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I was sceptical at first… really sceptical. Mostly because the hype about it didn’t serve this app very well. Mostly that hype sounded like a promise to let you use web pages offline. Yeah, in an age where we got fast Internet access at work and at home, an offer like that doesn’t raise as much as a big whoop from anybody.

Then, in spite of not being so impressed, I got to trying it out just a month ago because I heard good things about Twhirl and that just happened to use Adobe AIR. So from installing Twhirl I could see for myself that AIR is more than offline web pages. It’s really a platform for making web applications outside of your browser. And that’s not bad at all. Like the great urban philosophers told us: don’t believe the hype.

Given the hard times ahead for the tech industry, we’re going to see a lot of unemployed web developers in the near future. I expect some of them will direct their attention to Adobe AIR in their spare time

Now I’m on to my second AIR app: RTM Notifier (yeah, I’m so into web 2.0, I’m really Web 2.9—practically Web 3.0, but that’s another story altogether).

These days you can’t have too many gadgets on your desktop anyway, so pick the ones you’re going to like to use. The dedicated-purpose gadgets like Twhirl come with a fairly light footprint and because they know they’re small, they don’t bloat their scene with pointless extra features. They just do what they meant to do and little else. If only we could get the same out of our paid-for software.

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Ok, there’s been a hullabaloo of commentary about Steve Ballmer musing about Webkit, as recycled in Techcrunch last week: Microsoft Probably Not Really Considering WebKit For IE

But really, it’s not such an absurd idea. When you look at the two leaders for web browsing, IE and Firefox, it’s becomes pretty clear that a viable path for the web browser is a container… All Firefox is is a nice frame around Gecko… A frame that is extensible through their hundreds and hundreds of add-ons.

…So why couldn’t Microsoft Internet Explorer do the same? No reason, they just don’t right now. But in the future, IE could easily just be a container that wraps around MSHTML, WebKit or Gecko. If anyone could do it, it might as well be Microsoft since by sheer numbers they’ve got enough developers to come up with a  enough wrapper that actually co-operates with all three engines.

Really it’s not such a stretch. If you’re a Firefox user, do a quick survey of your add-ons. How many of them alter the chrome around the web page and how many of them alter the web page itself—and Greasemonkey scripts only count as ONE add-on. That’s right, a lot of them only interact with the edges around your web page so they have nothing to do with the rendering engine itself.

So we’re nearing a point where we can imagine configuring your web-browsing experience as: a) which rendering engine do you want; and b) which web browser frame do you want.

Of course, even if all the web browsers were 100% standards compliant in the exact same way then this still matters, each frame around your web browsing experience would be significant as it is the container for your extensions and add-ons as well and the quality of your frame would be a deciding factor between IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

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I only spent about one year doing freelance/"IT Guy" work from home. Two years ago this week I gave up on that to go back to full-time office work. The challenges are bigger and the regular paycheck is a real comfort.

But I miss working from home. I really, really do.

I'm only thinking of this because I've been doing a little extra work just this afternoon. I got a hot cup of coffee, comfy track pants and some decent tech podcasts for a mild distraction and this is pretty damn nice. It's cold outside, I don't have to worry about freezing my butt waiting for a train and when I need a break I can walk 20 feet to my left and flake on the couch. It's really not bad.

The only trouble with being-your-own-boss is it doesn't pay as regularly as having some other guy be the boss instead. That is a little bit of a worry, and the extra work to make sure you get paid is a hassle. On the other hand, it's pretty dame cool to open the mailbox and find a nice big paycheck inside. I didn't earn nearly the same kind of money I do now but I wasn't hurting either. I drove so little I wondered why I was paying car insurance!

Yeah, that was pretty good. For now, it's good enough to know I could go back to it sometime.

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I bought the cheapie home edition of Office 2007 last spring and with it the option to load up OneNote. I figured it was worth a look.

Frankly, I did what probably everybody else did when they opened OneNote… I yawned. Nothing special to see there. I closed it and forgot all about it for months.

Then a couple days ago I was sifting through a really long blog posting about programming and found a piece of it that I wanted to remember. The blog being so long though meant if I was going to post is to delicious.com would mean I'd probably lose track of what peice I wanted to re-read later.

Then I noticed the little "N" in my system tray and the light-bulb went on…. I copied the text of the piece I wanted to reference, double clicked on the "N" and pasted in my clipping. Even better, I included a hyperlinked footnote to the original blog-- and I clipped it from a Firefox window so I was duly impressed by this. That is, I get to keep my little nugget of info AND track where it came from. Sweet.

So now I get it. OneNote is better than a complicated version of Word. I've got a handy little tool for gathering small pieces of info into one place. I recall it said something like that on the box-- shame they can't really show you how handy it is on the back of the box.

It's early days yet, this may only be a little fad for me. But I'll keep trying. Now I'm already wondering if I can get his installed at work and organize clippings of useful code in the same way. If OneNote could actually do code colourization I'd really be impressed… I'll leave that for another day, but soon.

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Between this morning and tonight I have gained FOUR POUNDS, or so says my bathroom scale. My esteemed readers, I assure you that I have not consumed four pounds of anything, in whole nor in sum total, the past fourteen hours.

I submit to you that this shocking gain in mass can only be attributed to the one thing today I have consumed copious amounts of… Ladies and gentlemen: air is fattening.

That’s right. The very air you breathe is turning contributing to the cellulite pockets on your thighs, taking a firm grip from on love handles to curl up by your pot-belly.

Don’t despair we can fight this: for starters, try moderating your consumption of air. Consider taking up non-air-fattening activities such as scuba diving, or cigar smoking.

Most importantly, to be fore-warned is to be fore-armed! Tell all your friends and together we will win the battle over air-fatness!

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