Great quote - Professional jobs

Making partner in a law firm is like winning a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie.
-Old saying quoted in Curtis Sittenfeld's excellent "American Wife"

One could say the same about academics, and I imagine many/most professional jobs.

Making Home and End Keys work on the Mac as they do in Windows

I've made the switch to a map desktop. This handy tip allows you to have
the keyboard use the home and end keys as they work in Windows.

http://lifehacker.com/software/keyboard/mac-switchers-tip--remap-the-home-and-end-keys-225873.php

iTunes Genius

The new Genius playlist feature in iTunes is brilliant. Click on a key song and it will generate a playlist. I've tried this a few times and it's worked amazingly - Adele's "Chasing Pavements" generated not just a Kate Bush song, but the perfect Kate Bush song ("This Woman's Work.") It went like this for everything I've tried. With a large iTunes collection, it's like a better Pandora, or even more like the most perfectly selected satellite radio station. To me, this is the most revolutionary digital music innovation since iTunes/iPod iteself.

Here's an example for Bettie Serveert's "Tomboy"

Reply to all in Gmail

I use reply to all for an enormous amount of collaborative work email. The "reply" link

at the top of Gmail messages makes it too easy to just reply to the sender.

Great keyboard shortcut: Hit A while reading a message and Gmail opens a reply to all.

Hit Control-A and it opens a new window with the response to all.

Now if I can just make that an automatic response.

When will you run out of gmail space?

I've switched completely to Gmail and have been digging it.
Instead of over quota warnings from my university, there is
plenty of room.

I discovered a cool calculator to determine when, given Gmail's
ever increasing space allocation and your current usage, you'd
ever run out of space.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/08/when-will-you-run-out-of-gmail-storage_01.html

The answer for me: "never."

Sweet.

Drag and Drop Attachments in Gmail

I've switched to gmail as my main work email. One drawback was

the cumbersome method of attaching files via the browse button.

Solution: There's a Firefox add-in that allows you to drag and drop attachments

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2190

Safari (at least on the Mac) already had this capability

Great Quote

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho