Nitwit, Blubber, Oddment, Tweak

The operative word being oddment. To the left is my new favorite desktop image from Pixelgirl Presents. They have a pretty fantastic collection of desktops for people who like colorful, busy backgrounds as well people who really don't like clutter. Or just for the same person in different moods.

In the same vein, my grumpy new Adium dock icon, the devil duck. I think he's cute and feel quite bonded to him. You can find him and others like him at the Adium Xtras page. You should probably get Adium first. FYI, it's a multi-protocol instant messaging application that works with all the major clients and a lot of ones I've never heard of, is highly customizable, and obviously has lots of fun and completely useless add-ons. Its biggest drawback is lack of AV support. Also, Mac only. Sorry, PCs... ;)

And finally, I am addicted to Firefly. I've never really bought TV shows or movies off iTunes before because I don't think the resolution is good enough (and still don't), but I have fallen prey to the ease of downloadable content. Hopefully I can get the rest of the season (how sad that there's only one) on Netflix before I spend much more money.

A Few Of My Favorite Things

Found while trawling the internet, as I am wont to do (insincere apologies to PC users, as two of these don't apply to you):

• Flip4Mac, a free QuickTime plugin that opens .wmv files in QuickTime Player and lets you stream them in Safari. Bye-bye, Windows Media Player. I always hated you anyway. Opens files with no delay; haven't had a chance to test streaming yet because I don't run across many web videos in .wmv.
• FlickrBooth, a free Photo Booth plugin that lets you upload snapshots to Flickr automatically or at will. Works like a charm so far.
• The new version of Flickr Uploadr, apparently standard for Mac and PC (I have no PC to test that theory with). Since the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto started costing money (heaven forbid), this is my new favorite option, and this version seems far superior to the old one. Since all editing now takes place in one window, you can perform batch operations and then change them for individual photos. You can also reorder pictures (and actually be sure of how they'll show up in your photostream). Now if they would just integrate it with iPhoto, life would be perfect...

Old Dog, New Tricks

I've been taking a mental health break from blogging for the past few months, but I'm (hopefully) back! I put a new toy on here to motivate me: snapshots from snap.com. If you hover over the little speech bubble next to a link, a window will pop up and give you a site preview. I find this fun, but if you find it annoying, bring up a snap preview window, click on the gear in the top right corner, and you can disable it for this site or all sites. That's all for now.

RLS (Really Lazy Syndication)

I have dragged my feet about using RSS feeds for a long time. "Really simple" indeed - sure, they keep everything in one place, but you need an extra application or web application to do it, which has always felt extraneous to me. (But I am oversensitive to redundancy, I think.) Plus, it strips everything down - it doesn't matter what I've set up my blog to look like if you read it as a feed. So I've just kept the links to blogs I read in my bookmarks bar and clicked through them two or three (or twenty or thirty, depending on my level of procrastination) times a day. I don't read many blogs anyway, so it works. But I just bought a new Macbook (more stuff on that probably coming later, once I've used it for a while) with OS X Leopard, and this version of Mail lets you add RSS feeds in the sidebar with your other folders and alerts you when you have a new article, just like a new email message. OK, so not that revolutionary, I'm sure Google figured this out long ago, etc. - but this is RSS for the really lazy. I don't have to go online at all, I'm in my mailbox all the time anyway, and it's completely automated. I may have just been converted to the RSS way of life.

How to Increase Site Traffic

Thanks to the wonders of Site Meter, I can tell how people get to my blog. Usually it's through Facebook or similarly, but I do get some random and hilarious hits. This post has gotten two hits from people doing a Google search with the phrase "how to become a dictator." Hurrah for the internet - now anyone can learn the fundamentals of dictatorship. But not from my blog, as one irritated reader commented. It seems I haphazardly picked a title with key words that look nice to search engines - one way to increase site traffic, I am told. As you may have guessed, the title of this post is a bit of an experiment...