Tuesday, December 30, 2008

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...