October to January... that's not so bad.

So I figured I should get back into this blogging thing. I'm not about to recap the past 3 and a half months, or whatever... so yeah. That would be ridiculous.

I will say that I have a house for next year, so no more of this shitty dorm living. Should be a good time, and super nerdy, because, well, I'm a nerd, and pretty much everyone I'm living with is one too... so yeah.

It can be seen right here.

It's supposed to be like two apartments, upstairs and downstairs, somewhat duplex-esque, but we're renting the whole thing, so we have two living rooms, two kitchens, two sets of laundry machines... it's pretty neat.

Othe than that, life is boring. However, I leave you all with this gem from The Lantern, OSU's student newspaper. I beg of you, please read the caption.

Taskbar Shuffle

Busy few days. Cool new app, I think at least. I've been wanting Windows to do this for a while, but didn't really feel like doing anything to make it happen. That's why blogs rule, they bring me the info I'd like to see.

So basically, this neat little program lets you drag and drop your active windows on the taskbar, much like you can in Firefox, letting you reorganize. I always have the same few things open, and like my least changing items to be on the far left of my taskbar, and the ever-opening-and-closing ones to be on the right. I always get annoyed when GAIM or Firefox needs a restart, and it puts my taskbar out of typical order. Yes, that's extremely obsessive compulsive, and I'm alright with that... now I can fix it. This also allows a middle-click = close window, again, like a Firefox Tab.

Anyway - Direct Link: Taskbar Shuffle

via [Lifehacker]

Firefox 2.0 RC1 Available for Download

So yeah, the title pretty much says it all. I haven't installed yet, in fact I'm only at 50% on the installer download. But I'll be sure to be fiddling with FF 2.0 sometime this weekend, after this week from hell is over.

Details and Screencaps Here
via [lifehacker]

Choose Language and Download Here.



(I highly recommend the Punjabi version)

Another cool thing on the internets

Coming soon through a tube near you, a brand new Google project that's about 60% through beta. It's called Writely, and it looks to be promising. It's a web based word-processor, with some fairly extensive options. The real intrigue for me lies within the collaboration option. For every document you create you can add email addresses (by the way, login is achieved through your Google/Gmail account) of people who can in turn access and edit any or all of your documents. I can see this getting some serious use on college group projects, if nothing else. It also has something that even Microsoft Word is lacking, to my knowledge, an edit log. Your documents auto-save every ten seconds, and every edit is registered, so at any point (I think) you can roll-back your document to a previous state. So collaborative documents become mini-wikis of a sort in this way, giving you control to undo something if somebody else drops the ball. The next time I actually have to write a paper... when I take a non-math/science based class, I'm most likely going to use Writely, and see how it goes.

Netvibes

Too awesome to not blog about. That's pretty much the best way to describe Netvibes. It's a fully customizable homepage, that's a more sensible way. You can, after creating an account, add or subtract features at your desire, move them around the page, and even create new tabs within your page for each different type of content, or what-have-you.

The Built in RSS features are my favorite by far. I've tried programs for retrieving blog entries but have never really enjoyed them all that much, and I like to keep as few programs as possible open most of the time. But that's definitely not the only functionality here. It can be set to synch with your gmail (or other POPmail client), ebay, and del.icio.us accounts, as well as other things that I've never heard of. It will also retrieve news and weather for you, and you can set up in page post-it type notes, and to-do lists. The interface is clean, and it hasn't really bugged out on me yet. The lack of obnoxious advertising and gaudy colors is also pretty appealing. It's really pretty damn neat, and completely free.

I just found out about it last night, and am still noticing little things that make it even more worthwhile. I highly suggest giving it a shot... I doubt you'll be disappointed.

Cooking for Engineers

I was perusing the message boards that I post on, and on the College Life board, someone asked about the trials of learning to cook in an off-campus world, and someone linked him to this site. It's called Cooking for Engineers - being that I am a future engineer and all - it struck my fancy.

The site has 70 or 80 real recipes, plus a random smattering of other walkthroughs, for preparing other things, like marshmallows, for one. Each recipe is laid out step-by-step, with a picture for most, if not all, of the steps. That's not my favorite part though. Along with each recipe, is a graphical representation of the recipe, sort of like a condensed flow chart, that let's you know what you need for each major step and a heads-up for what's coming next. There are no times given, but it offers a pretty sweet overview regardless, and an easy reference for what should be done together, and what should be going on entirely separate. The marshmallow one is a good representation of this, I suggest clicking that link and scrolling to the bottom, just to see for yourself.

So yeah... call me a dork or whatever, but I like to cook, and if someone is trying to make it easier for me, I'm all for it.

I Rule

4-suit difficulty win - twice in a row. I am the king of Spider Solitaire.

This is my crowning achievement of the summer, and I think that may be sad.