gotshoo?

What kind of tools do you use for work and/or home (aka Your Digital Life)?

I’ve seen this on a few blogs floating around as a meme.

Home

• Gmail - I switched over to Gmail in 05/05 and have been using it as my dedicated email since. I can check it from about any computer and even my phone, and I’ve never been told my inbox is full.
• Firefox - My dedicated browser. Getting closer to trying out Opera.
• Sage - A Firefox extension that allows me to check up on my RSS feeds.
• Picasa - A free photo management tool distributed by Google that allows for quick edits such as red eye removal and cropping. It allows me to easily manage my 30 GB library.
• Flickr - A photo sharing site that I joined shortly after Yahoo acquired it in August of 2005. It costs about $20 bucks a year, but I have unlimited bandwidth and storage. As of right now, I have 1,398 photos uploaded with 10,068 views.
• Wordpress - The open source software that runs this blog. I blog, therefore I Wordpress.
• Windows Media Player - Until I bought a Windows media extender last year, I had been a dedicated Winamp user. But after the release of Winamp 5 and the amount of junk it came with it, I gave up on it. Media Player has improved immensely in the last two years, but it still lacks podcast support and native handling of MP4 files.
• iTunes - Because Media Player can’t handle podcasts and MP4 files, I open this baby to get my latest Diggnation and fill up my iPod Nano.
• YouTube - It’s slowly eating away the amount of time I spend in front of a tv.

Freelance Web Work

• Gmail - When you can search your email in half a second, it’s priceless.
• Firefox - My dedicated browser. Very rarely do I use IE 7.
• FireFTP - A Firefox plugin extension that allows me to manage multiple ftp accounts from inside the browser.
• Dreamweaver MX - I am still pugging away on an older version of Dreamweaver, but it does the job and has color coded text for editing html and php. It occasionally bites the dust and locks up. I get by.
• PHP.net - With most of my work being done using PHP, I can plug into the site and search for a function, check out examples, and get user feedback. Very good resource in PHP development.
• Bluefish - Essential the open source version of Dreamever, it has many of the same features and is pretty robust. I use it when working from my Ubuntu laptop.
• MySQL Admin - MySQL and PHP go together like open source bread and butter. MySQL is the ever improving open source database platform. Still lacks some of the features of Microsoft SQL and Oracle but has vastly improved with stored procedures, table locking, and transactions.

Professional Work

• Remote Desktop - I remote into different servers across the country with about two clicks. The newest version stores multiple usernames and passwords. It also allows for copy/paste functionality between a local workstation and a remote server. It does a pretty good job without flaking out.
• Microsoft SQL 2K and 2K5 - The essential back end for any Windows program, it does a very good job and costs a pretty penny. There are limited express versions for small application usage, but they’re limited. SQL Server Studio Management replaces 2000’s Enterprise Manager. I’ve had issues with Studio Management, but it does the job and offers more functionality than Enterprise Manager.
• Virtual PC - Makes my job way too easy. I can have two open XP environments both logged into different VPNs, remote desktop to my essential servers without cutting off access to local resources .
• Outlook and Microsoft Exchange - Can you tell I work at pro Microsoft shop? A robust email system. Not as cool as Gmail.
• Visual Studio - A tool for development that does way too much to learn.