Longhorn Still Doesn’t Impress - I’m Getting Scared
Well, I watched the Longhorn portion of the WinHEC keynote, and it left me cold. Frighteningly so, in fact. Chris Pirillo nails my feelings on it perfectly.
I sure hope that I’m wrong, but at this point Longhorn is not high on my list of things to spend money on when it becomes available. My gut feeling is that Longhorn is XP with a coat of lead paint; I expect it to run significantly slower than XP, regardless of all the talk of optimizations.
All of this from a guy that is getting very tired of Windows XP. I sure wish Microsoft would give us something to look forward to, because for anyone that is interested in Longhorn (and that should be any Windows user), there’s still nothing to get excited about. This state of affairs is starting to make me nervous.
Watch the Longhorn demo at WinHEC here.
Email Worse for your IQ Than Pot, Says CNN
Eric Mack points to an article at CNN that postulates that email is worse for people’s IQ scores than smoking pot is. My favourite bullet from the article is this:
Nine out of 10 people thought colleagues who answered messages during face-to-face meetings were rude, while three out of 10 believed it was not only acceptable, but a sign of diligence and efficiency.
So this means that at least two people thought that it was rude if someone interrupts a face-to-face conversation to reply to an email, yet they believe it is a sign of diligence and efficiency. I’m not calling this statistic into question; I think it’s accurate. I think we are all developing double standards with respect to politeness and respect, and somehow are able to take no notice of the inherent conflict we force ourselves to live with.
Thanks to (who else) Marc for pointing out the link.
Huge Shampoo Afro!
Yesterday I spent the day doing yard work. The previous night I had a late-night hockey game and didn’t get much sleep, so by yesterday afternoon I was pretty beat. I took a shower, and managed to rub liquid soap into my hair rather than shampoo. As soon as I did it, I realized my mistake, and thought to myself that I ought to use extra shampoo to wash out the soap. I’m sure you can see where this is going; by the time I had lathered my head up with a combination of soap and copious amounts of shampoo, I had the biggest shampoo afro I’ve ever seen. To be honest, it was pretty cool. I may even do it on purpose again sometime.
Wow, I can sure be immature sometimes. 
Great Email Overload Post
Marc Orchant over at Marc’s Outlook on Productivity has another great take on dealing with email overload. I emailed Marc a couple of weeks ago on this very topic, and he took the time to write me a very detailed and thorough description of how he personally manages this problem. This guy is a guru - seriously. If you have trouble dealing with your inbox, take the time to read what Marc has to say.
I’m the #1 Jason Clarke on Yahoo!
I normally use Google for the majority of my web searching. Just over a week ago Lifehacker pointed to YaGoohoo!gle, which is a site that allows you to submit one search query to Google and Yahoo! at the same time. So, of course, I searched for my name. Interestingly, my blog’s homepage doesn’t show up in the first 1000 hits on Google (I’ve used a different tool to verify that), but show up #1 on Yahoo. (I can’t bring myself to put Yahoo’s exclamation point after their name every time…) Certain posts from this blog show up in the top 100 results on Google, but not my homepage. I think I like Yahoo just a little bit more now. 
Yay for egosurfing.
Oh, and I’ve gone back to using Yahoo’s (well, really X1’s) desktop search utility. Copernic has a great offering, but X1 / Yahoo Desktop Search (same-same) have a user interface that works a little better for me. Plus, for me being able to see a progress bar during indexing is huge (yes, I have control issues). Copernic still doesn’t have that for some reason. Yahoo still blows chunks when it comes to releasing information about what they’re doing with YDS, and making it easy to find out if there’s a new version available. And they should be downright embarrassed about their ’support forum’. But the new version (which I found out about from a blog rather than from Yahoo) seems to have fixed my biggest issues, so I’m happily using it again.
