Brandon Live!

All too frequently I will tell someone that I work on Desktop Search, and get the response “That’s cool, but I know where all my files are so I don’t need that.”

Wrong I say. 

I keep all of my files organized in a logical hierarchy.  For instance, music is organized into folders by Genre, then Artist, then Album.  All of my photos are organized into reasonably sensible folders, same for documents.

Very, very rarely will I ever search for something on my hard drive not knowing where it is.  But I use Desktop Search every single day, almost everytime that I sit at the computer.  Why?  Read on.

1) Speed -

Without WDS - I can play Slide by the Goo Goo Dolls by going into my Music folder, drilling into “Rock”, then “Goo Goo Dolls”, then try and remember which album it’s on.  If I remember that it’s Dizzy Up The Girl, I’ll go there and double click the file to play it.  Or I could go through media player and follow a slightly reduced path.

With WDS - I can play the same song by typing “slide” into the Windows Search Deskbar.  Heck, I only have to type “slid” and I see 2 versions of Slide (one from the album, and one acoustic that I forgot I had) and another Oasis song called Slide Away.  Not only did I get there faster, but I saw every copy of the song I have in one place.

2) Everything in one place

Without WDS - I might have photos in Picasa, music and videos in Media Player, IM conversations in Trillian or Messenger, E-mail and attachments in Outlook, plus documents in all kinds of formats.  What’s worse, I might have some music in Media Player and some in Napster, iTunes, MPC, or another program.  Maybe Media Player doesn’t know how to deal with my SHN and FLAC files.  So now one kind of data requires me to work through different programs and UIs.  Yuck.

With WDS - I can instantly bring up data no matter where it’s stored on my computer (or even on my network shares!) and see it all in one place.  If you’re a live music fan like me, you might have 10 different copies of a song like Dave Matthews Band’s #41.  One query and I can see them all, even though they’re scattered across 10 different folders.  I can adjust the view by adjusting the query or filters.  Now I have one UI for getting to my data all the time.  And once I’ve found it, I can take whatever action I like against it.

3) We’ve only just begun to tap its potential

Search-based UI is still in its infancy.  The potential for rich visualizations offered by a lightning-quick index with non-hierarchical structure is vast.  For example, you can infer hundreds of different hierachies from this data without locking yourself into one.  You can pivot from one kind of metadata to another.  You could even use the result set from one query to feed the parameters of the next one.

Remember, you Desktop Search results are data, not just hyperlinks.

If anything, I find the Desktop Search label to be a bit confining.  Saying it’s “just search” is like saying that Windows Explorer is “just a graphical dir command.”  There’s a lot more to it than that.

It’s been maybe a month and a half since I started my aggressive workout schedule and began reducing my caloric intake.  The result?  15 pounds vaporized.  That’s about 8 lost since my last update.  And it means the “32 waist” section of my closet is open for business once again.

Which means I’m almost to my short-term goal of 170.  However, being the kind of person who is never satisfied, I’m moving the goal posts to 160.  I’m already close (if not already there) to benching that much weight again.  So an additional goal is to once again be able to bench my own weight, which should happen somewhere along the way down to 160 - which is where the charts say someone my height should be anyway.

My strategy has been simple.  Eat less, exercise more.  Since I hadn’t been exercising at all for a long time, “more” really means “a lot.”  Of course it helps to have motivation, and I’ve had the “really huge crush” variety for a couple months now.  Still, I think I would have done this anyway.  It was really the only facet of my life that I wasn’t happy with, and now that’s already changing.

I haven’t been using any special software, although the Calorie King application that Chris showed me is pretty sweet.  I do think that buying a scale was a smart move.  It really helps me get a sense of progress and accomplishment.  And on the days where it goes up a little bit, I’m just that much more determined to do better.  Oh, and a lesson I learned early on was:  don’t buy a cheap scale.  I went with the cheapest one I saw just because I thought “A scale is a scale, right?  I don’t need anything fancy.”  Turns out, the cheapest ones are really inconsistent and horribly impercise.  So I got a better one (I think $40 or something) from Tanita that’s far better, and shows accuracy to a tenth of a pound.  It can also estimate body fat and hydration, although I consider those kinds of analysis to be some dark form of “magic” and don’t pay them much mind.

Oh, and all those “lose weight fast!” commercials and spam mails really bug me.  I never once considered taking a pill or going on some kind of extreme diet.  Those diet drugs are either useless or dangerous.  And you can pry my fresh baked bread from my cold dead hands.  If you want to lose weight, you already know how to do it.  Exercise and eat better.  It’s not supposed to be easy.  Nothing worth doing is.