Looking for good deal on Laptop

I am looking for a good deal on a laptop for my sister but can’t seem to find one. A friend of mine is an expert on finding good deals and I guess I have to call him up to help me out. I am sure there would be some good website that have all the deals in one place but I can’t find it.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Data Directory

After searching online and on my computer for at least 2 hours (or more) I finally found where windows live photo gallery stores its data including metadata.

This was incredibly difficult and excruciating search and I want to document this for people like me who are pulling their hair but not giving up. Here is the magic folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\${USER}\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows Live Photo Gallery

I finally was able to purge all the unused tags (not deleting them one by one with confirmation for each).

I am half celebratory and half remorse mode. Celebratory because I finally found it (I conquered crappy conventions or total lack of them) and remorse because I lost so much time finding it.

In the event I ended up writing a feedback message to Microsoft but I have no hope of a reply or any effort to fix it.

I Discovered Windows Live Writer

I am not a big fan of Microsoft software but I have to confess the first computer I owned was an IBM Aptiva A90 running the newly released Windows 95 and the latest computer I bought an HP Pavilion m7667c came with Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Today I discovered Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG) through Flickr uploader page and while installing it I discovered Windows Live Writer using which I am writing this blog to try it out.

Not too bad but in between writing this post I am fighting with absurdities of WLPG where you cannot remove default imported folder without deleting (or moving) the actual files and there is no way to remove or refresh the meta data (tags and dates taken) even after work around the default imported files.

Today I was reminded why I hate Microsoft software so much but I am stubborn like them. They will keep on producing crap clown software and I will keep consuming, both parties are guilty in this regard.

Shozu Messed Up My Windows Mobile Phone

I have a Cingular 8525 (HTC Hermes) that among other thing I also use as my daily early morning wake up alarm. Every morning I snooze a couple of times or just dismiss the alarm before waking up.

This morning when the regular alarm rang I reached my hand for the cell phone and lo and behold the phatom of the windows mobile alarm has returned. The alarm was ringing but there was no alarm dialog box and there was no way to snooze or dismiss the alarm. What this does is wake up the kids and my wife is not happy if the alarm rings too long.

No matter what I try I can’t shut off the alarm. I finally killed the volume and put it to off (which should even turn off the vibrate) but it keeps vibrating. I can turn off the phone completely but the next time I turn it on (or reboot) it would start the alarm routine again.

This has caused me much grief earlier and I thought I fixed this by reseting phone to factory setting and upgrading windows mobile image. It turns out that was just voodoo.

The real problem I discovered this time is the Shozu windows mobile install. For those that don’t know Shozu is a mobile photo and video uploading/blogging tool in short. My device was behaving and working well (as well as windows mobile can work) until I reinstalled Shozu software yesterday.

If you think Microsoft is evil (which I felt again while retyping this enrty since the original entry on my mobile was lost due to an simple slip of my finger on the mobile internet explorer) then Shozu is an undercover side kick or something like that.

Anyway, my single piece of advice (as if anybody is listening) is do not install Shozu if you desire sanity of your windows mobile device.

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QoTD: Make a difference

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito”.
African Proverb

Mind Mapping Online Finalists

The 3 finalists and one honorable mentions are:
1. Mindomo – featureful flash based – best available
2. Bubbl.us – good for simple mindmaps – not so featureful
3. Thinkature – real slow but very creative and different
Honorable. MindMeister (Not Yet Publicly Available)

Mind Mapping Online

Mind Mapping is quite an interesting technique for brain storming. I have been planning to update my resume for while now and thought mind mapping would be a good way to do it. I started it on paper but quickly felt the geeky urge to digitize it.

I have evaluated commerical software like MindJet before but was very satisfied with the features of free open source freemind but since I am a big believer in web apps also my adventurous nature took me to quest of finding an online (no need to install available anywhere) mind mapper.

I stuck jackpot when I found the blog of a real mind mapping expert Chuck Frey. Through there I found few web based mind mapping candidates.

JumpCut – Movie Editing Online

For a long time I have been longing for a flickr for videos.

There are so many video sharing websites out there bit none of them makes it easy to upload videos (none have a bulk uploader like Flickr and all want you to fill out a form before you can upload a single video).

This weekend I am not sure how I discovered JumpCut and learned that it has already been acquired by Yahoo but I never heard of it before and nobody told me about it.

JumpCut was exactly what I have been looking for so long, some how Yahoo knows exactly what I want/like (del.icio.us, flickr and now jumcut).
JumpCut not only provides a way to upload video in bulk but also supports images and audio files to be mixed in to make a movie. It is like iMovie (for Mac OSX) but a web app.

So there are some demerits I have discovered like the flash based uploader is not as reliable or the video editor is not as smooth or that there is no option to sort by date of creation or by name but over all it is pretty solid and have options to tag and privatize your videos.

It has some good editing features but I have yet to master them and they require some effort and patience (specially on

Getting Things Done

Just got David Allen’s famous book Getting Things Done from the library today. Now I am debating with myself if this is a book I should buy so that I can annotate it while I read.