four page letter, and i enclosed it with a kiss... what better day to talk about technology than valentine's day? with the advancement of technology, each new valentine's day gets ever closer to becoming a day that men will never fear again. didn't buy your lady friend something nice? amazon for something/anything and have it delivered tomorrow. forgot flowers? order remotely, pick up locally, give immediately. can't put in some face time with the love of your life? give her a memorably epic text message or email. it's the thought that counts.

what i've been doing for the past week is exploring tech fads that have already entrenched themselves in the blogging community. flickr, picasa, hello, delicous, etc. some of you may have never heard of these things, but they've been the best blog/web applications of 2004. the way i adopt new technologies is to follow in the footsteps of the pioneers. i'm not good at actually being the man with machete in hand, i'd rather wait for the path to be blazed and then casually stroll along behind the people who did all the hard work.

currently, i follow ameer in all things computer and gadget related. he got a sidekick, i got a sidekick two. he got an external hard drive, i got the exact same one, but with both firewire and usb-two ports. he's getting an ibook, i'm getting an ibook. whenever i have questions about my new items, i just ask ameer. it's weak being a two-point-oh but it's super convenient.

i've barely begun playing around with picasa, hello and flickr. i want an online photo system that will be ideal for displaying my pictures. right now i use yahoo but it's just too small. the images i mean. with flickr, you can display multiple sizes. my problem is that the interface seems a bit cluttered. time will tell if i convert to flickr. picasa is a program that organizes the pictures on your hard drive. so far, it's great. i, and the giants that walked before me, recommend it highly.

del.icio.us is my absolute favorite right now. for a few years, i've been keeping a separate blog for random links that i wanted to keep. i just tossed up links in a blog and didn't bother to organize it or anything. it was slightly messy -- as you can see -- because there was no way to categorize the links, and no efficient way to search for links when you wanted to find a site again. enter del.icio.us. it gives you tools to easily post links to your personal links page. it allows you to categorize your links in any way you wish through the use of tags. oh tags and delicious, how i love you.

tags are also the new "it" thing. cool people all over the world are talking about tags right now. by sticking keywords on your pictures, files, links, whatever, you can search for everything a gazillion times more efficiently. instead of a vertically organized hierarchy (as is the case with folders), everything tagged is organized horizontally and found through tag searches. it's amazing. it's what adding a search engine to your email does -- like with gmail -- or having a search engine for your photos. anything can be found in a few seconds if you've tagged it correctly.

so what i plan on doing in my spare time is to tag all my pictures. i don't know why. this kind of stuff just brings me joy.

happy valentine's day.