This is sad, funny, obscene, ridiculous, and downright silly, all at the same time.

How NOT To Steal A SideKick II

I hope that the issue gets resolved soon. Stolen tech plus whiney thieves does not a great day make.

Lost may very well be the best thing on television. 24 is the only competition, and I’m happy to watch both. I’m just sad that they are both over.

The season finale for Lost was the most convoluted, breathtaking, confusing, awesome, amazing, and interesting end to a season that I have ever seen. Granted, I’m not a big TV buff, but I know what I like, and I like Lost.

I can’t wait until next season. I’m not going to discuss the show out of respect for those that haven’t seen it, but suffice it to say that now is the perfect time to catch up with both seasons and get prepared (pumped!) for next season.

Well, I just finished my second year of college, and I feel great. That’s all. I’m too busy enjoying this unstressness to post anything longer.

Continuing on my endless calendar fixation, 30 Boxes just implemented a todo list to their calendar software. The bottom line? It’s awesome.

You can add todo list items with 30 Boxes’ One Box quick add parsing, and add tags to each item. A new menu item at the top left of the calendar view lets you quickly see and edit your list.

Drag and drop reordering has been implemented, along with double-click-to-edit and a replaced contextual menu functionality. If you need to push todo events onto a calendar, the option is right there. Now, notice that I didn’t say “your calendar” or “the calendar,” because 30B has provided options to post to Yahoo! Calendar and Google Calendar.

Now, just move that drag and drop functionality to the main calendar and let me preface todo items with @todo in the main One Box entry form for even quicker adding, and we can really start Getting Things Done!

Earlier this week, Thursday offered their fourth full-length release to the public. There is a marked maturity about this album, both in terms of lyrical cohesion and musicality. The first single, Counting 5-4-3-2-1, is reminiscent of the classic Thursday sound, but contains just the right of experimentation that one could expect from this New Jersey post-hardcore outfit.

While not as mainstream or “poppy” as War All The Time, _A City By The Light Divided _is most definitely an evolution for Thursday.

Many of the songs on A City By The Light Divided have an advanced dynamic quality; the songs are long enough to allow for an emotional build and an ebb-and-flow characteristic to shine through. Arclamps, Signal Flares, A Shower of White (The Light), the album’s instrumental track, and Autumn Leaves Revisited are perfect examples of this.

The opener to this album could not be more perfect. Harmonizing such energy and emotion is a hard thing to do in this genre, but the twinkling guitar and eerie sound effects coupled with the macabre lyrics set the mood for the entire album. Vocalist Geoff Rickly’s inspiration came from a poem by Mexican poet Octavio Paz:

I speak of the immense city, that daily reality comprised of two words: the others.

The entire album’s atmosphere and mood is not necessarily the progression that every Thursday fan could have predicted, but it most definitely is a welcome addition to their repertoire and to their reputation as a leader in this difficult-to-define genre.

Rating: 4/5

I’ve been using 30 Boxes for a while now, but I was intrigued at the release of Google Calendar. The support for GCal in the developer community seems to be much greater than any of the other web-based calendars, which makes sense given Google’s prolific presence in the online world.

I made a post a little while ago that described some of my initial impressions of GCal; this post is going to focus on what elements of Google Calendar 30 Boxes needs in order to form an übercalendar.

Third Party Support

Within GCal’s short lifetime, it has already given life to a Firefox extension and a Quicksilver plugin (check your QS prefs to grab it.) While 30 Boxes seems to have support for developers, there have not been many results to speak of. The Themes section of their website is sorely lacking, and a quick Google search for Firefox extensions turns up completely irelevant results.

I want some third party support for 30 Boxes. It’s an amazing app, but it could definitely benefit from outside help.

Access Keys

Pressing a modifier in order to activate access keys is so 2005. I love zipping around Gmail and GCal with just a few presses of the keyboard. Maybe someone could write a Greasemonkey script for this, but the keys need to be default to the app itself.

Calendar Views

GCal’s Agenda view is pretty nifty, and 30B needs a week and proper day view that is accessible from the main page. Just having the month view can get pretty stale after a while. In fact, the 30B interface could stand to take a few lessons from Google. Sure, GCal is a bit cluttered, but the settings page is way more efficient than the 30B version.

… And Vice Versa

And now that I have lambasted 30B, here are some awesome things that Google needs to implement:

Tags

This could be the factor that determines whether or not I switch over to GCal. Google, multiple calendars is cool and all, but we need tags. Now.

RSS Feeds / Overlays

This is one of my favorite parts of 30B. I love seeing bookmarks and photos from buddies.

Social Aspects

30B was built to be a social app from the beginning, and it shows. The way that buddy calendars overlay onto your own calendar is ingenious. I haven’t done much with the sharing on GCal, but I know that event invites and additions in 30B is a breeze.

I know that 30B is actively working on implementing new features (and by actively, I mean, can someone tell the 30B guys to get a test server? This night testing beta feature thing is driving me insane!), and I’m sure that Google is, too. We as end users can only benefit.

Worst movie. Ever.

UPDATE: In my original post, I wasn’t too impressed with Google Calendar. I’m back on track now, and I’m ready to write a bit more about this webapp.

Issues

When I first signed up for Google Calendar, I was ready to be impressed. I already had a 30 Boxes account, so I found the Import tool, and imported my .ics file from 30 Boxes. For some reason, all the times for all the events were off by 5 hours, which happens to be the offset from GMT that the timezone I live in utilizes. Pretty fishy, if you ask me.

I tried deleting my calendar to start over, and (this is partially my fault) didn’t realize that deleting your main calendar deleted your account, too. After much cookie deletion and cache clearing, I finally got into GCal.

I made a new calendar into which I could import my 30 Boxes calendar. This time around, at the suggestion of a friend, I imported my calendar as a CSV. The times worked out fine, and I just had to make the few recurring events I had in my calendar start repeating again.

I’m impressed with the speed with the calendar. I love the multi-day select, and I love the different views of the calendar, in terms of day, week, and month.

Some features reminded me of 30 Boxes; namely the Agenda view and the quick add event box. However, there are a few things missing, and that’s why I’m sticking with 30 Boxes for now.

Tagging

A new Google app that doesn’t have tagging?! What is going on here?! I think the idea of multiple calendars is neat and all, but tagging is way more intuitive. With 30 Boxes, I can make a custom view of any tag, without having to create events in multiple calendars. Sure, the colors thing is neat, but I’d rather have tagging.

Quick Add

Just copy the 30 Boxes method. Seriously. You can add location, notes, tags, colors, recurring events, or anything you want from 30 Boxes “One Box.” You can’t do that with Google’s. I’m willing to bet that will change, but I can’t wait for that.

Calendar Management

Really, I just want a mass-delete-all-events-from-main-calendar button, but even a prompt to create a new calendar on import would be nice.

The bottom line is that Google’s calendar is a slick app. Of course, the search is great, and apparently it integrates with Gmail, though I haven’t seen evidence of this yet. There are some areas that need improvement, so I’ll just stick with 30 Boxes until Google gets the polish out and gives this calendar a once-over.

While the concept is nice, I really hate going to everyone’s blog and not being able to see these wonderful designs that everyone is so proud of.

Over at Stylegala there is an interesting comment thread about this idea. Sure, the underlying XHTML is very important. I even disabled my stylesheets in Firefox and fixed a couple errors in my markup that I wasn’t happy with. One could argue that this is the point of CSS Naked Day, but I don’t see the point in shoving it in every user’s face.

I can’t wait for 6th April, the CSS Renaissance.

Holy #$*&!

What an awesome move, Apple.

I can only imagine what this does for Apple’s image, both in the home and in the corporate world.

From the Boot Camp page:

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

Now I really want a MacBook Pro.