TechMate

When I think about the most productive people I have worked with they are also the laziest. By this I don’t mean that they do less work than everyone else, I mean they are always looking for better (and easier) ways of doing things.

Working with computers every day, one of the easiest ways I have found to be lazier is by using keyboard shortcuts. I find the amount of time it takes me to get things done is easily reduced by simply learning a few keyboard shortcuts in the common applications I use. One of my favourite tools Launchy even saves me from having to navigate through the clumsy Windows ‘start menu’ every day. Applications, documents and bookmarks are launched in just several key strokes.

One of the applications I use just about every day is Microsoft Visual Studio. The keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio are really quite good, but there are so damn many of them (and some of them are so complex they look like Mortal Kombat fighting moves).

Today Microsoft released three new posters outlining the major keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio. There is actually quite a few I didn’t know and could help me on my quest for laziness. I’m printing one out and putting it up near my PC for a while to try and remind me to use them.

I can’t remember the exact date that it happened but a few years ago I began my conversation with the web. The web was evolving and worldwide collaboration unthinkable just a short time ago was becoming ridiculously easy. I was overwhelmed by the vastness of information available to me on Wikipedia, freed from the constraints of my hard drive with Google Apps and I could consume the media that I wanted to, when I wanted to.

Savvy marketers branded it Web 2.0 like the internet had just got a brand new software update. It wasn’t an update of course, it was (basically) the same internet but we had learned to use it in a new way. It was more social, dynamic and it was smarter.

Recently I have come to realise I was not having a real conversation with the web. Sure I was responding to comments here and there on blogger’s posts I read each day but it wasn’t on an equal footing, it couldn’t be, it was their blog. So here is my side of the conversation, my blog. It may not be any more important that the blogger who posted his first post a second before mine nor the one who posts his first post a second after. But it is mine.

I came across a post recently that asked potential bloggers to consider when writing content if they would read it themselves. I would like to read about Aussie startups, I know they are out there but apart from a precious few who manage to make it to the front page of one of the ‘Valley influencers’ mostly they are hard to find. So I will attempt to find Australian tech companies doing interesting things, and if you think you are doing something interesting I would love for you to tell me about it.