I'd heard the name, but I had no idea...

Maria Callas - Ah! non credea mirarti (La Sonnambula)
As Wikipedia notes "Her dramatic life and personal tragedy have often overshadowed Callas the artist in the popular press." This 4:27 fixed that for me.
via Chris Case

Dude, get some sleep...you're here on business

In the real world, a mere five-minute walk from my cubicle, a fellow middle manager also loses his focus on his business priorities and seeks temporary escape from the rigors of the corporate grind via non-work-related internet surfing on his laptop. In the virtual word, we both end up at the same place - this site, although we come at it from slightly different angles...

8apps

I am trying the 8apps set of lightweight online tools. Handshake is the SNS and is billed as

... the place to meet your next friend, programmer, project manager, accountant, interface designer and more. By adding someone as a contact here, you can collaborate online in 8apps. Handshake is social networking with purpose.

Radar (aka spider) charts are popular in Japan, and it is interesting to see how they are being used here.

This could hit a little closer to home than I would wish. If I disappear suddenly from Handshake, you'll know a lightweight SNS does not necessarily need to be anodyne.

scrybe

Just as I was contemplating bringing a major bout of procrastination to an end, Scrbye lets me in.

notes


calendar


sends me an email reminder


can it sync w google calendar?
google calendar offers an address for ical; so far, so good


looks like scrybe needs a file from my disk

I downloaded the ical for Japanese holidays from google calendar then uploaded it to scrybe; it worked (kanji didn't render; double byte, but that's another story); but for things other than a series of dates, it seems like a lot of effort compared to pen and paper

but, it's only a matter of time



all in all, it's very smooth; I've got it on two machines now; eventually it will be able to sync w google calendar (via a url) and then allow editing of calendar while not connected to internet, for re-syncing upon reconnection. More or less have that now with abiword and google docs.

I bought a domain via google the other day. Seems like combining individual scrybe accounts w each of the (200 x 2g) mailboxes in the set of google apps for a domain would allow a reasonable biz setup for $10 p.a. Is that $0.05 per user per year? There must be a catch.