One of my major criticisms of Google over the last few years has been the state of most of their products. While many of them are initially innovative and useful, they usually fall by the way side and seemingly get abandoned. The “beta” moniker seems to be ever-present on most of their services, leading one to almost believe that there is no such thing as a finish product within the walls of Google. I just read this article where someone took the time to figure out just how many of Google’s products are in beta. The verdict? Nearly half of them, including the four year old gmail product ...

Tonight, while sitting at home on the couch, I was reminded of a conversation I had last week with someone that I hadn’t talked to in quite some time. That person was someone I used to hang out with quite a bit in university, but haven’t really seen that much of in the last few years. We both somehow ended up in software development, although I’ve stayed more along the lines of developing software while he has moved on to managing a small team of developers. The thing is, I left the conversation somehow being made to feel bad that after eight years in my career I haven’t advanced to full-time ...

About six months ago I got it into my head that I wanted to play around with RSS technology and see if I could come up with something cool with it. That eventually turned into a standalone RSS reader I wrote for the Mac called TrollDigger. The one feature everyone liked is the ability to view the actual pages instead of the RSS excerpts. I haven’t touched it since then, and the version that’s currently available for download is a bit clunky, but I was thinking about spending a few hours on it this weekend. To be honest, lately I’ve been thinking about a completely GUI-less RSS reader. I’d ...

So, I was multitasking at work today, installing Windows Vista on my laptop, and doing some work on my desktop machine. I thought the upgrade process would be simple, but instead it was a huge headache. First, Windows Vista Installer analyzed my whole machine and told me I was good to go. Then, I start installing it and it goes “wait a sec, just joking — you gotta remove all this software first before you can install Vista.” So, I uninstall Nero, my anti-virus program and a DVD RAM drive thing that I’ve never used. Install, take 2. The next part of the process is rather uneventful, but ...