pick of the week

books / cancer / friends / pick of the week — 1 Comment
22
Dec 09

“The Wolf at My Door” – Doug Gosling

And now on a more serious note…

On Sunday afternoon i went to the book launch party for “The Wolf At My Door”, something that my friend Doug Gosling has had in the works for a few years now.

The Wolf At My DoorDoug was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2002 at the age of only 49. The average age of diagnosis is 65. A few months after diagnosis he had a radical prostatectomy to remove the prostate, but 5 years later the cancer returned. Doug continues to fight what is now advanced metastatic cancer.

There are many books that prepare you to deal with the physical side of cancer, but not many that help you deal with the emotional side. This book describes nearly everything Doug went through emotionally & physically, in a very frank, honest & occasionally humorous way. It’s not just for those who have cancer, it’s for the loved ones of those who have cancer as well since cancer is as much an emotional disease as it is a physical one. Sidebar: My father was diagnosed with both prostate and thyroid cancer in 2007 so i have first hand experience with what it feels like to go through that (he was promptly treated and is currently in remission). I am about halfway through Doug’s book and while as a man who now has a family history of this horrible disease it can be hard to read at times, it does oddly bring some comfort to get such a blunt recount of what Doug has been through.

Doug saying a few words at the book launch

Doug saying a few words at the book launch


Doug also is the man behind the blog talkingaboutcancer.com, where he and other cancer survivors, friends & family share tips & experiences with both patients and their caregivers and can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

Pre-order the book at Amazon today US store / CA store.

apple / cool / pick of the week / recommendations / software / tech / travel — No Comments
11
Apr 08

Pick of the week: tripit.com

So let’s say your planning a family vacation. You’ve booked your rental car, your flights, your hotel and a bunch of activities. If you’re like me you probably haven’t had much fun keeping track of all this stuff. Once you get more than a few seperate confirmation emails for your bookings it becomes a bit annoying to manage. That’s where tripit.com comes in. I read about tripit last week on Techcrunch, and thought it sounded interesting enough that i should give it a try using my upcoming honeymoon to Hawaii.

Start by booking your travel online as you already do today, and all you need to do then is forward your confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. It matches the email address with the one you used to register and basically takes all your confirmation emails, and automatically extracts the important information and presents it in a attractive,easy to use interface. As i’m writing this, tripit already has a pretty extensive list of travel sites that they support to which they are adding & improving constantly. A minute or so later, you’ll receive an email from tripit letting you know they have received your confirmation email and it is ready for you to view on the site.

It’s all in the details
As they say, it’s all in the details and this is where tripit clinched it for me. Tripit automatically provides directions between multiple destinations using Google Maps, local weather & travel guides for the area(s) you are visiting. The travel guides are pretty weak right now as that feature is still under construction but i think it should be more useful 6-12 months from now.

The other thing i love is the iphone / ipod touch interface they developed at http://m.tripit.com. I definitely will be bringing my ipod touch along for the trip so knowing that i can jump on wifi and have up to date access to my itinerary if needed is great piece of mind. You can also subscribe to your itinerary in Google Calendar or iCal on your mac.

Share your itinerary with family & friends
If you have family or friends that you want to make sure can reach you while you are travelling, you can share your itinerary with them and they can goto your tripit page and see where you are, or find the phone number of the hotel if they need to reach you. The only drawback i can mention right now is that we booked a couple of bed & breakfasts not using major travel portals, and tripit was unable to import those confirmation emails. Not really the end of the world anyways, because you can manually add those parts of your trip.

All in all, a great useful web app. I highly recommend you check out tripit for your next vacation or business trip!

apple / cool / pick of the week / recommendations / software — 3 Comments
4
Apr 08

Pick of the week: Jing Project

Inspired by one of my favorite podcasts, Macbreak Weekly, i’m going to try to post a new pick each Friday. This week my pick is a great piece of software called Jing Project. There are a tonne of video / image screencap software tools out there that i have tried – Skitch, iShowU, ScreenFlow, dockdrop – the list goes on. The problem is i have my screenshot app, and my screencast app which is somewhat cumbersome and sharing my content is a little tricky sometimes, particularly for video.

This is where Jing comes in. Jing solves the problem of being able to show people what you are seeing and/or doing on your computer very quickly. It’s insanely easy to use, on the mac you invoke Jing by pressing SHIFT+Apple+1 which brings up a cropping mask that you can move & size to the area of your screen you wish to capture. Then it’s just a matter of picking your format – image or video.

Jing can then automatically upload the content to a destination of your choice (i.e Flickr for images) and a nice little touch is it will even put the URL of your content on your clipboard so you don’t have to go find it yourself. Now you just share that link with co-workers / friends / family and the whole process can take seconds quite literally. Did i mention it’s free?