Windows 7 Beta Prep

I'm getting ready for Microsoft to release the Windows 7 beta some time today! I've done a fresh backup , installed a download manager to help with the ISO file, prepared a partition on my laptop and even convinced myself to use Internet Explorer for the occasion (I'm not risking anything). I've got Google Alerts for " 'Windows 7' Beta" coming to me as-it-happens and I'm leaving Gmail open. This can't be missed! Let me know if you get Windows 7!

Bookmarking

I've recently decided to use Evernote as my bookmarking app. For the last year or so, I've Google Bookmarks; and that has worked well, but I wanted to have all my notes, clips, and bookmarks in one place, and for me, that's Evernote: I like it's powerful tagging and searching, as well as the fact that it covers all major platforms (Windows, Mac, etc.). After deciding to use Evernote for bookmarks, I had to 1) figure out how to get my current bookmarks into Evernote, and 2) what system I would use for incoming bookmarks.

After googling around a bit, I rediscovered Evernote's feature to import bookmarks from Delicious. That was great, although I didn't use Delicious (I'm not into social bookmarking). I set up a Delicious account, and easily exported my bookmarks from Google Bookmarks to an HTML file, and then into Delicious, and finally into Evernote. This whole process didn't take long at all, but it did take a while to clean up the results: for some reason, not all my tags from Google Bookmarks made it to Delicious; not sure if this was a problem in the exported file from Google or the importing limitations on Delicious. I had to re-tag and sort through all the imported bookmarks, but once that was done, the result was a clean database of bookmarks.

It wasn't so easy to figure out how to get new bookmarks into Evernote. In a lot of cases, I can use the Evernote web clipper bookmarklet ; it's great if you want to include part of the page in your note. However, if just want the bookmarks, sans extraneous text, you can't just not select any text: the bookmarklet will clip the entire page. And since the bookmarklet makes a call to an external script, it wasn't adjustable.

Then I tried to work with Evernote's ability to email notes into your database. Starting with the Gmail This! bookmarklet, I tweaked it so that it would include any selected text, plus the meta description of the page, if it had one. I set it to fill the "To:" field with my Evernote email address and here's what I ended up with (don't forget to customize it with your own address).
I was pretty happy with this, but one thing bugged me: when emailing notes, Evernote sets the source as "Emailed to Evernote." That's not as nice as the web clipper, which shows the page's URL as the source. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with a better Delicious bookmarklet . Yes, a Delicious bookmarklet: what I'm going to do (for now anyway), is bookmark with Delicious and then import them to Evernote. I just took the default Delicious bookmarklet and added a small but important feature: It will auto-fill the "Notes" field with the meta description of the page, as well as any selected text. When importing Delicious bookmarks, Evernote puts the URL of the bookmark in the source and brings your Delicious tags as well.This process creates an extra step—having to import the bookmarks from Delicious to Evernote—but it also gives you a backup copy of your bookmarks. My plan is to import to Evernote once a week or so.

So that's how I'm doing my bookmarking; what do you use? What service do you use? or do you prefer in-browser bookmarking?

It's Back!

I was pleasantly surprised when Puralator paid us a visit this morning. At five minutes to nine, I had my laptop in hand once again.

And they fixed the problem, too! According to the repair report, I've got a whole new LCD. Adjusting the brightness is working perfectly, and it's great to be able to use the max brightness even when not using the AC cord. I much prefer my own keyboard over the other keyboards around here; it beats our desktop's and Mom's laptop's for both feel and layout, in my opinion. It's good to be typing in fifth gear again!

Tech Support

Today I got a phone call from Trevor, my Dell technician. Well, he's not my personal technician, but I talked to him about two weeks ago about a problem I'm having with my laptop's display; he never got my follow-up email, and called back today to check up on my case.Whenever something like that happens (a technician calls me back), my opinion of said techie's company goes up at least a star-and-a-half. I've heard enough stories about bad support—and specifically tech support—to appreciate a technician's calling back a few weeks later to see what's going on, even if the call interrupts my highly scheduled afternoon.

Trevor and I went through procedures similar to last time: I explained what was going on; he took control of my laptop via Dell Connect; he battled freezing, crashing browsers (due to my habit of having at least 10 tabs open at once and saving the session for the next time I open the browser); I watched, half embarrassed, half entertained; he downloaded and installed a BIOS update and a QuickSet update; I told him the problem was still there . . . you get the idea.

Finally, he decided that I would have to send my Inspiron in for further investigation. Yeah, 69 minutes and 21 seconds of tech support and no conclusion. I'll get a box in the mail and have a week after I get it to send them the laptop (in the box [duh]). It's going to be tight, with conference this weekend, and then notes and recordings after, but I need to get this tech work done; I only have a month left on the computer's warranty as of today.