A Life Less Ordinary

Contemplating my switch to Windowns Phone

By Helen

I've been using Apple products since 2005. When I started at Meridian Pacific in 2005, the company used Apple computers so I got my first iBook. Two years later I was upgraded to a MacBook Pro (which I still use today). The company also gave us iPod Nanos for a holiday gift so I had that device until I lost it in an airplane. I then bought a full on iPod, which I recently sold to a classmate of mine. Eventually the company bought me the 3G iPhone which had been on the market for a couple of months. When I was training for the half marathon, I bought the Shuffle as well. In fall 2010, I upgraded to the iPhone 4 – which is really only the second Apple device I have ever purchased.

 

 

So now I am contemplating a Windows 7 phone. In all truthfulness, I'm not contemplating, I am actually going to get the phone, but I am mentally preparing for the switch.

Here is my thinking on the switch with a scale of 1-10 (1 being terrible, 10 being excellent):

Criteria	iPhone	Windows Phone
Works well as a phone	3 – drops calls, not a great phone device per se	7 – hearsay, but people seem pretty happy with the phone functionality
Games	10 – I plan Words with Friends, Boggle, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, Drop 7, Angry Birds, Tetris, Skeeball	5 – Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, integration with xBox Live, Angry Birds are coming – so it's definitely getting better
Social media integration	1 - There is no integration, every app is separate	10
Cool factor	10	2
Utility Apps	10 – One Bus Away, NYT, Amazon, Shazaam, Bump, OneNote, Kindle App	7- but getting better; there are some missing ones like OpenTable

      

It is unfortunate that it is hard for me to think of things the Windows phone has that the iPhone doesn't have. Good Office integration is definitely one as is a good Netflix app, but other than that, it is comparable. I also don't like the idea of sticking with the same technology and getting stale with it. At the end of the day, the new iPhone is only slightly better than the previous version and it may very well be time to try something new.     

Rethinking RSS Feeds

by Helen

I love the RSS concept.  I truly do.  However, living in the world of having too much information, going through my RSS feeds seems like a chore that is detracting from my happiness.  If I let my RSS feeds go for 2-3 days, I am easily at over 1000.  And yes, I have gone through them and deleted the ones I don't read. 

I have also consulting with @cgolis and we discussed how it is critical to always at least skim through the headlines and never hit "read all."  I have been doing that.  And forwarding interesting articles on to people I think would enjoy it. 

But here I am, Monday morning, and I feel daunted by the fact that I didn't read the news over the weekend and therefore I have the 1000+ number on feeds unread...And here is the other thing, the number of articles I read at least partially has significantly decreased since I've had the RSS feed system. I at best glance through headlines, sometimes bookmark stuff to read later.  And no, I cannot cut down my RRSS subscriptions.

So I am thinking of abandoning the system all together and just keeping RSS feeds for friends blogs and pictures - the ones that people don't update that much.  The serious quandry though is what to do with my cooking blogs - I think I will just cut it down to top 5-7 or so and get rid of all the ones that update way too often, NYT and Serious Eats.  And instead of all the blogs I feel daunted by now, I think I will rotate through 5 news sites a day (NYT, TechCrunch, Mashable, and Seattle Weekly or CHS Capitol Hill).

Has anyone come up with a good way to do this?

Email Lesson

By Helen

For reasons that are too long to explain, I have decided to consolidate my personal and my school email into Gmail. In this process, I now forward all my school mail that used to live in a desktop app to Gmail. This process I thought went pretty well, except somehow it deleted all of my mail before the forward date. A year or two ago I think this would have been devastating, but since my company had a 30 day email policy and my boss in Seattle was not super attached to mail, I grew detached as well. So not only did I only lose 30 days of mail or so, I also don't really feel a great sense of loss or devastation from it. Having said that, I am trying to track down some emails that had attachments that I need, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not so bad.

Going back to school in a technology era

So this going back to school thing is setting in and I have to say that the sheer amount of tools there are out there for students is quite overwhelming. 

I was happy to find that I will no longer have to aimlessly wonder around the UW campus in search of a building because there is now an iPhone application that includes a searchable map, student directory, list of classes and other stuff.  Though personally, the map is probably what I would use the most. 

Then my friend Marco tipped me off to this great list from Mashable.com of top 15 web applications for students that includes Zotero, Evernote and other useful apps. Click here for the link.   

Here are some other ones that could be useful that I found through various comments and other links: 

Doodle - Great for scheduling meetings

http://mathway.com/ - Helps you solve math problems 

http://mind42.com/ - Collaboration tool

http://tadalist.com/ - Another one of many to-do list applications that you can share and RSS feed to but is free. 

http://Creately.com/ - Online diagramming and design application  

All of the sudden I feel like an old person saying "in my days, professors didn't hold office hours via chat rooms..." but I will do my best to adapt to the new way of learning and try to incorporate online tools to it. 

In other news, I am very excited about having a Lexus Nexus subscription again!