Posts from — February 2007

I meant to post this earlier.. it’s not new, but it’s quite well done…

If there’s no picture above, click here

The fourth panel is my favorite.

If you’re a gmail power user, you probably already know about its keyboard shortcuts (which I mentioned before). Unfortunately, it leaves a lot of operations that don’t have quick keyboard shortcuts… for example, you might want to select all unread messages and star them, or select all unstarred messages and apply a label, etc etc. Sure, you can do these things with the mouse (or a lot of tabbing with they keyboard!), but it’s faster to use the keyboard most of the time.

You can add these types of capabilities with a greasemonkey script. It’s quite easy. In firefox, go here and install the greasemonkey extension. Restart your browser, then go here and click “Macros”. That’s it!

Press H in gmail (after installing) to get a quick description of all they keyboard shortcuts.

I installed this a few days ago, and now I can’t live without it.. I’ve installed it on all my machines.

Blogs and other publications keep calling YouTube “GooTube” after it was bought. It’s such an abrasively terrible name that I hate to read it. It’s a corporate acquisition, not a celebrity couple.

Is it just me, or is this interview with “A Senior Administration Official” quite obviously an interview with Cheney himself? The second paragraph seems to give it away. Rather strange.

I’m going to buy a lot of stuff for this apartment this weekend. I’ll have some free time, some money from my first paycheck (+relocation), and I’ll probably be sick of not having a bed by then. I made a spreadsheet of what I plan on getting here, so hopefully I’ll be able to get most of that. Jon Howard is coming in to town too, so it’ll be good to have someone else to help brainstorm the setup. I’m often terribly indecisive on my own.

Thanks to my relatively uncomfortable sleeping situation, I’ve made it in to work in time for breakfast every day this week, which has been really nice. I’d like keep that going if possible. They serve hot breakfast right in my building now, so it’s really convenient, too.

Via boingboing

I almost included this in the last post, but decided it’s a different topic. Adam Lasnik (a googler) wrote a good blog post about sensationalism in tech reporting. Everything is a “war”, or one company trying to “destroy” the other, which is really off base, at least in his experience (and mine). Key quote for those too lazy to click links:
“Let me give a clue to these folks who continue to moronically view—or at least portray—the exciting and complex world of technology as cross between WWF and rollerball: At the end of the day, only the users matter.”

You might have heard Adam’s name before, since he sent some Tylenol to someone who blogged about Google “giving me a headache” a while ago, and it was on digg et al.

How do I opt-out of a windows critical update? Is there a way to do that? Microsoft marked it’s “Windows Genuine Advantage Validator” as a critical update, so it was automatically downloaded and prompted me to installed. The installer had a few steps, and halfway through, I stopped: why should I bother with this?

I know my version of windows is genuine, it came preinstalled from IBM. How will that make me more secure? Why am I wasting my time protecting Microsoft’s business interests?

So, I cancelled the installation, out of principle, but now I have a pending “critical update” all the time, and I can’t see a way to select “no, thanks”.

I’m spending more and more time in OSX. There are some things I prefer to use linux for, but I haven’t really been missing windows. It’s good to have a lot of tools at my disposal, regardless.

In case you missed it…

Conservapedia is “a conservative encyclopedia you can trust” - basically wikipedia for conservatives. Not regular conservatives, but the crazy/hilarious kind.

Anyway, it’s a treasure-trove of unintentionally hilarious prose. Everything is a liberal conspiracy. Even the entry on “cactus”. My favorite quote is from the article on “Equator” (which appears to be written by an 8-year-old):
“Florida is the state closest to the Equator in America(except for Hawaii).”

There are so many gems in there. I also like how they criticize wikipedia because of quality, and then write so many terrible articles.

Anyway, just about anything “for conservatives” seems like a bad idea. A wikipedia for liberals would be terrible, too.

The site is really slow now since a lot of bloggers are linking to it. I’d imagine it’s on digg, too.

(slight tangent)

Anyway, for those who are interested, Keith Olbermann had a good special comment last night.. video.

Rainn WIlson (Dwight from The Office) hosted SNL last week.. overall I thought he was good. My favorite part was The Business Meeting. It reminded me a lot of Monty Python in its absurdity, and especially the ending.

If you missed it, the opening segment with Wolf Blitzer was also pretty funny, as was Rainn’s monologue, but only if you watch The Office.