need to do mobile too. Now with the palm, I get the Palm Desktop, but I want to do everything over-the-air. GMail is easy. You just create the Versamail account according to the instructions found here. Now for the calendar, I use GooSync. Pretty easay to set up, not alot of extraneous features and pretty straight forward.

Next up, to-do's, memos, and other trivial things that I can sync.

Stay tuned.....
Average Guy X~~~~~

Cuil is not cool

All this buzz about the new search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool") going on perks my interest. Now, I'll give anything a chance once. I go there and search for myself. I have a few hits on Google, and maybe a few on Yahoo, but most of the time, I get the results for someone else with the same name as me. So I search Cuil for my name. The results are a little goofy looking for me, but I'll play.
First of all, this image this is ANNOYING! Every search result I have comes up with the same 2 or 3 photos which is really distracting. Now why do they think that I need a random picture to identify my search results? Not very helpful.

-10 cuil points

Next, I add it to my Firefox search bar so that I could use it throughout the day instead of my usual Google, or some other random engine. I'm doing some coding for the sidebar I use in XP; Desktop Sidebar. I need to do some regular expression parsing. So I use Cuil to search. I put into the search bar regular expression debug or something similar and I get 0 results. That's right. nil, zip, zilch, nada, niet, nothing, bupkiss, the big goose egg!!! Now being the proper geek that I am, I should have found out why, but I'm too busy to be bothered with it. DOH! But still, I gasped. No results! FAIL!

-100 cuil points

Now I'm exercising a few searches in Cuil and I'm looking for the next pages. Let's see.... Oh wait... there it is. It's in the black "frame" on the bottom.

-5 cuil points

I found the pagination links. Great. Now lets go through the results. Page 2... hold on... it looks like page 1. Well,.... it's the same as page 1 with the order changed. (well almost) But still, no really new results. All the same images too.

-5 cuil points

Go on to page 3 of the results. Good, there's some different links in there. But all the images are the same. Why? If you MUST have images linked to search results, why not go the ask.com route and take a screenshot of the web site? And why does it insist on putting a picture for a website that's a mailing list archive (read: text only) site?

-5 cuil points

Now the category thing pops into the rightmost column. Do any of the categories have anything to do with the search results or the search term itself? I'm not really sure, and I'm not sure if it's even useful.

-5 cuil points


Total: -130 cuil points

Sorry Cuil, that's a fail!

Moving my life to google

Now I'm not sure how much sense this makes, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Between home, work, friends' houses, in-laws, outlaws, and wherever else I might find myself, I feel the need to find my online presence. Now here's the hard part: how do I keep everything in synch so that I can get to everything I want? Google. It seems that Google can organize your so-called online life. Email, bookmarks, reader, calendar, groups, YouTube, Picasa and whatever else you'll need to live online.

First, I cleaned out my Gmail account. It had alot of remnants of past lives. Now I'm not sending out a mass change to everyone with a new email address, I'm just adding an "identity" to gmail. You can do this in the "Accounts" tab in the Gmail settings. Just add another email address you want to send from, and then Gmail will send a confirmation email to that address and you either click on the link or enter a verification code. Then Viola! You can send email as that email address from Gmail. I've also added my regular email account to Gmail so that I'll get my email in Gmail also.
Next come the bookmarks. Now what self-proclaimed IT guru would be complete without their own bookmarks? Not I! I've installed Gmarks, a Firefox extension to manage my bookmarks from Firefox. Not a bad extension.

I'll move various other things to Google also and let you know how it goes.

Stay tuned!
-Average Guy X