WebOS

One of the things I’ve been fiddling with over the past few months is seeing how many of my computing needs I can offload onto some free or cheap web app that I can access from home or work, on whatever operating system is handy (provided it’s got a modern browser). The ones I’ve been using a lot are:

gMail

Google’s free email service, which I have thoroughly adapted to.

del.icio.us

A social bookmark manager. I’ve stopped using my local bookmarks file for anything but bookmarklets and the stuff I use every damn day. And the ability to subscribe to other users’ bookmarks is a great source of new links.

LiveJournal

Yeah, this counts.

Another I just subscribed to today, but haven’t found a use for yet:

Backpack

A personal information management site. For free, you can get your own little wiki-like site as many as five pages with specialized features for to-do lists and reminders. Lots of cool integration — you can have your reminders sent to you by email or SMS to your phone, or exported to an iCalendar, and each page gets a unique email address you can use to add stuff to it, or even (for paid users) email it files and images. And you can share pages with other Backpack users. The site just went live today, and the servers were really getting hammered for most of the afternoon. They seem to have gotten the problem straightened out by the evening, so you might as well sign up for a free account while there’s still a chance of getting your preferred user name.

A few more I’m not using:

Basecamp

From 37Signals, the same people who made Backpack, this is a project manager aimed at businesses. You can get a free account that lets you manage one project.

Ta-da List

Yet another 37Signals project. A free to-do list manager.

Jotspot

A wiki with simple integrated applications. I think. They don’t let you see the advanced tour till you join, and you’ve got to apply as a beta tester to join. When it goes live it’ll cost $5/user/month, so I’m giving it a miss.

flickr

Probably the most popular web app I’m not using. I’m just not into photo-sharing, and I’m turned off by having to pay for more than whatever the limit is on most recent number of pictures accessible.

Purple sage

I’m halfway through Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, which was recommended as a good inspirational source for Dogs in the Vineyard. And it is, even though the Mormons in the book are the bad guys. There’s a strong faithful-versus-the-unfaithful plotline, with a Mormon Elder organizing his community to interfere with a powerful businesswoman who’s being too friendly with the Gentiles. There’s lots of useful period and location color — I’d never thought about how visible people would be against the sky when standing on a ridge.

And the opening chapter reads almost like a series of just-talking conflicts, with stakes clearly defined and the hero bringing his gun dice in at the end of the last one without actually escalating. I’m going to disappoint drcpunk here by not actually marking up the damn chapter with game mechanics, mostly because it would be tedious, but also because I can’t resolve whether it’s got three conflicts with the second and third being over the same stakes (a no-no), or just two conflicts with a new PC joining in the middle of the second (also a no-no). Here, go read it for yourself.

I’ve read that Riders was phenomenally popular in its time. It was published in 1912, which means that most of the old pulp SF writers probably read it growing up. When I read the first of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books I realized that this was the prose style that Gary Gygax had been trying to imitate, and sadly failing. With Riders I see the style that those old pulp writers were trying to imitate, and sadly succeeding. There are enough puzzles set up that I actually want to see how the story comes out, but if I have to read much more about the damn three-year-old girl who says things like “Has oo a little dirl?” I may just give up.