How I Work

I’m a big fan of Lifehacker. They run a series called How I Work. Figured it was neat enough to do myself.

Here are the programs I use on a daily basis:

Firefox – Been using it ever since it was called Mozilla and was a raucous, huge beast of a program that also included an email client and a newsgroup reader (I think). Anyway, Firefox is Where It’s At, and yes I have seen IE7. And what a sad little program that is.

Gmail – I live and die via my email. While I use Microsoft Outlook for work email, for personal email it’s the Great Goog for me.

And I now present my favorite quote from my Doubting Thomas friend, Jeremy, who tried to convince me not to use Gmail: “When would I ever want to host my personal email with a search engine company?”

When it’s the best, that’s when.

Winamp – It plays my music. Need I say more?

Crimson Editor – My text editor of choice. I love the tabs, I love the syntax coloring, and yes, it does have the kitchen sink included somewhere in those elaborate menus. I prefer to do most of my writing in plain text with no Microsoft Word frills. This is where that happens.

Newzbin – The utility I use to find stuff on Usenet (the newsgroups)

Newsbin Pro – The program I use to read the .nzb files I get from Newzbin and download the files from said newsies.

Filemaker – The ‘Access-like’ database program that my employer uses. Neat, if not a little ugly.

Microsoft Office – And all of its various proggies. Obv.

Remote Desktop Connection – How I talk to my servers.

Google Talk – My preferred IM. Just ask Jeremy about my decision to drop Trillian for this much more elegant, simple solution.

Blogjet – My blogging program. What I’m typing this in right now.

Vuescan – My awesome scanning tool. Best scanning tool I’ve ever used. Well worth the cash.

Onfolio – The best blog reader ever. Period. Thanks for stopping by.

Fireworks – My preferred imaging tool. Photoshop is just too much for my needs. This space used to be occupied by Paint Shop Pro, until it decided it wanted to be Photoshop and began sucking.

CuteFTP – For all of my FTP needs, it gets no better than this. WS_FTP is close, but second place is still first loser.

Nero – What I use to burn CDs.

CD-DA Extractor – The tool I use to rip my CDs into mp3s. It also burns CDs, but this is hit-and-miss compared to the mighty Nero.

PuTTY – My telnet/SSH client of choice. Great, simple, free.

And that’s about it for the programs I use and abuse on a daily basis. If you have any cool programs I may be missing out on, feel free to chime in.

Strapped down to my bed, feet cold, eyes red
I'm out my head, am I alive? Am I dead?