We had a great trip. We are going to start up a blog with our travel log. Stay tuned to this channel for details.

For now, we have posted pictures from the first stop: Rome.

Update! We have Florence pictures up too.

I’ve also begun geocoding our pictures, so there is a Flickr map.

Becky and I are putting the finishing touches on our suitcases. We’re ready. It has been seven years since we took a real two-week vacation.

We are starting in Rome. We see the Vatican our first day there. Then we are spending a week in an apartment in Florence, doing day trips into the Tuscan countryside. We finish up in Venice, Vicenza and Padua.

We will post pictures when we return! See you all in October.

I use del.icio.us to archive the things I’ve read for later retrieval or for sharing. I use it to help manage to torrent of information coming across my desk (or phone) through email and RSS. It acts like a sort of supplementary memory so can I focus on other things. And on the whole, I have been pretty happy with del.icio.us. It’s always been slow and its interface has always been poor. But it had a number of advanced and rewarding features that made it the only viable option for social bookmarking (more on this later). I tried a handful of other products over the last few years and I wasn’t impressed with any of them – certainly not impressed enough to go through the hassle of moving services. Until now.

I tried Ma.gnolia at least a year ago. Nobody was on it. It was basically a pretty del.icio.us without any substantive new features or interaction improvements over its competitor. It was not something I would switch to. At the time Del.icio.us was still the ugly king of bookmarking. Well, things have changed a bit in the intervening months and my assessment has changed along with them. Ma.gnolia is pretty cool after all and I have made the switch. Continue reading »

It took me a couple tries to get this, but it is really straight-forward. The trick is to drag the del.icio.us bookmarklet into the Safari toolbar on your computer; and then sync it with your phone. ITunes will place the bookmarklet on your phone’s browser. To invoke it, simply select that bookmark while viewing a page and it opens the usual del.icio.us post form. Now, the cool type-ahead javascript doesn’t work but otherwise, you’re in business.

Typing is not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. My Verizon phone took a nasty plunge onto the metro tracks – a sure sign it was time for a new phone. It was an accident, I swear!

Issues so far:
no flash plug-in
safari crashes constantly
no way to scroll in form elements