43 Folders

Still up... banging away on my work laptop... so late now the thing is trying to phone home for whatever middle-of-the-night updates/eavesdropping data exchange it normally does, I suppose. Frigging thing keeps chiming in with a dialog box, complaining that it can't find it's desired network path...

Reading this note about Google Desktop from Merlin Mann on 43Folders.com does my heart good. It's so nice to read a tech pundit who can use the English Language-- has fun with it, even.


I can remember, during a seminar in graduate school--back in the bad old dial-up days of the mid-90's-- William O'Rourke lamenting the affect he perceived email to be having on the average American's already insufficient proofreading habits: "It's all too easy to just hit Send," he said.

And sadly, with the advent of text messaging, and all the ascii short-hand that all the kids seem to be doing these days [insert basic example here]-- and my own sad examples of often downright poor usage here in this space, I fear curmudgeonly O'Rourke was right.

So while I think my friend, Dr. Funkhole, could give him a run for his money, all the same, it's a refreshing read, whenever I get the chance.

Also-- the more I read from Merlin about Quicksilver, the more I think I may need to look into it.
The thing to do the last couple of days-- following Merlin and John Gruber's example-- has been to install the new Google Desktop for Mac OS X.
I've always thought, much as I like Google's other offerings, that Google Desktop didn't present itself as anything much better than what I already get with Spotlight on my Mac. Of course, on a Windows machine (like this work laptop-- which is STILL trying to phone home, BTW), a better, more intuitive local search utility is MOST desired. But on my Mac? Thanks, but I think I've already got that.
And the reviews so far from both these guys seem to bear that out.
In fact, Gruber's latest note is more severe:

I don't think I could cover all the bets that would be placed on "Uninstalls Google Desktop before it finishes indexing"

But as I said, Merlin's thing is QuickSilver-- and as he says in his note-- if you think you've got everything you need in Spotlight, you haven't been exposed enough to QS.
So put it on the list of things to consider...
after wiping the drive and a cleain reinstall..
which will come after I buy a new, 320+ gig external hard drive so I can store at least one complete image of the hard drive...
which will probably come sometime after Leopard is release...
which may not happen until after the June WWDC... hmmm....