20 July 2008
By Daniel
In Internet
I use OpenDNS for DNS resolution (the way domain names match up to websites) on my home and office networks. My favorite feature is their URL Shortcuts. I have a bunch of them set up to quickly search various sites I use often:
| Keyword |
Website |
| g |
Google Search |
| gi |
Google Image Search |
| gm |
Google Maps |
| wiki |
Wikipedia |
| imdb |
Internet Movie Database |
| dict |
Dictionary.com |
| esv |
ESV Bible |
| gl |
Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” Search |
| cache |
Google Cache (just found this one here!) |
The idea is that you can type something like ‘esv gal 5 1‘ or ‘wiki cumberland valley‘ and be taken to the appropriate page, bypassing several pages you’d normally have to navigate through, like search results.
I was having trouble today with the next-to-last one on that list: the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. But it looks like they fixed it while I was writing this post. Unless I clicked the actual “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on their front page, Google was just taking me to a search results page, even if I pasted in the google.com url I was redirected to for a split second.
I save a lot of time using these shortcuts. If you don’t use them already, why don’t you start now?
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dns, Internet, opendns, productivity
19 July 2008
By Daniel
In Humor, Life and Mac
Rands In Repose posts a list of peoples’ personal quirks that he gathered via Twitter. I share a bunch of them, but I’ve got a whole pile of unique ones, too:
- I always make sure the paper coffee cup’s seam (and sleeve fold if there is one) is directly below the sipping hole so I can drink it without looking. This produces a helpless feeling if the cup is made without a seam.
- I always wet my toothbrush
before after applying toothpaste. Sometimes that makes the toothpaste fall off.
- When I was a kid, I kept track of how many clockwise and counter-clockwise rotations accumulated while moving around in a room, and always made sure to unwind them by spinning that number of times in the proper direction when leaving. Or, I tried NOT to accumulate any rotations.
- I can’t step on sidewalk cracks. If I do, I have to step on another one, with the opposite foot.
- When I didn’t have a rotary volume dial on my car radio, I always made sure to press the volume up and down buttons in multiples of five. Now I just make sure the digital marker is perfectly centered between digital ticks on the display.
- It bugs me if my Mac’s application windows aren’t all tiled or lined up, with no overlaps and no spaces (or a 1 pixel space, but it depends).
- I always use my turn signal, even when I’m pulling into a parking space or the driveway off our shared driveway. My reasoning is that if I neglect it even once, it could destroy my habit forever and I won’t be able to rely on it. Only slightly tongue-in-cheek.
I think there may be others that I’ve grown out of, or can’t think of right now. Outside observers may know of more.
Update: Today Jennifer caught me using my turn signal in the Wendy’s drive-thru. Yes, I was just following the the drive-thru around the building.
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ocd, personality, quirks
