BradPace.com

I have decided to write a series of posts about my favorite technologies. These will be broken down by how often I use them (daily, weekly, monthly). These are not work related technologies just personal stuff. Here I list “some” of the coolest the technologies I use everyday (in no particular order):

• Yahoo toolbar – I love this thing. It has a quick link to my MyYahoo page, my yahoo email, and best of all my bookmarks. This is how I manage all of my bookmarks. I can access them from any computer and they are all stored on Yahoo’s servers. I will never loose a bookmarked site and I have several hundred sites bookmarked.
• Yahoo mail – I have a Gmail and Hotmail account as well but have liked Yahoo the best. I have been using this email account for 10 years. I do get a bunch of spam now but it filters about 90% right into the junk folder. It has great search features and tons of space.
• Roboform – I hate filling out forms on the web. Roboform stores all your form data and will fill out these forms with the click of a button. It also stores credit card info and makes online purchases easy (Becki would say too easy). It also allows for multiple identities like home, work, or my secret identities . This is one of the few pieces of software that I have actually purchased and I feel it is worth the $30.
• MyYahoo – This is my default home page for all my browsers. I have customized this to show local weather, sports scores, stock tickers and movie show times. I also use this as my RSS feeder. Which means that all the blogs I follow are summarized here. This saves a ton of time and makes it easy to find just the information I want to read. I have about 20 blogs that I follow on a daily basis that are listed on MyYahoo page.
• ITunes – I don’t have an ipod but I do use itunes. I have ripped all my CDs into my itunes collection and have purchased a ton of stuff from itunes. I also use this to automatically update the podcasts that I follow. This works great. I use itunes everyday to listen to music and this is my main mp3 player.
• Firefox – I have converted 100% from Internet Explorer to Firefox. This is a great product and I find that the tabbed browsing feature saves me a ton of time. I often have 10 or more web pages open at once and Firefox handles this well.
• Treo 650 – This is my cell phone / PDA. I have had it for almost a year and it has worked great. I love having everything in one device (cell phone, PDA, games, mp3 player ect). I think I will always be a one device guy.
• Alerts – This is a very general technology but worth talking about. I get daily alerts from several websites everyday or almost everyday. I am obsessed with reading job descriptions and understanding the local job markets. Not because I am looking. I just love to know what is out there and what fields are hot. Everyday I get alert emails from monster.com for job searches I have entered. I also get alerts from Ebay with new listing that I may be interested in. I have alerts setup in Google to inform me if there has been news on various subjects that I am interested in. I love “push” technologies like this that provide me with the information that I want.
• Google Search via Blingo – The Google search engine is simply the best. But I do access it via a service called Blingo. They have the same Google results but there I have a chance of winning a random prize. I have not won yet but Kris my coworker has won several times. What the heck it is worth a try. If you want to sign up go to www.blingo.com.
• Google Desktop Search – This is an app you download from Google and it provides a better way to search your hard drive. Windows search does not compare!
• Instant Messanger – I am always running several IMs at any given time. I use Yahoo Messanger and the MSN Messanger. At work we use one called Pandion that we use all the time as well. I love this technology because it saves me alot of time.
• Skype – This tool makes it easy talk with others for free over the Internet. I do use this mostly for work and talking to my web development team in India. But for a guy like me that is always at a PC it is a perfect solution. I have a headset at home and at work that I use and Skype works perfectly. It is actually better quality (usually) that a standard phone.
• TV remote – And lastly the greatest technology of all is the TV remote control. I just can not function without one of these and sadly as much as I try to cut down my TV watching I do still use the remote every day.