Geekery and other stuff

First, Change of Shift is up. It’s, um, colorful!

Now, geekery.

• del.icio.us: I avoided investigating this tool for a long time because the trendy use of periods inside a word annoyed the heck out of me. Petty? Perhaps, but that’s just how it is. I actually gave it shot a long while back, and the site seemed sort of…unusable. The links were scattered about in big lists, and I just didn’t see the point. But now with Flock, I LOVE del.icio.us. I hit cntrl-B and in the sidebar appear all my bookmarks, tagged and searchable not just from my laptop but from any computer I happen to be using. Very cool.
• Jott: I had no idea that anything like Jott existed! You call a number (speed dial on cell phone), talk to the friendly voice, and get your message transcribed and sent to the destination of choice. At first I thought, “What’s the point?” It doesn’t take that much effort to just call someone or send a text message or—for that matter—record my own voice message on my phone and write it down later or put it in my PDA. But because I’m a geek, I tried it anyway, and I’m now hooked. I call the number, say, “Me,” then, eg, “Remember to buy soy milk.” A transcribed e-mail goes to a label in my Gmail box called “to do.” Alternatively, I can have the e-mail sent to my Remember the Milk inbox, where it appears as a to-do item. The possibilities are endless and mind boggling.
• Google calendar just added a bunch of cool stuff, thus causing me to spend the day screwing around with various ways to sync it with my Palm and phone. These are all highly device dependent so I won’t go in to the details, but I have found a fairly painless way to get synced with both. I haven’t had a desktop calendar for a long time because I am annoyed by Palm’s desktop calendar and refuse to pay for a third-party one (FREE geekery is my true passion!). Thanks to Bluetooth (for all the contacts in my Palm) and Google calendar, I can now safely leave the house without my Palm and still have the info I might need. I’m not ditching the PDA by any means, but it’s nice to be able to save it for more heavy-duty usage.

I went to get my clinical clearance card yesterday, and big surprise! My two phone calls to ensure I had ALL the correct documentation were fruitless. I have to do more stuff. I am bitter. Are all nursing schools so totally discombobulated, or is mine worse than usual? I can get through no process without some major freaking problem that costs me a lot of time or money or, more often, both. I guess it’s the price one pays. At least I’m not a first semester anymore.