Updates + Shareware
Hey, I wonder if this damn thing works. It does! It does! For some odd reason, I am back in my voice recognition program. I had a whole bunch of things to talk about, but now I I can’t quite remember them. I did end up finding my cell phone charger… actually, Adrian found it. And in the same place as I had looked earlier. We are hanging out of my grandma’s house, and I have uploaded all of the pictures that were lying around on the camera. There are some from the trip to Chico, and some from Ansell Hoffman Park. Due to a bug in my uploading software, they are not displayed by date taken. I’m thinking of e-mailing the developer later today. I was supposed to go to IKEA with Christen this morning, but for some reason my phone never rang and it just never happened. However, she has the bed now and I’m thinking of going over their later tonight and using me and Adrian’s man muscles to assemble her bed.
It’s two more days until my interview at the magazine. I have sent a few more resumes off, but have had no responses. My car barely made it to Davis last night to pick up Adrian. However, I put a whole bunch of oil in it today and I’m hoping that will make it run a little bit better. My current theory is that the people wrote the wrong date to have my oil changed on the little sticker, because I got it changed right before I drove down here and it’s been almost three months. Did I mention that Adrian got a job? I’m pretty sure I did. He starts in a few weeks. I’m going through the job papers today and doing a bit more Craigslisting before we head on out, but I’m really hoping I get that job. I don’t think I really want to work in journalism as a career, but that’s pretty much all I have expertise in and it makes a good story for potential employers that I’m going to college get my journalism degree and such.
Today I’m burning all of the files I used for the project I did for Molly onto DVDs so they are off of my hard drive yet still in existence if they are needed sometime in the future. I’m out of blank DVDs though… and I really don’t feel like driving to RadioShack. Or anywhere, for that matter.
We spent last night in Adrian’s basement. I know, that sounds Byzantine, but it was not bad at all. We had slept there a few times before, as there is a door to get into it which doesn’t require access to the main house. Adrian’s dad did a really nice thing and rearranged a lot of the clutter in their so that we could have a comfortable place to sleep if we needed it. I’m going to help him take some of the more environmentally dangerous things (like a few old CRT monitors, two microwaves, and an ancient laser printer) to the dump or recycling center later in the week. He’s supposed to e-mail me the information. Also, he says he has a lead on some layout projects using InDesign that could potentially be lucrative. Since InDesign layout is one of my specialties, it seems a natural fit. I’m supposed to bring over my copy of InDesign and see what is to be done. I’m also supposed to draft a paragraph or two about my experience with layout. I think I will do it after I finish this post.
For the first time in a while, I’m feeling hopeful. My car might not be destined for death this month, might have a job soon, and maybe I will even be able to afford a laptop.
This virtual machine software that allows me to run my voice recognition is the first piece of software I’ve actually paid for in a very long time. Let’s see… what software have I actually paid for? I’ll make a chronological list:
MusicMatch Jukebox (Windows) - $25: I had a music library of about 1000 tracks which had no ID3 tag information, so I couldn’t organize them by artist or album or anything. MusicMatch had this service where he would automatically look at all your songs and tag them, and that was definitely worth $25 for me. Also, since that lookup feature was a connection to their server, it was impossible to find a serial number that hadn’t been banned. Also, I may have been using the Pro version for a long time before I actually bought the license.
Trillian Pro (Windows) - $25: Don’t get me wrong, I like Mac OS X. But there is really no multi-service (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, etc.) chat client for Mac that is as versatile as Trillian is for the PC. Adium, the program that is the leading multi-service chat client for Mac works great when you are just using text, but it does not support video at all. To do that, you have to use iChat and you can only do it with others on AIM. I used Trillian on my PC for about a year, and for the most part it was great. The people who make Adium are working on voice and video implementation, so someday it will be there… but not yet.
SuperDuper (Mac) - $30: for those of you who don’t know, this is a program which allows you to make an exact copy of everything on your computer and then restore from it later if your computer dies (sort of like Norton Ghost for Windows). Every night, this program copies my hard drive onto an external USB drive, so I always have two copies of my email, photos, etc. in case my computer explodes or something :)
Parallels Workstation (Mac) - $50: this is the program that allows me to run Windows in a virtual machine. The only reason I need Windows is that my voice recognition software runs it. Parallels was in beta for ever, but it works now… and I snagged it for the early bird price of 50 bucks. It now costs $70.
Synergy - (Mac) $5: this is a cool little application that shows this translucent display of what song comes onto iTunes. It also has a bunch of features that allow you to control your music library using keyboard shortcuts that work in any application. It also allows you to control iTunes from the menu bar. It’s useful when you are listening to a new album in the background and when each new song comes on you can remember the name of it using the little translucent display.
Delicious Library (Mac) - $25: I have talked about this one whole bunch times. You can make this cool little virtual library of all your books and movies scanning the bar codes in with your webcam.
Jungle Disk (Mac, Windows, Linux) $.02/month or so: this is software and a service. You can use the application to mount a virtual hard drive on your desktop and drag files onto it that are absolutely essential. They are copy to Amazon.com’s “ultra reliable” servers, so you won’t lose them even if somebody steals your computer and your backup drive.
I don’t know why I had to write this little roundup, but I wanted to understand the reasons behind me purchasing software… after years of being poor and not being able to.
Well, I guess it’s time to go. If I had a laptop I would be able to write more posts on the road, but I’m just not that affluent yet.
