The story continues ..... but over here.

I'm currently reading Inspector Rebus novel 'Resurrection Men'.  I notice he uses the term high heid yins

This is a great phrase but very Scottish.  I was trying to think of an equivalent phrase that would be used in Canada but I couldn't.  My parents never used this phrase whilst I was growing up, they never said "Those high heid yins in Ottawa..."

High heid yins is defined as 'upper management' by The Scottish Vernacular dictionary.

Here is high heid yins used in context

"The experts are not the 'high heid yins' - the experts are the 'Teachers on the ground and in the classrooms'. They are the ones whose opinions should be sought in the debate about standards of education."

In 2006, I tried out more new applications and web 2.x services than I had in a while.  Recently I've had to get a new computer set up and I've noticed what are my can't live without applications:

FireFox - I cannot live without this Browser.  To go back to *non*-tabbed browsing is like going back to dial-up.  Also, I realize now that IE starts a new browser instance almost everytime you click on a link.  Firefox re-loads the active browser tab.  That has its advantages and disadvantages but over all its better than having 11 IE windows open.

Thunderbird Feedreader - I haven't found a better tool to read RSS feeds than Thunderbird.  I like that I can have a huge list of feeds in the left pane and scroll through them.  I also like that I can select a headline and read the article within Thunderbird.  I'm trying to get into Google Feed reader but I haven't really got into it yet.  Add feeds to my Google Homepage forces me to visit the web page if I want to read the full feed.

What's RSS you ask?  Really Simple Syndication.  Its the only way to monitor newspapers, industry journals, blogs etc.  I don't know what I did before RSS.

Apps I've stopped using

Riya.com - I tried it and it was interesting but here is another web 2.0 applications that the creators seemed to loose interest in.  It took me a while to get a hold of anyone in Support to delete my account.  In my mind Riya is a cautionary tale for Web 2.0.  There was much hype around this application from TechCrunch and others.  It really hasn't gone anywhere except into a new tool called Like.com that also doesn't seem to be overly developed.

Flickr - I wanted to try this to upload my Prague photos but its not that easy to upload a huge number of pictures for a trip.  This was a surprise for me.  Flickr is definitely meant for the take 2 or 3 pictures a day people.  I'm not like this (yet).