On Task Technologies

Pete Cashmore at Mashable! writes a review of standpoint. The title of his article is Standpoint – 43Things for Beliefs. Maybe The Robots should buy them out and add fulfill the idea of having a 43 Beliefs aspect to the family of 43 sites.

I’m happy with my current Apple PowerBook G4 Titanium. I’ll save up for the new mactel, MacBook Pro to be my next hardware upgrade.

During the process of purchasing gas via credit card at a PDQ self serve gas pump, I noticed an inconsistancy between one of the questions and the selection controls. Before being about to select fuel type, the user is required to indicate whether a car wash is also to be included in the charge. At this step, the text message screen says, “Car Wash? Press yes or no”. The control buttons are located below the message screen. However, the order is reversed. True, the red for “no” and green for “yes” aid in selecting the correct button; yet, I tend to hesitate because I expect the “no” button to be located in the same order as the text message.

I had fun marketing myself. I experimented with some new sites:
Oyogi – Ask and answer questions
Postaroo – classified
Favorville – a place to trade favors

I entered a contest at one of my favorite blogs, TechCrunch, to win a free pass to SXSW Interactive (SXSW). I am one of seven people who now have a chance to get the pass.

TechCrunch writes, “Last Saturday I wrote a post to give away a free pass to the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin this March. I asked interested people to leave a comment on the post describing why they want the pass, and what they think they will get out of the conference. Requests had to be in by midnight last night, and I am now presenting the seven applications that I think are the best for a vote. I am running this poll until midnight Friday PST.”

Lena really wants to go to SXSW - Vote for Lena

SXSW Interactive.

I have entered Peach into the Infinite Cat Project to see if she can be cat #1132.

TechCrunch is ”...a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new web 2.0 products and companies.” I have added their RSS feed to my group of Bloglines feeds that I read first. The reviews provided by TechCrunch are thorough and enlightening. The site design is pleasing.

A January 8, 2006 post—Giving Away a Pass to SXSW—indicates that they have a free pass to the interactive part of the conference.

I would squeal and jump with delight to be the recipient (squealling and jumping being the appropriate response to unexpected joy.)

I have been a Blogger user since July 2001. My Blogger username is ontask. I have my own domain name of ontask.net, so I post directly to my own website. I have just discovered, that back in September of 2004, a Blogspot blog was created with the blog name and URL of ontask. Apparently, there are no restrictions to setting up a Blogspot blog using a Blogger username that is not your own.

I am concerned that his will cause brand confussion. Already, it is a barrier in syndicating my Blogger account content to other locations.

In particular, on SuprGlu when asked for my Blogger username, instead of being able to import my Blogger content, I am getting the Blogspot blog of ontask content on my Staying On Task with Glu. (SuprGlu is another one of those new Web 2.0 sites that has popped up. I created a Suprglu account in order to evaluate and review the service.)

I’ve written an email to Google and to Blogger explaining the situation. I guess I’m feeling unhopeful and just need to rant.

I realize that my blog content is not currently really exciting… but I hope to improve the quality such that I can build traffic. I suppose my main problem is that I am passionate about the discussion of how to improve consistant Internet identity. This recent discovery certainly makes the issue of Internet identity personal.

How to cope with this situation? Should I just shrug and say, “C’est La Vie?”

I use Adobe Photoshop to prep numerous Website screen shots. One method: click, hold and drag the rectangular marquee tool around the area to save; use image—> crop. Making one continuous, exact selection can be tedious.

I’ve always known that an irregular shaped selection will crop a rectangle that matching the greatest height and width. However, only recently did I realize that this same functionality would increase the speed of cropping my screen shots.

Now, I use the rectangular marquee to make a small pixel selection of the desired upper left corner, use the navigator to quickly slide the view to the lower right, use the add selection rectangular marquee to make a small pixel selection of the desired lower right corner, and then use image—> crop. Even though these are tiny selections at different areas of the image, the final crop is just the right size.