Although having a Wii arrive at my dorm right around finals may be a bad idea, I’m willing to take that chance.

Flickr is a phenomenon that you can’t understand the hype behind until you have used it yourself. It is intuitive and easy to tag your photos, add them to sets and link them to others’ work by adding them to groups. I could spend hours browsing through the millions of creative and beautiful shots that people have taken.

In this process, I’m also realizing how inadequate my little Canon Powershot Elph SD450 snapshot camera is. It’s 5 megapixels, it takes good pictures for a non-SLR camera, and it has a really large LCD screen, but to get really good photos you need an SLR. I can’t justify spending money on one, though, as I have no idea what I’m doing with photography yet. For now, a tripod would be a much better investment.

Being a big fan of a hierarchically organized folder system, I was initially put off by the complete lack of folders in Gmail. I have at least 20 folders in Mail.app, and 10 or so rules so that most of my mail gets sorted as it comes in. Then I realized that Gmail has tags, which might be better than folders because messages can have more than one tag. In addition, they won’t immediately disappear into a folder where I’ll forget about them; they’ll stay in my inbox until I choose to archive them. Also, Gmail’s conversation feature, which groups messages by thread, is really, really nice.

I’m about to pull the plug on Mail.app by forwarding all my Rochester email to Gmail. The only thing that is holding me back is that if I do that, my mail will be split between residing on my hard drive and on Gmail. So I think I’ll open Mail.app every once in a while and download my Gmail messages, so I have a copy on my hard drive. This would also save me the problem of having no access to my mail if I did not have an internet connection. I haven’t completely decided what to do yet; hopefully I’ll figure it out in the next week or so.

Brown: Visitors to Brown’s website are greeted with an extremely simple, clean homepage that has a header and a list of popular destinations, with related links in smaller text to the right. When mousing over an item on the list, it slides open like a drawer to reveal a recent news item. “Life on Campus,” for instance, reveals information about a series of free concerts to celebrate a newly renovated recital hall. These drawers are extremely well-implemented; there is even a short delay before they pop open so that you can move your mouse freely without springing open every drawer.

Dartmouth: Dartmouth’s three-column design resembles that of a blog, with quick links to events and news on the right, short news features in the middle, and important links on the right. The header is a large, visual representation of recent college events; each time the site is refreshed, a random picture is selected from a pool of nine or ten. The pictures are replaced with new ones each week. Needless to say, the photos are beautiful and convey well the collegiate atmosphere. The spacing is perfect, the colors are very pleasing, especially the light background, and the text is the perfect size.

It is interesting to note that Brown’s site was developed with the help of Pentagram, a design company with a wide portfolio and many recognizable clients. Dartmouth’s, on the other hand, was developed totally in-house. I slightly prefer Dartmouth’s design over Brown’s because everything is visible at once. Although Brown’s tabs are sexy, the appeal wears off quickly.

I suppose that I’m writing about other collegiate websites because I have website envy. The University of Rochester’s site looks quite outdated. I want to be able to set it as my homepage, but it’s much too static. Great websites, such as Dartmouth’s, are always changing. There is something new to look at every time you visit. Another great example of this is MIT. The homepage image is created by a different member of MIT and changes each day; it is used to spotlight important research and events.

At Rochester’s site, the news section, which is the only dynamic part of the page, is too small. College news should be prominent; it should be the second thing (after the logo/name) that catches the eye. It shows that the college is alive, that faculty are productive and that students are enjoying themselves. Another problem is that the same thirty or so pictures have been gracing the front page for the past few years. The whole site could use more of the screen; right now it isn’t taking advantage of today’s higher-resolution monitors. Hopefully a site redesign will arrive with the new logo and new identity that we will be getting later this year.

I can’t really believe that I just paid for a browser, as I’ve never done that before in my life, but OmniWeb so impressed me that I bought it within the first five minutes of using it. The feature list is extensive – live previews of tabs, multiple workspaces, ability to set viewing preferences by site, an integrated HTML editor/viewer of sorts, and an absolutely gorgeous interface. Its also extremely intuitive; every button is exactly where you’d expect it to be. Don’t pass this one up!

All of the content on his site is free, so the membership is more of a donation to support his writing. However, with the membership comes a subscription to the RSS feed of his “Linked List,” a separate blog of sorts where he posts really insightful links about a number of different topics. Last week there was a free trial period for this feed, and I was disappointed when the time ran out, and was considering purchasing a membership. But it was this post that I read this morning that finally convinced me.

One of my favorite articles that John ever wrote was Windows: The New Classic, right after Apple released Boot Camp. While most people were still scratching their heads trying to figure out why Apple would ever want to allow you to run Windows on a Mac, this article made it seem like it was the logical next step. He writes, “This is a move of supreme confidence — Apple relishes the comparison between Mac OS X and Windows XP.” Clearly some have seen the light, as recent market share gains have shown.

You really don’t have any street cred with other Apple fans until you read Daring Fireball. The RSS feed for the full posts is free, so I urge you to try it out.

For those who care to know, DNS (Domain Name System) resolution is a service usually provided by your ISP (Internet Service Provider). When you type in a site name in your browser, the first thing it does is to query your ISP’s DNS server to find out the IP address of the computer that hosts that site. Once it has done this, it can load the page. OpenDNS claims to shorten the time that this IP address lookup takes by having a huge cache, meaning that they usually can return a result to you without having to ask another nameserver, which would take more time. In addition, they have servers at the main crossroads of the internet. Whenever you see “Looking up (example).com” in the status bar of your browser is when DNS resolution is occurring.

So maybe give OpenDNS a try, if you have access to your network settings. You may be pleasantly surprised at how fast your internet goes. They also claim to offer phishing protection and will block known phishing sites. The service corrects spelling errors, too, so if you type in something like “google.co” instead of “google.com,” you will be instantly redirected. Pretty cool!

I also decided to go with a new theme for Wordpress, the much raved about K2, with all of its AJAX goodness (live search, rolling archives). I’ve been rolling my own with the colors. I originally had a light-on-dark style, but it was too depressing, so I modified the CSS a little and I like what I see. The combination of dark edges with the white page is really pleasing, and I really like how the red titles and blue links stand out. The color scheme seems much more unified than previously. My favorite part is the picture on the top, which one of my parents took, and I edited. Enjoy!