In my search for some kind of memory-enhancing, panacean note-keeping application, I’ve had to confront again what is becoming an increasingly common conundrum: do I want a solution that lives on the desktop or on the network?

Despite the significant leaps forward seen in online applications in recent years — Google Docs and the 37signals suite of apps, to name just a few — I still find most of this stuff slower, less efficient and less integrated with the way I prefer to maintain my own personal information ‘cloud’ than desktop software.

Given the choice, I’ll almost always opt for the native speed of an application written in Cocoa, the ability to call it up with suddenness and satisfaction via Quicksilver or from the Mac OS X Dock, and seamless, peer-level cohabitation with the data stored inside my Mac OS X Address Book, iCal other local data resources.

NPR: Nina Simone’s 1968 Tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr

Mon 7 Apr 200803:39 PM

Ratings

4 of 5 stars

What’s this?

Three days after King was assassinated, Nina Simone and her band performed “Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” a beautiful tribute written by their bass player Gene Taylor.

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Chris Andersen: Of Fly Eyes and Newspaper Revenues

Sun 6 Apr 200807:55 PM

Ratings

3 of 5 stars

What’s this?

“If you’d ask me to describe the state of the newspaper industry based on the scary coverage about it alone, I would have guessed that it had fallen by half and that we were back to 1970s levels. Instead, it’s a US$45 billion business, which is twice as big as Google and Yahoo combined.”

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Johnny Mnemonic

Fri 4 Apr 200812:22 AM

Scary realization: more and more often, I’m finding I have no useful recollection of the details of conversations I’ve had in the recent past. You might have sat with me in a meeting last week, say, and we may have come to perfectly lucid agreements on what steps we’d take next to advance whatever project was at hand. But lately the chances are increasingly good that when you ask me about them next, those action items will have escaped me. I’ll probably recall that we spent some time in a meeting together, sure. And maybe even that we had arrived at some mutual understanding, too. But little else.

This is really inconvenient, not to mention frustrating. At first I thought this condition was a symptom of the sheer number of projects I deal with each day (lots), but more and more I worry it’s just a function of getting along in my years. Office life is making me old.