tech.gadgets.video.geekculture.gaming.kittens.
First day off
First of all, it’s Monday and I’m not at work. That’s weird enough. And I guess I’m on vacation right now, which is also strange for me. Usually when I took time off from CNET, it meant I was going somewhere. Now I’m just… home.
So far today I’ve cleaned the bathroom, tidied up the bedroom, emptied the dishwasher, organized my Adium contacts, mailed off some bills, thought about travel plans to Santa Monica, thought about travel plans to Connecticut, and got a much-needed coffee.
I really dont know what to do with myself. I’m sure with more time I’ll be dangerously close to driving Ryan insane just by being here (he has his daily routine down to a science), so I need to figure out something for the week. My main plan is to hit the gym a bunch, maybe take some yoga classes, and go climbing more. Get myself out of the house as much as possible.
I also find it weird to not be tethered to Outlook all day. I’m so used to reminders, and my folders, and just the constant influx of corporate mail. It’s very disconcerting to only rely on gmail. I’m trying to decide if I should start using Mail.app for my mail, or if I should stick to the web interface. Now that I don’t have two computers to worry about, should I move all my web based stuff to apps, like my RSS?
/sigh
Relaxing is hard work.
No related posts.
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#2 written by James 4 years ago
In reading your description of the dilemma that is your free time, I was reminded instantly of my last summer break during college. You start with whatever is immediately around you (cleaning the bathroom, etc), quickly zoom through any of the normally time-consuming chores, and quickly find that there is nothing to do. Hopefully, you’re better than I was at carrying out your plans for getting out of the house and all that jazz (I usually reverted to video games).
Anyhow, enjoy your time off.
Oh, and sorry, I can’t give much of any advice as far as moving web based stuff (like RSS) to apps. I’m currently hooked on Google Reader and a host of other web apps and don’t plan on changing.
Good on ya!
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#5 written by Rick C 4 years ago
Well, you have no excuse to not finish HP7. The downside to nonstop WoW is that if your level gets too far past the rest of your guild, that might be a problem. My guild had that problem when two members were laid off and went on an orgy of DDO and LOTRO and got about 10 levels past the rest of us in a week. Your mileage may vary. All that said go do it somewhere else. When you work at home (as I assume Ryan does) distractions drive you nuts and just being in the space might be off putting to him. It was to me when my wife had to work from home for a week while they were doing construction in her office. Have mercy on the boy
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Organizing Adium contacts? I should try that sometime.
Gmail has always worked really strangely for me in the mail app, I personally like the web app better, and you’ll still have to use the web app because if something important gets stuck in your spam folder it won’t go to the mail app.
but if it works for you, you should use it
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#8 written by Moe 4 years ago
Oh poor dear LadyV,
May I recommend the following course fo action to help you with your employment hiatus.
Wake up late.
Eat pancakes with chocolate syrup (Waffles are better)
Turn on Cartoon Network
Shower and dress
Go to your car and pick a compass direction
Drive aimlessly and discover all the wonderfully weird and special places that may lie in your path for several hours.Come home and eat ice cream
Kiss your boyfriend
Watch more cartoons
Sleep -
Well try and enjoy the time off. As far as your mail. You have a Mac, what about an IMAP mail like .mac. this way you can use both a mail app or the web interface as well as your iPhone and not worry about where you downloaded what email like pop. You could also have you gmail forwarded to it so you will have everything when ever you need it. Just a thought
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#13 written by Vance 4 years ago
Hello V, glad you are having some “downtime”.
This is also time to reflect and plan and brainstorm for your upcoming gig. So, in that spirit, here is some advice from a fan’s perspective. Hope you find it helpful!
The great thing about BOL has always been the combination of:
1) an UNSCRIPTED dialogue between smart and funny people on topics I am interested in, and
2) an organized process for getting through those topics in a professional way.
Too many “news” broadcasts are scripted, prompted and rehearsed. This = boring.
Too many “talk” broadcasts don’t have enough structure and focus. This = tedious.
BOL has always balanced these two very well.
Now, a tip for you in your new venture. Your greatest talent IMHO is that combination of insight and charm when you are UNSCRIPTED and just chatting about stuff you know knows well. When you have a scripted piece for video, a bit of this gets lost, if you know what I mean. A bit more of a “performance” than just “you being you”. Yes, still a better performance than most and still very entertaining, but not as much, I don’t know, not as much “just V!”. Hard to say that without sounding critical, which is not what I want it to sound like at all! You are GREAT either way, but maybe I am just such a BOL fan that I know I will miss just hearing you chat about stuff in that way.
Is it possible to do an unscripted, spontaneous and “natural” daily video bit? I don’t know. But if you can capture THAT, you’ve got gold.”
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Just saw a back episode of the buzz report where “veronica” played molly…very funny.
http://reviews.cnet.com/4660-12578_7-6555920.html?tag=vid.2 is the url of the video.
We’ll miss you at CNET. Check for me: LSLUTSKY, a PTG @ Mahalo.
Leonard
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#19 written by Lazlo 4 years ago
RSS – That’s how I read your blog – all blogs actually. It’s my preferred way to read DIGG, delicious and the news. I like it for blogs because people don’t post everyday, and for the mass content like DIGG just because I can scan the headlines. And I love that the RSS does the work of going to the sites for me.
There are still a couple of sites I go to manually and don’t RSS, but those tend to be the daily stops.
As for staying out of Ryans hair – I recommend taking BART into town, and then the ferry up to Tiburon. -
Mail is a great app and fun to use but GMail is so darn convenient. It’s nice not to have to download your email to your local machine. Let it all be archived on Google’s servers. You won’t have the problem a few years down the road where your local mailboxes get so bloated and things slow way down until you archive thousands of emails out of the application.
I forward all my email to my Gmail account. I have my iPhone setup (using the ‘other’ section in the iPhone Mail settings, not the Gmail section) to check my GMail account for incoming email. I use my ISP for outgoing email. This enables me to have my tristan@mydomain.com (not my real email address) as the “from” address on my iPhone=nice! If you use the stock GMail section on the iPhone, you must have the Gmail address as your “from” address.
If you have Comcast (they don’t allow you to use their outgoing email servers except when you are connected to your cable modem with them), then you will have to use another outgoing email server such as the AT&T cwmx.com one as outlined at:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305634
You probably know all this already though. Mostly I’m posting this info. in case someone is doing a search or something.
Cheers and best wishes in your new endeavors Veronica!
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First off, it has been really weird not hearing your voice on BOL, and enjoy your down time, it takes a little getting use to not having a daily routine any more. When you start your new job, getting settled in will keep you very busy, so enjoy you downtime, Ryan will have to adjust.
Mac OS X Mail.app is a great program, it takes some getting use to, but you can have multiple accounts POP Forwarded to it. While it is not Outlook, it is a great stand alone app, I ditched Outlook Express and Thunderbird after using OS X Mail.
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#24 written by Cads 4 years ago
here’s some stuff you can do:
drive to M5 and watch the Mythbusters at work
watch some old episodes of The Screensavers from the 90s and see them marvel at 128 meg of RAM!
hang around a populated area and see how many people recognize you
learn to play the gummi bears theme song on guitar
listen to some Miles Davis
bike from Sanfo to Sausalito, get coffee there and bike back
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#29 written by Taylor C. 4 years ago
I highly recommend Apple’s Mail app. I use it with my gmail account (which is actually my domain’s e-mail routed through gmail) and the integration with other applications and ease-of-use is second to none. It’s a great client. It’s much more convenient to be able to have local archives of e-mail you need offline and fact that you don’t have to go to a web browser, log in, or use a third party application such as Google’s notifier. It’s all on your desktop.
Anyway, looking forward to see what you do at Mahalo.
- Taylor
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If you do decide to go the Mail route, I have a neat trick to make Gmail act as an IMAP service in case you ever do use two computers again (I discovered this when trying to make something like this work on my iPhone):
1. Open an AOL mail account (they’re free, they’re 2GB and I don’t advertise this address).
2. Go to Gmail’s settings and set it to forward all messages to your supersecret AOL mail account.
3. Go to Mail.app, set up a new IMAP account using smtp.gmail.com as your outgoing mail server, and imap.aol.com as your incoming IMAP server.
4. Voila!Make sure you set AOL to NOT use the spam filter – way too much stuff ends up in there that shouldn’t, and Gmail’s spam filter is (usually for most people) excellent.
This has worked brilliantly for me, and now I have a Gmail IMAP account on my computer AND iPhone!
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#39 written by Todd 4 years ago
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#40 written by Matt 4 years ago
Veronica
I just finished listening to your last day on BOL and mourning the fact that I would not be hearing you on there again…..and then I realized that through the magic of the web I would still be able to hear you again, just in another forum, and I see that many fellow fans had the same idea! Best of luck to you!! And I hope you find something cool to do on your time off….like sleep!
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#41 written by Adam 4 years ago
Mail is pretty great now, but with Leopard on the way I think it’s really coming into it’s own. My main reason for using it is the integration with Address Book, iChat, iCal etc., but you’re using Adium so that may not be as big of a deal. Adium is great, but the lack of voice, video and total integration bums me out so I use jabber to hook up to whatever chat protocols I need (see: http://cavemonkey50.com/2006/08/add-gtalk-msn-and-yahoo-mutiple-accounts-to-ichat/). It’s somewhat involved workaround to make up for iChat’s lack of native support for gtalk and msn (among others) but it let’s me have one buddy list managed by address book -as well as allowing for voice and video chat. If you decide to try this jabber.freenet,de is working pretty well jaim.at seems to have gone off line, and follow the directions carefully
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#42 written by Sergey 4 years ago
Hi, I just wanted to recommend you a new tool from MS, I understand that Gmail is maybe better than MSN, but MS developed a new tool for their Live Mail service – Windows Live Mail Desktop. I’m using it since it became available as a beta and I should say that I like it very much. There are some bugs and strange things, but I think you should take a look. It can read RSS feeds, deliver mail from different sources, deliver newsfeeds and many other nice things.
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#46 written by Jay 4 years ago
No more PRIZE FIGHTS thats wierd. You should add a video blog to your site and possibly do a review or do tech tips. You got to stay on top of your game, but I’m sure ideas are forming. Anyways, I just think you make TECH interesting and HIP.
Too bad for CNET cause their youthful target audience will probably continue to drop although CNET UK will probably retain if not gain more of an audience. Now the only youthful persona I can identify with is Rich Demuro, and hes just okay. I seriously believe if James Kim (GOD rest his soul) had not died. Your Crave show would have been a hit you two had a really good knack for making some technology look interesting and you guys had good chemistry. I would have been great to see you guys walking the streets of Japan checking out the cool gadgets and stuff. Oh well..
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#48 written by ian 4 years ago
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“Now arrives a new 3rd party service called TwitterMSN, integrating Twitter into your Windows Live Messenger application. The TwitterMSN service allows you to update your Twitter account from your MSN account. To use the service, you just have to add msn@twittermsn.com to your Window Live Messenger friends list. Additionally, this third party service also lets you receive the friends’ updates, automatically converts URLs to TinyURL, sends tweets even when Twitter is down, and allows you to extend past Twitter’s built-in 140 character limit.”
Copied and pasted from Channel 10, written by Sarah Perez . Bacon chocolate sounds really nasty by the way… -
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You could also watch CNN for 4 hours straight, that’s what I did when I was bored. It was amusing, seeing headlines on the hour, every hour, welcome I’m so and so, and you’re watching CNN Today from London for the gazillionth time.
I understand the hard transition to a week of nothingness between jobs. When I left my former position for my current one, I took a week off to just vegitate.
As with V, I also cleaned and did some bills, but then picked up a good book and read, caught up on my TiVO television and just relaxed
Went for a walk or two, hit a museum; played tourtist!
Enjoy the time off, the work life will be coming back soon!