Day: August 8, 2002

Seeing the Doctor

Today I went in and saw my doctor about the viral infection that’s been making me feel lousy most of this week.

Not very interesting, perhaps, except my doctor has a peculiar habit that I’ve never seen any other physician do and which is simultaneously scary/intriguing — when he gets to the point where he’s convinced he knows what’s wrong with you and starts to tell you what to do about it, he closes his eyes and tilts his head upward as if he’s concentrating on some universal truth.

So he’ll close his eyes and look to the ceiling while he says, “You need to take this antibiotic for the next five days.” Then he’ll open his eyes, look at you for a second, and then close his eyes again to say, “And makes sure you drink lots of fluids.”

It’s like doctoring as a performance art. Or maybe he’s got all the answers written on the back of his eyelids.

ActiveWords = DIY CLI

I’d never heard of a little program called ActiveWords until Jon Udell gave it high marks in a post on his InfoWorld weblog.

This is essentially a DIY command line interface for Windows. Pick a keyword, assign it a task, and you can instantly launch any application, window, URL or script from anywhere within windows (or just use it for simple text replacement). When I’m replying to e-mail, for example, just typing ‘go’ and F8 instantly launches Mozilla and goes to Google.

I’ve seen programs that did some of these features before, but none that did it anywhere near as well as ActiveWords does. For example, if I wanted to I could modify my Google keyword to pop up an input box for a keyword, hit return, and the browser would launch with a Google search on that keyword.

I usually work with both my text editor and web browser open 99% of the time, and it’s a real joy to launch programs and scripts with just a few letters and the F8 key in either. Easily worth $30.