Years ago, I used SideKick as my PIM, then I ran into Tornado Notes for DOS, which became InfoSelect for DOS, which got ported to Windows 3.1, and which is, in it’s latest incarnation, still my PIM of choice.

But during my search, I kept coming back to a very interesting little app called TheBrain.

A static picture doesn’t do it justice, you need to navigate around in it to get the full effect. It’s gaming meets info management if ever I’ve seen it.

I never could see the benefit of that kind of arrangement for managing your personal information because, for my personal info, I already know how things are connected, I just can’t remember the details.

But for navigating information that you don’t know much if anything about in the first place… Now that’s where this kind of thing can shine.

And back in the present, I just stumbled onto The Visual Thesaurus that does just that. It’s a pretty nifty way to explorer around seeing relationships to words visually. I could definitely see children learning lots of new words by navigating through similar words they already know. Plus, its got that “video game” flare that screams Play With Me!

Or how about a visual code navigator, for developers new to a large project. Browsing through a project using that metaphor could be very illuminating, very quickly.

I’m not sure that Visual Thesaurus will actually make it or not. I don’t see many people paying even their low $2.95 “subscription” for it. But the idea, and more importantly, where it’s been executed, seems like a good one to me.

Can I get that in an OCX?

Scott Hanselman recently did a very nice series of posts about building his “Ultimate Developer Rig“, a quad core, dual PCIE video card monster machine, that certainly has some impressive specs to it.

That Scythe Cooler is particularly impressive:

Too bad he didn’t totally geek out and put a plex window and some light tape in there… Too much?

Now, there are some that would say this is the “Ultimate Developer Rig”:

(For the full specs, check it out here.)

But I gotta say, Scott’s setup is pretty hardcore. In fact, it’s almost eery the similarities between Scott’s rig and the one I put together a little less than a year ago. I went with a dual core E6600 because, well, if the quad cores were even out at that time, they had to be too rich for my blood. I tried, hard, to justify the 1000$ for a E6700 Core 2 Duo Extreme at that point, but just couldn’t do it.

Still, my rig gets right up there, scoring a 5.5 on the “Windows Experience” scale in Vista. If I was so bold as to delve into overclocking, I might even improve on that some. Maybe eventually.

Then, I stumbled upon Kevin Hammond’s commentary on Scott’s rig, and I have to say, I’m right there with Kevin.

I diverged from Scott’s rig in much the same ways Kevin recommends, with a few minor deviations:

• Vista 64 just isn’t ready from primetime, due to driver and utility support
• RAID 10 is hard to beat for resisting downtime
• I went originally with a Gigabyte GA 965P DS3 board, but then switched to an Intel D975XBX2 when I discovered the Gigabyte didn’t do 4 drive RAIDs
• I used a Zalman cooler instead of the Scythe. I guess I’m partial to copper
• Scott damped the inside with foam. With that Antec case, I haven’t noticed the need to. It’s virtually silent once the fans initially power up.

About the RAID, George Ou wrote a pretty good article on half-stroking or quarter stroking a harddrive to improve its performance. No idea whether it has similar effects on a RAID. In other benchmark tests, George pretty much slays RAID 10, which I’m a fan of. I’ve lost a drive out of a RAID 10 setup, replaced it and was on my way with no downtime. But when I lost a drive out of a RAID 0, I was down for almost 3 weeks trying to get everything back and operational. And drive images are only good if almost everything else about the machine stays the same, which, in my case, didn’t.

None the less, if you’re looking to put together a wickedly fast machine for under 2 grand, and you want it to be so quiet, you NEED lights on the outside to tell it’s on, I highly recommend reading through Scott’s parts list.