Computer breakdowns, Google Reader, TimeSpace and goodbye 2008

Once again I find myself neglecting this blog, lets see if 2009 is a better year.
So my PC laptop crashed at home last week, and after many many attemps I managed to boot it into safe mode just long enough to drag all my stuff out onto another drive. I loaded all my photos, university stuff, master's project and papers, etc. on to my G4 powerbook last night and everything seemed like it was working fine. I "needed" to run my mac updates since I have not done so in a while, but really I should not have as something went coocoo after that update - maybe just a coincidence but I'm pretty sure the hard drive is pooched. So back to my PC laptop which I spent 2 hours this evening restoring and now it is in pretty good shape, much much faster than before which is one good thing that came out of this. But now I have this pretty g4 laptop that is pretty much useless until I figure out if I need a new hard drive or not, and whether I can grab the stuff inside or not. I do have a backup of it, but my only concern is I am not sure how recent my backup of the code I wrote for my masters is. Sure that was a while back (Jan 2008) but still I would like to keep the code I delivered...

Anyway enough boringness, for the first time I set up iGoogle and personalize my page. Very neat, added a lot of fancy little portlets, got my news, jokes, weather and shit all on one page. But then I decided to setup Google Reader and hook it to the blogs I like to keep up to date on. Now that Google Reader is a master piece - so simple yet I think it is probably one of the most useful product to come out of Google Labs. I love it! Thanks to Google Reader, I came across TimeSpace - a Google map based news aggregator with a time slider

Very cool. As you can see I have been occupied with the news from Gaza, what a sad way to end 2008. God help them and bless them. Anyway won't start my rant on that topic just yet...

Is this the coolest way to browse Flickr or what?

I Came across this Flex app (flash) a few weeks ago that searches tagged flickr images that match your choice of keywords. The app is called Tag Galaxy, try it out.

So once again I am MIA on this blog for several months now. Nevertheless I have been very busy the past few months working on some very interesting projects.

Google Earth Day 2008
What have you done for Earth Day this year? I was on a team that developed a website for others to make publish what they will do for Earth Day.

Martha Stewart Store Locator
A map based store locator for MarthaStewart.com allows users to search for stores that hold Martha Stewart products. Filter stores by city, zipcode, radius, product and retailer. Very neat!

Audiograff.com
A really cool Google Maps mashup that plots the location of music events - currently in the UK mainly, but will grow to world wide events at some point. The other neat component is that the database is loaded with new events from Ticketmaster every day! Got a band? what are you waiting for?

On another note, I bought a Nikon D40 recently and started reading about photography. I am really impressed with the picture quality of the D40, I barely have to do anything and the pictures come out ' redonculously' awesome! I will put up some of the best shots soon - maybe I can tag them and get them to show up on tag galaxy! All in all, I am very happy with that purchase.

This was a pretty generous update on Random Sh!t tonight for the very few readers left out there. I'll try to be more active in the future.

Come again