New (to me) and Useful: Visual Search
Many of you know that online searching frustrates me. That frustration results, in large part, from the ugliness of search results and their inability to let me describe what kind of thing I'm looking for. Pattern matching, result sorting, pish posh. I want internet finding. Enter visual search. Thanks, machine learning and digital image processing!
I've been hunting for new black shoes that I can wear with both jeans and suits for years. Years! Molly, my incredibly helpful librarian friend, introduced me to Like.com. Information Aesthetics, a fantastic blog, introduced me to Modista.
Like and Modista allow you to search for shoes, watches, sunglasses, handbags, etc. visually. On Like, you enter some search terms like "black boots" and then get to click on ones you like and see many more that are visually similar. You can filter by color, style, brand, site, all kinds of useful categories. Modista starts with a kind of item, such as "eyewear" and then shows you a variety of styles. Clicking on examples refines the search. Modista uses fancy sliders for limits on price and other continuous variables.
I found black boots at Zappos that I'm keeping; I almost love them. I'll use visual search again the next time I need shoes or accessories, and I look forward to the improvements coming to Like's apparel searches. Searching by sight is so much more fun than plowing through those boring text lists!
New and (Potentially) Useful: Cuil
Have you seen Cuil? It's another new search engine. It shows results in a grid kinda like the front page of my blog. The results skew toward social media in use, at least when I search for "libby hemphill". I got Intermedia and wiki research results. That's cool, 'cause I publish and study wikis, but my blog didn't show up on the first page of results. A search for "microsoft research" showed another new feature - categories of search results. It offered to show me "Microsoft Employees," "ACM magazines," and ".NET Progamming Languages," for example. No other search engine has been able to help me find a bar in Redmond that has the MLB package. Can Cuil find me a place to watch the Cubs? Let's see...
Cuil says, "No results were found for: mlb package bar redmond"
Bummer. Yes, I tried other keyword combinations on this and other search engines. Yes, I asked the social mailing list at Microsoft. Yes, I asked every person I could find who might care about baseball. No, I still haven't found a place to watch the Cubs.
Thanks, Natalie Hanson, for the Cuil link. She and I are on the anthrodesign Yahoo! Group mailing list. Sometimes it's good to click through signature links.
New-ish and Useful: Seafood Selector
I like a Patagonia tooth fish (a.k.a. Chilean sea bass) as much as the next girl, maybe even more, but it's time for me to be more responsible with my seafood selections. Luckily, the Environmental Defense Fund makes that ridiculously easy by providing both a PDF and a mobile-web viewable version of their Seafood Selector (get both versions here). I didn't manage to completely avoid farmed salmon when I had sushi yesterday, but I promise to do better. A story on Fresh Air last week reminded me that EDF provides these pocket guides. You can still listen to the story.
Stick to small fish that grow back easily (sardines, anyone?). You can still eat salmon as long as it's wild caught. Yum!
New (to me) and Useful: Upromise
I owe a lot of money in student loans. A lot. I'll take nearly any help I can get paying them down. Upromise to the rescue!
Because I have some loans serviced by Sallie Mae, I can transfer my Upromise account monies to my loans. I'm pretty sure it works like this:
- Open an Upromise account
- Link your credit cards to your Upromise account
- Shop at stores that contribute to Upromise accounts
- Small percentages of your purchases get put into your Upromise account
- Transfer your Upromise account money to your Sallie Mae-serviced loan
- Repeat steps 3-6
See, free and simple. You can also get your friends and family to sign up so that percentages of their purchases go to your Upromise account too. Thanks, family! Mine came out like gangbusters and signed up right away. Let me know if you have no loans and no one else to support via Upromise; I'd love to get a piece of your shopping too. 
Upromise is good for people planning to go to school too, but I don't know all the details there.
Oh, I almost forgot. Upromise partners with restaurants and bars too. That's right. 4% of what you eat out or drink can go to your savings account. Woot! Ann Arbor restaurants and bars include aut bar, Arbor Brewing Company, Leopold Bros., and Scorekeepers. There are more, but that's a start. Again, woot!
New (to me) and Useful: Tangerine
I want a MacBook Air. I don't need it, and I can't afford it, but I want it. Badly. So, I got myself some new toys for my MacBook instead. Free toys (well, toys with free trials). The first is Tangerine.
Those of you who have seen me in person lately know that I've been spending a lot of time at the gym. I walk a little funny. I sleep a lot more. My workouts have been pretty intense. I'd like them to stay that way, but first I need better soundtracks. It's tough to power through the stairmaster or some spinning torture when the beat drops to 90 beats per minute (BPM). Tangerine is a rockin' bit of software that analyzes the BPM and beat intensity of your iTunes music. Exporting that info to iTunes is as easy and clicking "File" and "Export BPM Values to iTunes" (that feature is available only after you pay the $24.95 license fee).
Tangerine's playlist generation and display options are killer. First, when you create a playlist, you select a duration, BPM, beat intensity, and pattern. The BPM and beat intensity selections use range bars with sliders, so that's easy enough. Then, you pick a pattern (these look a lot like the programs on the elliptical trainers at the Ann Arbor YMCA). I do a bunch of interval training when I work out, so I picked the pattern closest to intervals. You can also tell Tangerine not to use duplicate songs and to select songs for a playlist based on their ratings. I haven't rated many songs in iTunes, so that's not useful for me, but it's a nice add-on nonetheless.
I started downloading Tangerine at 7:55pm, and by 7:56pm, it was downloaded, installed, and analyzing songs for BPM and beat intensity. In fact, by the time I opened the Tangerine window it had already analyzed at least 50 songs. That's crazy fast. Here we are at 8:24pm, and it's already in the "S's" (2/3 of 4312 songs). I've used DeKstasy, beaTunes, and some tapping thing to get BPM data before, and none of them are near as blazing as Tangerine. I still like DeKstasy for remixing (GarageBand and I are not friends), but I'll stick with Tangerine for analyzing BPM and probably for making mixes.
I need 2 playlists per week for those non-spinning class sessions at the Y. Hopefully Tangerine delivers after such a great start.
UPDATE: As of 8:47pm, Tangerine done analyzing my whole library. My dad called, so I'm not sure when exactly it finished, but that's crazy fast.
UPDATE: Making playlists was a easy as it looked. Some of the songs had the wrong BPM, but you can fix it by clicking "Window -> BPM Calculator" (or Apple+D) and clicking the beat. Not ideal, but I've had to fix only a few songs so far.
New (to me) and Useful: Mint.com
Ah, finances. What a pain. I just started using Mint.com to keep track of mine. I tried using Quicken, but that was too complicated for me. I really hated getting my bank account balances right - why won't Quicken make it easier to start using it in the middle of a month? Who starts at $0 anyway? Enough about Quicken. Mint automatically logs in to my bank accounts (including credit cards), categorizes my spending (I adjusted about 10 transactions), and then shows me where my money goes. It also shows me how much I owe relative to how much I make, where I might be able to save money, and how I'm doing according to my budget. Rock! Check it out.
I found out about Mint on the BusinessWeek.com 101 Best Web Freebies slideshow.
New (to me) and Useful: Remember the Milk
I, like many of you, have a lot to do. Not all of it needs to be done right now, and not every item on the list is mission-critical. I often find that I have a small amount of time to work - maybe an hour or two - before something like a meeting comes up. I try to keep a To Do list up to date so that I can make the most of those short bits of time - I'll know what I need to work on and can probably find something on the list that takes the amount of time I have available. The trouble is, I haven't found a good way to keep track of that To Do list. I've tried iCal, my email Inbox, a couple of To Do widgets for Google Homepage, paper, and Jott. None of them allowed me to keep track of the relative importance and order of tasks - at least not at the granularity I'd like.
As I was reminded this weekend when Naomi was working on something I promised long ago to streamline for her, those tasks that aren't mission-critical often get lost. That same incident reminded me that leaving things to do in my Inbox wasn't all that effective; that thing is pretty crowded, so tasks get lost easily (mission-critical or not). Today's surprise reminder that iConference reviews are due was more evidence that my current task management process is just not working. So, a number of problems are happening here - I don't have one place to look for things to do when I need to maximize my efficiency, and I lose track of tasks that aren't mission-critical or that are due far in the future.
What's my solution? Today it's Remember the Milk. RTM is one of many (see this guy's blog for more) To Do list software apps out there, and I started using it yesterday. I like that it lets me assign tasks all kinds of metadata (including tags, due dates, estimated completion times) and to group tasks into various lists. I have lists for my dissertation, the KNOW SI project, other research, and personal stuff. RTM lets you email in (or Jott) new tasks, has Google Homepage and Mac widgets, and is generally a friendly application. I downloaded Google Gears too, but I haven't had to use RTM offline yet.
Hopefully Remember the Milk will help me stay productive and keep better track of those low priority (but necessary) and future tasks.