Right now I’m sitting at home and my cable internet is down. “Oh, how can that be?” You ask. I’m clearly online and posting stuff, and who the hell can do anything functional on dialup anymore?
Well my friend, Verizon BroadBand Access Connect – available either as a stand alone feature via a special card, or a a sub feature that you can add if you already have a Blackberry with them. I’m only getting about 300kbps down and 110kbps up – but that’s enough to browse stuff, read email, and even post/upload content. It’s only $15 more when you have the unlimited data service, and it sure beats any other option when there’s nothing better to use.
Next item – StarDock’s ObjectDock. If you’ve got Mac envy (and who doesn’t these days) this will let you pretend you’re something more then just another Windows poseur. Of course, doing something like this is pretty much the definition of poseur, but whatever.
Objectdock is free and it give you that little scrolling-autozoom-thingy (kind of like a quick launch, but better) that everybody’s seen included as part of OSX. When I initially ran it, I had some problems with the screen re-draw after auto-hide, but whatever combination of settings I screwed with has now fixed that. In addition to launching applications, it also shows you currently running, and you get the little “bounce” on loading and also on “alert” (like if somebody sends you another IM to a window that’s currently minimized). I recommend that you check it out.
Just becuase you don’t know how to do it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done.