That's right, it's me! And that's because, of course, I've recently accepted a part-time position with a friend of mine at his small business here in Chicago; but he's not ready to announce the business yet, because he's still finishing up the cool cutting-edge Flash website for it, so I can't tell you at this point who he is or what his company is or what I'll be doing for him. (Hint: it's marketing stuff.) I'm not going to be doing too terribly much for him, to tell you the truth, but he can't really afford to pay me much, either; he did, however, decide to spring for a DSL in my apartment, so I'll be able to do my work for him much easier.

Well, so, where do we even begin? Well, okay, so that this doesn't just turn into one giant unending list of new tools and opportunities at my disposal (which, frankly, it is), let's just start with this confession: that there is now, in fact, so much at my disposal, that it has so far in the last 24 hours just overwhelmed me. So what I've been doing instead, then, is taking a "Getting Things Done" approach to it (of course, because I'm one of those GTD dorks), and have so far only tackled two new things in total, one quite boring and another a new subject for me. So maybe I should limit my discussions about all my newfound online freedoms this way as well, and to only talk about subjects when I first explore them in depth here at home as well.

Okay, so the boring one was simple enough: the first thing I did after the DSL went live was to finally coordinate all three of my email address lists (at Hotmail, Gmail, and on my Treo, which is synced to my desktop's iAddress program). And that was boring, but needed to be done. Ah, but then this morning, I finally taught myself all the cool things you can do with del.icio.us, and why it is that that service is so insanely popular. And this is news for readers as well, because it means that I'll be now giving up the weekly Heterotopia Report I've been doing here the last several months, and instead maintaining a much larger and much more quickly-updated collection of links at my del.icio.us account instead. A walkthough, for those who are still unfamiliar with the service...

del.icio.us at heart is no more than my weekly Heterotopia Report: links to interesting things elsewhere on the internet, that is, with the option of making a smartass remark about it as well, if you wish. Now that I have a desktop and broadband, though, del.icio.us makes this process a whole hell of a lot easier for me than writing the Report was; I've got a Firefox extension, for example, that lets me simply right-click on any link, choose "Send to del.icio.us," and get a popup window with the link and title automatically brought over, and with there being a chance for me to write a smartass comment. And so this is good news for people who liked the Heterotopia Report, because it means the same thing but with a lot more updates, done a lot more often (every time I sit and read my RSS feeds, that is, since del.icio.us is now running at the same time). And so, for example, there are nearly 20 entries there right now, just from my reading this morning, and you can click here if you want to read them yourself.

Ah, but that's just the start of what you can do there, which is of course why the service has grown so insanely popular in the first place. That page, for example, has an RSS feed; so you can subscribe just to it, for example, and have my links arriving in real time to your news reader, start page for Yahoo, Google, etc., the top of your Gmail page, in the bookmark menu bar in Firefox, in a desktop Widget, sent to your mobile device, emailed to you, oh it just goes on and on. And if you visit it via web browser, then, you also see how many other people on del.icio.us have been linking to it too.

But then it gets a lot more powerful, see, because you also add tags to each link as well, general categories that you think that link best concerns. And so del.icio.us then collects up all these tags as well, and aggregates them all together, so that you can look up the collective set of links there based on how people have been tagging them. So as a user, for example, you also get an inbox, where I can keep track of all my subscriptions, and you can go there and see what interesting things I'm tracking (like basement-press news, mentions of my website, etc). And then all those subjects have RSS feeds as well, and you can subscribe to them and get real-time updates anytime anyone in the entire del.icio.us system tags a new link with that.

Ah, but there's another cool benefit to being a user: you can also point out anything you link to yourself specifically to another user, by adding another tag called "for/[thatperson]." So if I was talking about some specific topic in the news here, like I often do, and you came across another blog entry or news article that you thought better illuminated the subject, while you were tagging it for your own account you could also add the tag, "for/jasonpettus." And then that'll make it show up at the special page at my site just for showing these tags, which is also public, which could actually turn into this nice supplemental thing to my journal entries, I think, if fellow del.icio.us users wanted to regularly send relevant things there. And yet again, this has an RSS feed, so I'll be able to subscribe to it and get real-time updates whenever one of you send me something you think I should check out. Pretty cool!

And then of course there's a "popular" page, and of course a very thorough search engine, and this really nice minimalist look to it all, too, and of course lots of dat fancy-shmancy AJAX magic to keep all the kids impressed. So, this is pretty much the only new thing I've tackled with the new broadband connection so far, in the 20 hours or so that I've now had it. And then lots and lots of more new subjects, and new discussions, just dozens and dozens of new things, coming up one by one over the next several weeks and months. And of course more news about this marketing job I'll be doing, as soon as my friend says it's okay to start talking about it in public.

So of course this recent DSL is going to mean big changes to this site as well, which is welcome news not only to you but to me. For example, I'll be able to go back to being a regular human being, and actually posting my blog entries in one part, instead of split in half because of software limitations on my mobile device, a Palm Treo. Plus I'll be able to add categories and tags at the same time, plus a stand-alone 25-word summary, for those tracking through RSS, which saves me a lot of work that formerly I was having to go back in and do later, en-masse. And this also means that I'll be able to go back and quickly add the relevant categories and summaries to the, what, 200 or so entries I've so far written for this new database, in the last eight months or so of the new design.

Plus, of course, I'll be able now to connectly directly to my website from my home computer via FTP, which was tricky at internet cafes because most don't have FTP software installed. And so that will make for much more quick imports, profoundly more quick, which will hopefully mean a wrap-up to the entire importation process much more quickly than I was expecting. Plus I'll be able to do a whole lot more tweaking, much more quickly, and get a lot of dead links fixed and the like; and of course will be able to do real-time beta experiments on closed pages, and invite all of you to follow along as well. (Like, here's a del.icio.us link I did this morning about a new beta project I'm going to try, a Perl script that will let me display real-time thumbnails from my Flickr account here at my main site, in a highly controllable way.) So all of this is exciting, of course, and will hopefully let me get through all these projects quickly, in preparation for my new arts center opening for business this September.

Oh, and even cooler, I've been saving up tutorials and sample files on creating your own widgets, like for Mac Dashboard and Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) and Google Desktop, etc. But I haven't gotten to build any of them, because I didn't have a way of live-testing them. So now that I have home internet access, this too is something I'll be able to finish up, and have these funny little downloads for you that will let you, for example, read my journal in Mac Dashboard if you want, or have a bot deliver it to you through instant messenger. Pretty cool! Not to mention that I have chat software running at home now, so is easier to get ahold of me (in fact, try it out if you want: MSN is 'ilikejason@hotmail.com,' Google is 'ilikejason,' and Yahoo is 'jasonpettuschicago.' I'm using Adium for Yahoo and MSN, Gmail Chat for Google, 'cause it saves the conversations afterwards right into your Gmail account, searchable and taggable and everything, and that's so fuckin' cool I don't know where to begin.) And yes, I'll be setting up a Skype account, so international readers should feel free to send along their own account name in preparation.

Okay, well, lots more I could write about today, but I'm so busy actually trying shit out (hence, me not getting this posted until late afternoon in Chicago). Okay, so I'm going to run - see you later!