I swear it's not contagious

I love Google. I love Google for the ways it simplifies my life. For the ways it releases early and often. For making great products available for free. For seemingly knowing what features I want. For having so much of my "stuff" on it's servers so I don't ever have to worry about it.

Ahem, well that's a bit much. Essentially the new Google Reader redesign was BIG for me. RSS, err, feeds, are really important to me. Aggregators like Digg simply can't pull all the content I want to see to the surface and going through a massive list of bookmarks is such a massive waste of time that I couldn't keep up. So back in the dark ages when I was still on a windows PC I began to move my browsing into Thunderbird. And yes I'm talking about the email app. I was a big Thunderbird fan for my email (I was using IMAP with my webhost) and it happened to have a really nice feed reader built-in. When I moved to Mac I continued to use Thunderbird for a bit, but unfortunately I find the Mozilla XUL apps not quite as fast or polished or integrated as well on Mac as on Windows. So I found NetNewsWire and all was good. I'd spend most of my time on NNW, the built in webkit browser and tabs + mail like interface just worked really well. I could even keep my laptop and desktop synced through FTP as first and then through Newsgator. The problem however that I found was continuously moving between Camino (my browser) and NNW. I have my email in the browser through GMail, I have my word processing in the browser through Writely and now Google Docs (which I'm writing this in), I have my schedule in the browser through Google Calendar. My browser is where most of my work occurs and everything else I do on the web. Therefore it makes sense to have the feed reader as a web accessible application. All the current web app readers felt lacking to me in comparison to NNW. When Google Reader first came out while I was originally excited and tried to move over to it, it was shit. It was certainly innovative in it's design, but unfortunately it didn't particularly work well and was too slow. When the re-design was announced I thought "well maybe they fixed it" and that's absolutely what happened. The new design relies on the usual mail like inbox look, but in a very useful way. I find I'm more productive in reading through Google Reader than NNW in addition to eliminating the moving between apps, everything is right in my browser that I need. Even the few nags I had with Reader after I switched were fixed a few days later in an update. I'm very pleased with with Google's new "less products, more features" push as it's certainly adding value for this user.

Here is something I've been pondering lately. When conversing with women as a man I find there is an odd balance of how much I want to add to the conversation. Generally I'm more interested in the woman and what she has to say versus anything I may be thinking. I'll usually let her do most of the talking and chime in when appropriate with my insights. But sometimes I want to talk about myself, maybe get her opinion on something, just want to share or let her know something new about me, etc. This is where I have a dilemma, some women don't particularly want to hear my male babbling, I'm not saying they have straight out told me that, but they generously give hints. Now not all women are like that and and ones I am getting to know may especially want me to speak up more. The trouble is the uncomfortable game of not being able to simply ask, but gauge her feeling as it's likely to be more truthful. So usually I'll refrain from sharing my thoughts much as a cautionary measure. Because being annoying will kill  the relationship or chances at one. However on the flip side of that she may think I have intimacy issues which can be just as bad.

I love OpenDNS. Its a fantastic idea and a well executed service. The idea is simple; your ISP sucks at resolving domain names into IP addresses, slowing down your web browsing experience with ridiculous resolution response times. So OpenDNS has you bypass your ISP for DNS resolution. Using a "optimized" DNS infrastructure and intelligent caching with their service you can experience near 0ms domain resolution response times. The service is executed with that first and foremost, but adds two features in addition. First is phishing protection, blocking known phishing sites so that you'll likely never be the victim of such attacks if you happen to be tricked by an email. Second is typo correction, for example if you accidentally type google.cm or .cmo OpenDNS will go ahead and send you to google.com instead of throwing a error page at you. And speaking of error pages thats where they plan to make their money. Any web address you try to access that doesn't exist will pull up an OpenDNS page with search results to help you get to where you wanted to be and has some related text ads. Which to me seems more than fair for such an amazing free service. Since I switched over to OpenDNS I've noticed a very tangible speed increase, now your mileage may vary depending on how well your ISP handles DNS resolution, but my provider Cox Communications apparently doesn't do so well. Therefore I see a reduction in page loads of nearly a second, in some cases a full two seconds. Now you may think "well big deal, its only a second or two". But if every time you clicked something on your desktop you experienced a one or two second delay you'd be extremely unhappy. We expect instantaneous results. We expect our 5Mb connection to serve a few hundred KB or less webpage near instantly, removing a one or two second delay will make a large difference in your entire browsing experience. I highly recommend switching to OpenDNS. It's almost brain dead simple to setup and you have a few preferences like if you want to turn off the typo correction or the phishing blocking.

Getting back to elitist pricks. I almost can't stand my two friends now. Its the sheer arrogance and condescending attitude. And what's worse is I know I'd be amongst those criticized, but its like I've been given a "pass" for knowing them. Its fucking ridiculous. Although I know I'm talked of negatively behind my back. What they lack to understand is that you can make good wage, have nice things, etc. and remain humble and respectful to others. You could attribute their folly to youth or immaturity, but I disagree. There are quite a few people I know over the age of 40 that maintain the same way of life. I know I'm ranting about this but its really because I'm so bothered by my best friend falling victim to this psychological flaw. Gives me a sense of loneliness. All too familiar feeling, but sad to lose a good man nonetheless. On the other hand I don't want to seem hypocritical highlighting psychological flaws of others when I have plenty of my own, but in my view my particular flaws are not affecting others, only myself, and I don't control or choose them. Elitism and arrogance are choices affecting those around you and as Bill Hicks would say "tainting our collective unconscious".

I can't take ignorance very well at all. I'm a very patient man but thats one thing that bothers me at my very core. And my even bigger pet peeve as of late has been elitist pricks. Elitist pricks take ignorance to a whole new level. The ease with which they piss on anyone they deem to be of lower quality than them is staggering. Their inability to realize they have no fucking right to disrespect any human being regardless of their income, their social standing, where they live, etc. It baffles me and fills me with hatred. And it boils down to them being ignorant of the fucking world they live in. The sad part is I have a small group of 4 friends. Two of which have become elitist pricks, the other two live in other states. Leaves me in a shitty position.

I'm lusting for a creative outlet. I have feelings of pent up energy. My job is utterly boring and repetitive, scripted almost in my mind. I want to get back into web development. The uniqueness of every design, the creative drive to strive for better design, more efficient code. I miss that. I just don't know what to do to get back into the swing of it. Its been over a year since I stepped back from my creative stride. While the basics of getting it done haven't changed, like xhtml and CSS, new things have come into the fold. AJAX drives the client side to do some neat things and then communicate those commands back to the server asynchronously. Not too difficult to learn, but quite a task to master I'm sure. I need to set aside some time and really teach myself and dive back into it. In other news I'm obviously contemplating getting back into the whole blogging thing, we'll see how it goes. I've just been feeling utterly meaningless lately which used to not bother me, but for whatever reason I feel like mattering.

I need a new cell phone, think I'll buy this Nokia 6131 next week. The one advantage of Cingular; unlocked phones :). Also I downloaded the new album by the Decemberists called "The Crane Wife". I've been listening to it obsessively for the last 6 days or so, its that good.

Ever feel like no one understands you? Yea that's how I feel ALL the time. Loving adult relationshis are few and far between. Even my guy friends don't get me. My close friend Bill kinda does, but even then he seems unsure of me sometimes. I'm not saying I'm such a psychologically appalling creature that I can't manage to find connections with people. Certainly I am at least capable of that. But once I try to reveal any depth of myself, show a different side perhaps; things go to shit. I'll say the wrong thing, or do the wrong thing, always completely innocently not knowing my own fallibility. Then I feel hurt and disillusioned by my feebleness to try to mend whatever it is I have broken. My pent up emotions constantly put me on edge. I need some sleep and my head hurts.