I’ve always liked the idea of using a desktop client to post to my blog. (Somehow, Google never managed to sell me on the browser-as-an-OS idea.)

Now that I have a laptop with Windows 7 on it, I’ve decided to give Windows Live Writer a test-drive. Here goes nothing.

When I navigated to Google’s search page today, instead of their familiar inter­face, I was greeted by the company’s expanded “add-all-your-widgets-here” webpage called iGoogle.

To tell you the truth, I am not a big fan of iGoogle, My Yahoo! or any such “person­al­ized” sites. First they want me to bookmark them, then they want me to change my homepage, next, they want me to install some toolbar that they claim would work wonders for me. No, thank you.

I can almost imagine Google arguing with me about this.

[2005]
Google: Look, we’ve intro­duced this brand new thing called Google Person­al­ized Homepage.
Me: Oh cool…lemme check…yeah, it’s ok. [Goes back to watching a movie.]
Google: No, look! It’s awesome!
Me: Um, okay.
[2006]
Google: Seriously! Look, we’ve added a lot of cool stuff. Now you can come here and search Wikipedia instead of going to their website. Isn’t that really awesome!?
Me: (Yawn!) …um…yeah, okay.
[2008]
Me: [Opens www.google.com] WTH?
Google: Isn’t that really cool!? We didn’t want you to miss out on all the fun, so we’ve made things even easier by redirecting our old homepage to the iGoogle homepage. Isn’t that really awesome!?
Me: If I tell you it’s awesome, will you stop bothering me and go away?

After I switched from KDE to XFCE as my desktop environ­ment, I had to abandon KMail as my email client (since I would rather not run KDE-based appli­ca­tions in a non-KDE environ­ment). The replace­ment I settled on was mutt, something I had already tried and liked a lot.

So what’s the big deal about console appli­ca­tions, you ask? I don’t know, but they’re just much nicer than GUI clients. It must be genetic or something.

So here’s how I’ve set up mutt:

• I can read my Gmail messages (actually, Google Mail for my domain).
• I can send email using Postfix, which routes messages through Gmail’s server
• The recipient’s address is automat­i­cally added to my address­book when I send email
• I can look up or autocom­plete addresses while composing email
• Messages are signed using GnuPG before they are actually sent

I don’t like to manually check my email. Instead, I’ve set up a mail-notification applet (a ‘biff’) to check my email every couple of minutes and play a sound when there are new messages. Reading, deleting and composing mail are all just a few keystrokes away. Addition­ally, there is no need to open any heavy appli­ca­tion — the terminal window pops up within seconds.

Call it curiosity if you will. That little dropdown list that pops up every time I start typing into Google’s search box makes me wonder what people are searching for, and more impor­tantly, why. Here’s a list of terms begin­ning with how to that a lot of people are inter­ested in:

1. how to tie a tie
2. how to kiss
3. how to lose weight
4. how to draw
5. how to make money
6. how to write a resume
7. how to play guitar
8. how to make a website
9. how to get pregnant
10. how to play poker

Inter­est­ingly, how to make a website has the largest number of results, whereas how to write a resume has the least, amongst these search phrases. I am not sure if these are ordered by popularity, but if they are, then I guess these days the average Internet surfer is more inter­ested in knotting a tie than learning to kiss — especially when you consider last year’s statis­tics.

And while you’re there, does it seem strange to you that who is god is the most popular query of that type? Are we getting more pious these days? Don’t worry, who is satan is not too far behind — it holds the tenth spot.