Posts from — September 2006

“While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw a number “6″ in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Seriously.

Keith Olbermann has a couple of good segments about GWB’s recent statements about torture and Colon Powell’s recent statements. First Second.

Bush’s statement was “It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” The phrase “unacceptable to think” something is certainly an easy target for criticism, but it’s also easy to think that those criticisms go too far. It could have been a slip-up, and it wouldn’t be the first. However, given recent comments from rumsfeld et al. about how those who disagree with some policies are “morally confused”, it’s more troubling.

Regardless, can he really not think of a time in which the US has “kill[ed] innocent women and children to achieve an objective”? If that’s the unacceptable thought, then we have a lot of history to revise.

I’m not sure which is worse:

• Canine social networking site Dogster exists.
• Canine social networking site Dogster turned a profit.

“a handy ranking of the various dangers confronting America, based on the number of mortalities in each category throughout the 11-year period spanning 1995 through 2005″

Web email market share:

People often forget how small gmail is compared to other mail sites you hear less about. Some caveats:
- Gmail is newer than the others
- Not sure what defines a “user”… do they have to be an active user?

Regardless, it’s still small. I’ve been using Yahoo’s beta mail system for a couple of months now. It acts a lot like thunderbird, which is cool, plus it has tabbed reading and writing, which is also cool, but it’s too slow for me right now. Also, it lacks gmail’s conversation view, which is a big thing for me. It’s generally a good mail client, though, and integrates well with other yahoo apps.

Edit: Oh, yeah, there are huge graphical ads on the right that are irrelevant to what you’re doing, which is annoying. I forgot since I have adblock installed in firefox.

a screenshot

Signed my offer letter yesterday- I expect to start at Google on Feb 5, 2007. In the meantime, I’ve gotta make sure to graduate.

I wrote an entry about how people reference “the lessons of 9/11″, but upon rereading it, I didn’t really like the post, so it’s not going out right now. But maybe I should invert the process… when someone refers to “the lessons of 9/11″, what do you think they mean?

The President claims that he’ll “never forget” them, whatever they are.

As an aside, there are probably lessons we should be learning from this:

Avon, CT has satellite coverage in Google Maps (I can find my house!). They updated a bunch of places in the US and internationally, which will be a nice surprise for some Runstoppable users, too (I checked and the Google Maps API also has the new imagery).

Two WEEKS!