Gmail has done some pretty amazing things with DHTML in its pages. Click on a header for an individual email in a converstaion (or "thread", as we used to call it in the days of Usenet) and the header expands to the whole e-mail, without reloading the whole Web page. The quoted part of the message is not shown, though; click on "Show quoted text" to see that. Again, no page reload. I don't know if it fetches just the part you need, or whether that was already loaded (if that's the case, this thing must be a real bear on dialup!), but it sure makes it less "GOD I HATE WEB-BASED E-MAIL!!!". Start typing an e-mail address or whatever, and a drop-down menu pops up with possible completions. Incredible.
But I noticed this seems to be coming at a cost. I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts and mouse-free computer use, and my browser, Mozilla (and Firefox) does a few things to this end, especially by letting you move the "focus" to a link on the current page by simply typing some substring of the text in the hyperlink you want to go to. But Gmail, evidently ignoring this great feature of Mozilla, came up with its own idea for what should happen when you start typing letters, to wit: each letter does a different thing, like the Control+
Even the tabbing between links seems to be broken. This is probably because most of the "links" are not links, a fact that Mark alludes to several times. I wish there were something a little more complete than what I have written here, but a little less exhaustive -- and exhausting -- than what Mark wrote, but glance through it if this is the sort of subject that interests you.
Sahara Smith finally has her own blog. Still no CD, but evidently she and her mother are cool, for now, with grabbing the handful of MP3's that are out there.
If you don't know who I'm talking about (and if you care), you can probably get some information from the Prairie Home Companion site, or join/scan the sahara_smith Yahoo[u.p.o] Groups site.
Well, I'm about to be sent on, I believe, my very first business trip. To Chincoteague Island, or something like that. For the first part of next week.
The most important thing about this is that I am taking my laptop. This means that my blog will be offline, unless I decide to fire up my roommate's computer and put a static version of it on there.
The next most important thing is that I will finally put enough miles on my new TDI Golf to justify refilling it, and I will finally be able to make my first estimate of my MPG. I wonder whether I'll just drive until almost empty, refill only as needed, or whether I'll fill up before hitting the road so I can get one reading that covers my city (really, half city, half highway), and another reading that covers my highway MPG.
Oh yeah, the island is supposedly picturesque or something. But that's clearly of tertiary importance. Forget I even mentioned it.
I just got one of these types of e-mails to one of my accounts.
Interesting. I already made a comment there about the format of the URLs in the message I got, so go read my comment.
OK, I actually have no idea what "whither" means, but I'm using it anyway. Sue me.
Matt Haughey proclaims a fix to set Gmail up as your default mailer when you click on a mailto: link in your browser. Only he -- and the author -- left out one tiny detail; this all involves registry hacks (not to mention Visual Basic). I realize that people are going to do this -- make useful things that only work in Windows -- but I thought Matt was Mac-using kind of guy who would point out that this was a Windows-only fix.
I'm surprised there's not already a Mozilla extension. Or maybe you can already easily modify an existing extension to do it. Have to look into that.
Could someone please tell me why Christopher O'Riley plays such godawful music on his show? I mean, he gets these kids to do amazing performances of great music, by worthy composers from J.S. Bach to Sarah Gibson, but then he takes his little solo in the middle of the show with this poppish music he apparently writes, which sometimes seems to belong to the early 20th century, and should have stayed there, and sometimes is sort of new-agey. Barf.
Well, almost by accident, I've secured myself a Gmail invite. Now I just need to take some time to come up with a good username. I could go with the mind-numbingly conventional first-initial-last-name or first-name-dot-last-name (I was always kind of envious of the names with the dots that I would see on other people's business cards), but I feel like I want to grab something that is highly sought-after. principal.skinner and principalskinner are both already taken. principle.skinner is not, but I kind of don't want that. penis.enlargement is available, and extremely tempting, may I say.
Well, have to sleep on it another night or two.
OK, I'm a dork. I discovered some truly Slashdot-worthy news, and didn't think to check Slashdot before trying to submit the story myself. Could have saved myself a good 15 minutes; it was already a story there. Here's the writeup I submitted, anyway:
Yahoo has seen the writing that Google has left on the wall. I logged into my Yahoo Extra Storage account this morning to find an announcement saying 'Your Extra Storage service is now Yahoo! Mail Plus, for the same low price!', which now includes 2 Gigs of storage! Regular non-paying users have been upgraded to 100MB. But Extra Storage users will also find their rates 'upgraded' to the Yahoo Plus rate when their accounts are up for renewal.
What is an issue is how their Web e-mail service has gotten dog-slow. I mean, unusably slow. Hopefully that's just growing pains, or perhaps half of their former "Extra Storage" users are at this moment POPping their 25MB of mail, and the other half of the new 2GB users are uploading their pr0n to their new online storage.
I just noticed something on Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] Mail that most people probably wouldn't, because it concerns a feature I used to use from time to time. At the bottom of your Yahoo[u.p.o.] mail window, you used to see a list of links to the various (20 or more) other Yahoo [u.p.o.] services (Maps, Groups, News, etc.). I used to use this especially for the groups, so I could do stuff related to the various groups I am a member of, without having to bookmark or memorize some long URL relating to said group.
Well, it seems they have taken that list away. Now, at the bottom of the mail window, you just have "Mail - Address Book - Calendar - Notepad", and then some ©opyright/legal junk below that. Sucks. Now I have to figure out how to get to my list of groups afresh.
Normally, Geek sites consider it a pretty serious breach of ettiquette to publish someone's e-mail address verbatim. For almost as long as there has been spam (the unwanted e-mail variety, not the canned meat variety), spammers have created simple programs that comb through every Web page they can get their slimy little hands on for strings that fit the e-mail address pattern, forcing careful 'net users to obfuscate their addresses (anything from "jimbob AT mailhost DOT com" to "[email protected] [take off every '.zig']") when they post their addresses at all.
But what if an e-mail user wants to get spam -- lots and lots of it? Why then, go ahead and put it right in an article about said user, if the article is interesting to your audience.
If you pay attention to that sort of thing (i.e., you are a tinfoil-hatted Slashdot reader like me), it looks so blatantly wrong to have an e-mail address right in an article. And yet... it has never been so right.
GK was doing one of his gay sing-along things last night on PHC. I had just gotten in my car (the Nova) to head over to CSPAC to practice my band music, and when the radio came on, he was singing Kumbaya with the audience. While the car was still warming up, he morphed it into the old "Amen" classic, sang bass harmony, slowed it down towards the ending, and ended up on this amazing basso profundo note. I just had to know what note that was, so I pulled the bone out of the trunk, pulled it out of its ornery gig bag, slapped it together, and found the note: it was a C! Not bad for an English major.
I'm so jealous. When I was, I don't know, 14 at most (maybe 12?), I could go down to an E, which seems to be the lowest note required of basses in Gilbert and Sullivan. I figured, that's great; by the time I'm 21, I'll have one of these terrifying Russian Bass voices, as those extra years of maturity would give me another fourth or so on the low end. Never happened, though. Some days I can crank out a D if it's early in the morning, I've been to a loud party the night before, and I tilt my body just right, but it's nothing I could perform usefully.
Oh, and by the way, someone who was still active until much more recently, Ray Charles, died for the first time yesterday.
Well, they've finally done the funeral, taken the picture of Gorby, Maggie, and some Canuck all sitting together, so hopefully we can get back to real news starting tomorrow. Or Sunday. Well, Monday, since nothing really happens on Sundays anyway.
OK, if you're like me, you've always been bothered by the fact that there's no common, single-word form for the 10-year-old country we all call "the Czech Republic". "Czech" is the adjective describing, well, the Czech lands, people and language. But isn't it normal for an adjective describing a country or region to be derived from a noun? I mean, we have France -> French, Germany -> German, Kazakhstan -> Kazakh, America -> American, ? -> Czech....
Well, last night I ran across the term "Czechia". Apparently the Czech1 Ministry of Foreign Affairs long ago decided on and recommended this name for just that purpose, for use in English. They also created versions for other European languages. So what happened? Well, the English-speaking world just never cottoned on to it. I know I never even heard the word before last night, or if I had, I probably thought the speaker was making the word up, and blocked it.
I'd have preferred if they had spelled it "Chekia"2 or something more literal, since the spelling of the word "Czech" doesn't even come from the Czech language (they use a Č -- a 'C' with a hacek over it -- at the beginning), but apparently Americans are so bloody stubborn that if carrying the odd, illogical spelling of the word "Czech" over to the name of the country will do anything to lessen the resistance, than so be it; I just want to have the one-word name for the damn country.
So, come on, everybody, say it with me -- "Czechia". "I'm taking a trip this summer to Easern Europe; I'll visit Poland, Czechia, Hungary, and Austria." See, how hard was that?
[1] There's that adjective form again, but at least it's not there for the purpose of circumlocution
[2] I'm assuming on the pronunciation, here; I've seen in several places that the official common name is this aforementioned string of 7 letters beginning with "cz" and ending in "a", but none of these sources has explicitly mentioned what the spoken form is, let alone why a name created expressly for English users must be saddled with a letter combination which is probably unique among all the words of their language.
I haven't been following Wil Wheaton's and Anne's progress on their walk-a-thon for their leukemic friend, but today's evidently the day. And I just started thinking about "walk-a-thon". 26.2 miles. They're "just" walking it, so the first thing you think of is that it can't be that bad. But when I think of it, 4 hours is about a typical time for an average amateur marathon runner. How long will it take them to walk 26.2 miles? 8 hours or so, I'm guessing. Which means they're probably on the road right now.
Come to think of it, when I was in the Army, I did a 25-mile road march once. I think we were supposed to complete it in 9 hours or less. Not that it was easy. We had to carry 40 pounds of gear, and I don't remember whether the M-16 we had to carry at-the-ready was included in that 40 pounds. OTOH, we were doing it at night, in Monterey, Calif., not in the middle of the day in San Diego in June.
Anyway, good luck to Wil and Grace, oops, Anne. And if they don't make it, I want my money back. All zero dollars and zero cents.
It's not as if anything's going to change drastically in the coming days or weeks. President Shrub may have to come back from Europe a bit early, or cut some time out of the upcoming G-8 summit, but for the rest of the world, Ronald Reagan has been just a memory for the last 10 years or so. At 93, he was the longest-lived president.
I've been sort of sickened about the frenzy over the last few years of naming things after Reagan, most of all the National Airport, especially when he's still alive. Doesn't one normally wait until some time after someone has died to name buildings after them, so you have time to a little more objectively assess the impact this person has made on history?
It's funny, I was out and about this afternoon, and when NPR hourly radio updates would come up, the big news was the capture of some major Mexican drug dealers. Funny how the focus of news can change so drastically in the middle of the day.
That's my unpleasant discovery of the day. I'm going to have to remember not to leave the engine running while I sit in a parking lot listening to the rest of the radio show, or warming up the engine, which I'm not supposed to do anyway (just start the engine and start driving), lest I make my cow-orkers/fellow tenants feel like they're in a bus terminal. It's pretty pungent, really. Maybe I'll have to start doing the biodiesel thing sooner rather than later, even though it could void my warranty.
Oh, did I mention I bought a new car?
VW Golf TDI. It, um, runs diesel. It is kind of noisy on the outside (rough-sounding, though not terribly loud; has the sound of a not-terribly-well-put-together engine). I had more or less decided that I would buy a car on Memorial Day. I went to College Park Motors, or whatever it's called, because they seemed to consistently have more TDI golfs than the other dealers in the area (in most cases, the number of TDI's the other dealers had was 0). When I got there, they (apparently) only had one left; the almost-fully-loaded "Mojave Beige" (read: gold) GLS. I didn't talk the price down enough, but at least I knocked almost $1000 off the sticker.
But man, did I ever get a case of buyer's remorse that evening (was it actually after midnight?), in my first solo drive of the car! Somehow, in the test drive, I completely missed how much less comfortable the seat was than the seats in my Nova. Those seats are so comfortable. The seats actually felt decidedly uncomfortable that night when I was driving. And there are all sorts of other wacky things with the Golf: the reverse gear on the stick is in the forward left corner, instead of in the rear (reverse, rear, see the connection?) right. The clutch seems to require more force to operate, and the pedal itself seems a little smaller or not properly angled, so it sort of digs into the ball of My Left Foot, which is the only part of my body that still works properly.
And what's with all these things that want to do extra stuff for me? I've been waiting for years for the car that will tell me if I've left my headlights on; this one does that, but for a price: it actually won't let me drive with the headlights off in the middle of the day, like a sane person. And I can't seem to get the rear wiper to wipe without it spraying its wiper fluid, just like I can't spray wiper fluid on the windshield without making the wipers go right over what was just sprayed.
It does have cupholders, though. Cupholders were my biggest complaint about the Nova; not the broken air conditioning, not the way the shocks froze in winter, not the fact that the radio often refuses to properly tune in any station higher than 95MHz. If I ever sire any children with birth defects, I shall blame it on the Nova, and all those hot lattes I had to transport between my legs because the Nova wouldn't provide me with this simple convenience that even the car I owned previously -- a 1980 Corolla -- did, after a fashion.
I can't believe this advertisement for a clearly cheap (and presumably also inexpensive) service appeared as the banner ad in my Yahoo[u.p.o] Mail. I suppose it was at least appropriate that it appeared while I was looking at my Bulk folder.