Friday Five

Wow. What a couple of months this has been. Since moving back to San Diego, I have been in town for a collective 7 full days (12a-12a), 5 of those being Saturdays where I left the following day. I've flown around 22,000 miles in that time.

As a trainer, I tend to measure the passing of time on a class-by-class basis; time passes in 5-day blocks. So my life for the past couple of months had the following pattern:

Home on Saturday
Travel out on Sunday
Teach a class for 5 days
*rinse and repeat as needed*

(Of course, that will be the pattern for most of 2008, but that's a story for another posting.) All-in-all, though, it's been a good experience. This was the last trip for the year, except of course our annual trip to Vegas for New Year's Eve.

Earlier this week, a good friend of mine, and regular commenter on this blog, mentioned Pandora in a Facebook note. So it got me to thinking of sites that not everyone uses or knows of but should.

1. Pandora - This is a site based on the "Music Genome Project", which tries to tie different songs together based on their characteristics. The way the site works is you type in a song you like, and it will go off and find other music similar to that song. Great way to set up background music. Listening to it right now as a matter of fact.
2. Google Reader - Google makes a ton of great products, but this is one of their lesser known ones. Google Reader allows you to "subscribe" to blogs and easily read through them. There's a good number of blogs that I follow but I don't read every article. Google Reader makes it very easy to scan through a blog, read the articles you want, and have the rest automatically mark themselves as read.
3. Wikipedia - It has come to my attention that not everyone uses Wikipedia. I don't understand how people exist without it. I've always found Wikipedia to be reliable on the whole. You'll be amazed how you'll find yourself reading articles on almost anything - like what a sesame plant is.
4. Facebook - I didn't want to get hooked up on one of these personal sites. I really didn't. But what's nice about Facebook is unlike certain other competitors *ahem*MySpace*ahem*, Facebook looks good and isn't crawling with 20-somethings just looking for a fling.
5. Meebo - I have had occasion where I did not have direct access through a normal chat client. Meebo allows you to chat on any service through a web-based client. Very slick.