The Essentials....

Essential Applications

- Mozilla Firefox - An alternative to Internet Explorer. Firefox is more secure, faster, but most importantly - it's plug-in architecture allows the browser to be extended in some very powerful ways.

- Vim - Text editor for programmers. I still do most of my coding in Vim. It doesn't have as many programmer friendly features as many popular IDEs such as IntelliJ, Eclipse, Visual Studio and others, but it's blazingly fast. And that's why I still use it.

- Miranda - Universal instant messenger. Why install MSN, AIM, Yahoo IM, Gtalk, ICQ, when you can install Miranda and talk to anyone who uses any of the above IM clients ? (To be quite honest, ever since Google integrated chat right into Gmail, I don't really run Miranda either. Most of the people I talk to have Gmail accounts, and so Gmail chat is sufficient most of the time).

Essential Firefox Extensions

- ScrapBook: Save web-sites on local drive for offline viewing

- IE View Lite: Adds an option to view a page in Internet Explorer. (Firefox is good for 99.9% of the websites, but for the 0.1% of web-sites that do not display properly in Firefox, this extension is key)

- FSLT: When you close a tab, brings focus to the tab that was viewed just before that.

Essential Web Sites

- Gmail: Free online email with over 2GB of storage.

- Flickr: Online Photo Hosting. 25$/year(unlimited) or free (if will only upload up to 25MB of pictures per month)

- Google Video: Free video hosting. Additionally, helps kill those boring hours: tons of fun videos to choose from.

- Bloglines: Online RSS feed reader. This is the 2nd web-site I visit every morning(the first one is Gmail)

- Google News: News aggregator.

- Googe Maps: Whenever I need to look up directions

- Del.icio.us: Stores all your bookmarks online, and allows for easy discovery of related pages.

- Yelp: Reviews of pretty much everything in San Francisco.

Essential Blogs

- Google Blog. Google releases new products and introduces new features almost on daily basis. The only way to keep up with all this is by reading Google blog.

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