Riding the Flow

My main target was the service for good personal blogging – mainly to eliminate the need to IM all bits of personal news to all of my friends :) Therefore, some social networking feature were desired too , but they were second to blogging. So, quick search turned out several most known candidates:

Toshiba Qosmio X500 http://socialnews.toshiba.co.uk/?ReleaseID=13687 Intel® Core i7-720QM (2.8GHz, 6MB L2, 1333MHz FSB) Up to 8GB DDR3 RAM (1066MHz) Up to 1TB HDD (500GB 5400 rpm + 500GB 5400 rpm) 18.4" Full HD TruBrite® LCD screen (1920 x 1080p) 6x BD-RE optical drive (Blu-ray rewritable) nVIDIA® GeForce® GTS 250MNV (1GB) Integrated Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/Draft-N Bluetooth 2.1 3x USB 2.0 Sleep-and-Charge ports 1x USB Sleep-and-Charge/e-SATA combo port 5-in-1 card reader I would much more prefer 17-inch laptop, since 18.4 feels just tad too big – and I will have to find a new laptop backpack too. However on the upside this one looks a lot slimmer than prev-gen X200 and X300 (I have X200 now). And no alternative to Toshiba brand for me – as far as I’ve seen, only Toshiba makes high-end laptops with truly superb speakers – they on par with proper "mini-theater” dedicated sets.

Learning CSS and refreshing my HTML now – at least on the basic level to do decent job on the blog :) CSS makes HTML truly clean & separates “visual” from “data” very well. Thanks to Blogger CSS customization you can tweak formatting with ease without changes to blog posts.

Well, to my surprise I’ve found that Microsoft Word <=> Blogger integration is virtually nonexistent. There was a Blogger for Word add-on from Google, but it was discontinued ages ago. Why can not Windows Live Writer use Microsoft Office spell & grammar checker – I’ll never know (after all, Microsoft Outlook does). I guess, yet another example when they can not even share technologies within the same company. Welcome to the real world… So, since I really want Word grammar checker, I now: write a bulk of the post in Word copy & paste it in Windows Live Writer do supplementary editing publish … it sucks :) Still, searching around the Web turned out that this is really the best solution available for now...

Blogger has pretty good standalone web editor for blog posts. However, it lacks spellchecking. Also standalone editors a tad more responsive & feature-rich. It seems that Windows Live Writer is a pretty good offline editor – also quite lightweight and integrates with Blogger. Update: While I was writing this post, I’ve found that spellchecking is here, but, well, lacking. It’s only a spell checking, and not comprehensive spell-and-grammar check as found in, say, Microsoft Word. So I think my next try will be just to integrate Word ;)

Just created a blog here :) Not sure yet if I'll keep it yet though - currently in progress of investigation of several alternative solutions to try to figure out what is best for my needs. Update: looks like I am here to stay, but I think I need to sleep it over ;) If everything goes well - (more) content is coming :)