February 2005 Archives

Lifehacker writes about a very interesting ICQ robot called SmarterChild. You can send it messages that will tell the robot to give you reminders, help you with spelling, geography, give you the headlines, or tell you when Million Dollar Baby (or any other movie) is playing in your area.

The thing Lifehacker doesn't tell us is that it's ad supported. Just simple inline text ads, but ads nonetheless. They are pretty easy to ignore, but if you don't like ad supported tools, don't use SmarterChild.

Robots have been around on IRC and ICQ for some time, but this one is really easy to use, and has a lot of good functionality. Check it out and see what you think.

So, since I started my new job three weeks ago, I've been using IE. It's been a long time since I used IE, and I thought that I'd give it another chance again. Well, it still sucks. No tabs. No RSS. Spyware problems. Crappy CSS.

I'm back to Firefox.

I did find something very interesting, though, if you really need to use IE. Try the Avant browser. It uses IE for browsing, but wraps it up in a lot of extra functionality including tabs. Now, if you've never used tab browsing before, I feel for you. Tabbed browsing is the best UI addition to browsers since the back button. Try it, you'll love it.

I just started a new job this week at Salesforce.com. I'm back into technical communication. So far it's been great - interesting technology and great people, and I'm going to be working on some great projects.

One of the other perks, though, is the location. I'm now working in downtown San Francisco. I have a view of the Bay Bridge out of my window. My commute is one hour less each way.