I love a good meme, and this seems to be one. Thanks for passing it this way Mr. Lindsay :)

Total volume of Music on my Computer

Work: 13.1GB
Home: 18(odd)GB

Song playing right now

UNKLE - one of the tunes from Widescreen Edit - A New Hope

Last CD I bought

Fat Freddy’s Drop - Based On A New Story

Five songs I listen to a lot/mean a lot to me

• Jimi Hendrix - Castles Made of Sand
• Smashing Pumpkins - Mayonaise
• Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
• Fat Freddy’s Drop - Hope
• Beasty Boys - Get It Together

Five people to whom I am passing the baton

• Manda
• Sean
• Suze
• Dave
• Peter

Thanks to email aliases and Gmail I’m able to completely discard my email client. My email is now web based. No more POP or IMAP for me sonny-Jim! I get all my email forwarded to my Gmail account and let it take care of the spam and the filters and contacts and pretty much everything my old email client used to do.

It’s very liberating to be able to throw away an application that used to be the basis of my online life. Without email (and therefore the email client) I would have completely lost touch with most of my buddies from back home. (I know there’s IM - but living down here in NZ it very hard to get my mates to stay up and chat to me…or vice versa.)

The next thing I need to eradicate from my life is my RSS reader. I use Thunderbird to keep track of all the blogs and news sites I read…but I now realise i don’t need it any more.

So - what’s the best web based RSS reader?

Backpack is the new release from the makers of Basecamp, 37signals. Backpack, in a nutshell, is a personal organiser. Its seems like a ‘home’ version of Basecamp. It has pretty much the same features as Basecamp but it’s been arranged in a slightly different manner.

Pages

You create pages in your ‘backack’ and add certain things to it, namely:

• Text blocks, or Notes
• Files
• Images
• Lists
• Links

They give you some examples of pages you could create like a page to organize a craft project, store favorites in your city, a portfolio, client mock-up presentations, etc. The possibilities are endless!

The free version allows you to have up to 3 pages. You can, of course delete and reuse these as you see fit. Another cool feature of the pages is that you can share them with other people.

Reminders

This is probably my favorite feature of Backpack. As you can excpect from pretty much everything 37signals do the interface is really simple and a joy to use. Backpack can remind you in two ways - there’s the regular old email method (which i’ve tested - and as a result remembered to blog about Backpack this morning :) ) or there’s the SMS method (which is currently unavailable in New Zealand).

I’ve recently discovered the usefullness of a shared calendar thanks to Mozilla Calendar and Apple iCal. Both of these products make use of the iCalendar format. What this means is that i can have one centralised online calendar and subscribe to it using either Apple iCal or Sunbird. Nice you say - but what has this got to do with Backpack? Well - the reminder system in Backpack automatically creates an iCalendar link that you can subscribe to. Sweet as! My life just got a whole lot easier!

Changes

Now this is where things get interesting…You can track changes that other people have made to any page you are sharing. It shows you a chronological list of the changes made and by whom and it also generates an RSS feed of those changes. Phat, I love RSS - the more I can get, the better!

And?

And - I love it! I can see myself using this daily. I can see my mum using this daily! Go 37signals! Such a tight little application that is so open you can pretty much do what you want with it.