Windows Media Player in Windows XP puts you just three simple steps away from creating your own digital jukebox.
Profusion Delivers
A few of my regular web stops don’t publish newsletters, push feeds, or acknowledge my existence whatsoever, so I have Profusion send me an e-mail when these pages are updated. I get an html page in my inbox with any changes highlighted for me. I have an Alert Me! button on my toolbar between Blog Me! and… er… Define Me!. How much would you pay for all this convenience? How’s nada?
Outing a Mailwasher
In commenting on a New York Times article on the subject, Steve Outing (at Poynter) speaks promisingly of a “new” spam-fighting trend of filtering in good content and trashing the rest (as opposed to the traditional scan-for-bad appoach). You know, I’ve been doing this with Mailwasher for nearly a year now. Set up a filter to delete everything. Scan the list (while it’s still on the server!) and drag the good stuff to your friends list. Then download. The process takes a minute and works flawlessly.
Powersearching
From the folks at Powerreporting.com comes this comprehensive tutorial on search techniques. Without getting over-technical, this tutorial gives just the right amount of detail to help you find what you need from search engines (even Alta Vista!). Did you know, for instance that by typing “link:www.yoursite.com” you can see a list of sites out there that link to yours? Good stuff here.
Rightclick-mp3
…makes it easier to encode or decode your wav’s and mp3′s. All you have to do is browse to your file like normal through My Computer or Windows Explorer. Then, just right click the file and choose the appropriate function. Download for free.
Icon Factory
Add pizzaaz to your desktop. There are lots of utilities at this site to create or modify your own icons if you’d like to innovate.
Lit and Woe
John Kilgore of Eastern Illinois University writes in The Vocabula Review (subscription required) of the aversion many students have of sitting in a classroom reviewing works of poetry, and the equally potent aversion teachers have to presiding over same. One salient point:
English poetry reports in from every point of the compass and from eight different centuries, and it is simply to be expected that any given reader will have trouble making basic sense of much of it. Johnny performs dismally as a reader of sonnets, but how would Shakespeare fare with a rap CD or a Nintendo game?
Now for those of you who wish to place the Bard on a higher plane than Busta Rhymes and Sonic the Hedgehog, that is your right (and admittedly my first inclination as well). But on reflection, which truly helps us make sense of this world? Indeed I’m a product of this day. Perhaps my literature background gives me an expanded view of the world. Were it in math, perhaps I’d see equations everywhere…
