My Tech Week In Review – It Sucked (smile)

In a previous post I arrogantly announced that I was kicking FireFox to the curb and switching over to Chrome. Well, I did and now it looks like I may need to make the switch back (smile). Mind you, I like Chrome. It is blazing fast. Perhaps this is due to the fact that it is not loaded up by a lot of available add-ons that reside on my FireFox page. Honestly, I was able to get by without those.

My problems with Chrome center around the fact that it just does not play nice with several programs that I use regularly including: Ning (editing problems), FreeCRM (dumping me out of the software), and WordPress.com (a combination of crashes and editing issues). Unfortunately, those issues outweigh the speed gained. My biggest problem with FireFox remains typing latency. I am hoping that this may be resolved in version 3.6. If you look at the image in the upper left corner of this post, the logo in the middle is a combination FireFox/Chrome icon. I am realizing that this is sometimes what it takes….. two browsers at the call for different applications.

DSL: In another vain attempt to maybe minimize my latency problems. I upgraded my DSL speed today from 1.5 meg to 7. Do I see a huge improvement in terms of speed anywhere? No and that sucks The conversion was also touch and go and I am so grateful that I chose to have the Qwest tech do the installation and can promise you that I made sure I got my money’s worth on that service.

Bing Mobile and Loopt: I installed these apps on my BlackBerry this week. For me at least, Loopt is lame. As for Bing mobile with live search, great idea but I can not seem to figure out an easy way to get the voice search to work. On top of that, both these apps are GPS reliant. Loopt is all GPS. Having those activated proved to be a huge drain on my battery so I removed Loopt altogether and disabled the GPS on Bing. I can activate it if I ever need it.

Google Wave: I am severely underwhelmed by this product. What good is it to provide somebody with an invitation to try Wave and then not provide you with any invitations that you can send to others so that you have somebody to “Wave” to? At best, it strikes me as a fancy hybrid of instant messaging and email. Now, if you and your team were to schedule a time to all meet together on-line for a wave session, I can see the value. Like email, it is totally dependent on having whoever you wish to collaborate with being on board at the same time. I think I have 6 people on my contact list that have it, one of whom I have no idea of who he even is, and even the person who sent me the invite has never responded to my request to collaborate. Same with two others. This tells me that nobody in my small circle is any more excited about this product than I am.

My one bright spot for the week has been threadsy. I requested a private beta invite a few weeks ago and one came in my inbox a few days ago. Think of a Tweetdeck or Seesmic like interface, and it is very pretty, and then throw your email feed(s) along with Twitter and FaceBook. Yes. Multiple emails and multiple Twitter accounts. It get’s better. Your email is not just a feed. You can actually use it to send messages and reply to those received. More on this cool app in an upcoming post.

Well, pretty grumpy this week. That parking ticket on Tuesday didn’t help (smile). Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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