Once in a while a product comes along that is truly brilliant. PicLens is just such a software product. If you use Flickr then this is probably one of the best ways to view pictures in a pool (group) or even to show off your own photostream.

http://www.piclens.com/site/firefox/win/

Google is buying GrandCentral.com -- a company that came up with the idea of giving you a single phone number that you can use to get all your calls -- home or office or cell -- whatever.

Everyday Google buys a company. I cannot think of any other company that had a more voracious appetite. I am not sure Google will be left with any companies to buy. Or maybe it will because its buying frenzy is certainly creating entrepreneurial frenzy in turn.

Nowhere than in in software is it truer that every change is for the worse.

I launched Parallels Desktop just to run some Windows program like I generally do every few days. This time it came up with a message that I should upgrade as a newer version is available. I thought for a second as my inner anti-tech angel warned me against it. However, I decided to go ahead. What harm could it possibly do?

After a few minutes it was installed. I tried to launch XP virtual machine and it failed with a fatal error message -- "Virtual Bridge not found. Is it running?" What the hell do I know? You tell me it is running or not! It won't work anymore. As usual, I switched to Google and searched for the error message. The only place I found it was in Parallels user forums. I duly clicked on the link only to be notified that the "forums are down for maintenance."

Nothing succeeds as planned.

I have sort of gotten used to the buggy, sluggish Aperture to get my photography work flow going. I was just reading this story about how Leopard will impact Aperture and all I did was shuddered. I didn't want a change -- even for the better -- because there is no such thing -- at least not in software -- and at least not often. Change is for the worse. More stuff gets added to the software that you don't want and only makes apps buggier and harder to use.

Boy, do I sound like one or my clients!

Apple's airport base station that supports the new faster 802.11n standard is similar to other things apple. Cool but not very useful and quite expensive. I bought it a few months ago mostly to be able to take backups on the usb hard-disk that it can supposedly share with other computers on the network and can be used for backups. I've tried to take backups several times and it has never finished. It dies after a few hours due to broken network connection. The disk works fine when connected directly to the mac. The performance is decent. The wep protocol for security is poorly implemented and confuses the hell out of my old tivo that thinks it is wpa. So, in order to connect my tivo -- I need to remove all security from my wireless connection -- which is of course a bummer.

I haven't tried sharing a printer yet but I don't have high hopes.

Another product that basically just disappoints.

You know what is a pain to use? Blogger! Google with all its might cannot get this FTP publishing right. Once you click publish you get the web equivalent of an hourglass for several minutes and then the page simply errors out. Everyday Google becomes a bit more like Microsoft. The question is whether their general incompetence will ever reach at the highest level and make them change their direction from: "lets do everything" to "lets do good things."

I knew I should not be doing it but the curious in me one again. I installed Firefox 2 on my iMac and now tabbed browsing is completely broken. If I open a tab is opens in a half inch thick strip on the left and overlays the original tab as well and rest of the screen is blank white on the right. I tried removing plug-ins and extensions but to no avail.

I hate technology more every day.