From the Interwebs this morning:
Actually cool - Yahoo Farechase. Now you don't have to search multiple discount airline sites. Yahoo Farchase does it for you. And has all kinds of other useless bells and whistles. I personally like that their "choose a departure time" feature actually works, so I can make sure my flights don't leave before 7 am.
And a hillarious parody of Web 2.0 featuring my all time favorite Internets innovation, the blink tag. Web 2.1 sever side blink tag
And in case you haven't read the hype on Web 2.0, here's a brief introduction. I think it's mostly a load of crap for those of us who still have traditional websites to run instead of chasing venture capital, but I'm willing to beg, borrow or steal any idea that might make my life easier or my site better. Thanks giant XML!
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
It's official
I'm obsessed with World of Warcraft. Like all I'm thinking about right now is going home to start some auctions and level up my tailoring. The only thing stopping me from doing it right now is that running WoW via Remote Desktop tanks the connection and generally messes everything up.
Three months or so into playing, I have a lvl 24 mage and a lvl 28 druid. But then I decided I hate my druid and don't enjoy playing the character. So I've started a new mage to be my main. Her name is Pamplemousse and she's way cute. I'll post a screen shot when I get a chance.
Three months or so into playing, I have a lvl 24 mage and a lvl 28 druid. But then I decided I hate my druid and don't enjoy playing the character. So I've started a new mage to be my main. Her name is Pamplemousse and she's way cute. I'll post a screen shot when I get a chance.
Just some stuff
It's 71 in Tucson right now, and only expected to hit 81 today. That's downright chilly for late April here. I'm going to do something after work to take advantage of the nice weather. Like, you know, play computer games.
I found this Wikipedia entry on "leetspeak". It's maybe the funniest thing I've ever read. Note the totally egregious misuse of the word sociological.
My doctor's office called me this morning at 7:40 to cancel an appointment. In what world is 7:40 a reasonable time to call me? The world where I leave for work at 8? Irrelevant I say! I wasn't planning on getting up until 8:05, so I got back into bed and slept until 9.
I'm an official freak about timezones. I used to not care, because no one who lives in the Eastern time zone needs to care. Everything is calibrated to the East Coast. But now I live in Mountain Standard Time. Always MST, because we don't observe daylight savings time. One of my top ten pet peeves is the misuse of "standard time" when one really means daylight time. Last week Blogger said they were going down at 4 pm PST. Which of course was a lie, because it's Daylight Time right now, and they went down at 4 pm PDT. So I wrote to them, being a timezone freak and all. And today their scheduled outage posting is for 4 pm PDT. I feel so vindicated.
I found this Wikipedia entry on "leetspeak". It's maybe the funniest thing I've ever read. Note the totally egregious misuse of the word sociological.
My doctor's office called me this morning at 7:40 to cancel an appointment. In what world is 7:40 a reasonable time to call me? The world where I leave for work at 8? Irrelevant I say! I wasn't planning on getting up until 8:05, so I got back into bed and slept until 9.
I'm an official freak about timezones. I used to not care, because no one who lives in the Eastern time zone needs to care. Everything is calibrated to the East Coast. But now I live in Mountain Standard Time. Always MST, because we don't observe daylight savings time. One of my top ten pet peeves is the misuse of "standard time" when one really means daylight time. Last week Blogger said they were going down at 4 pm PST. Which of course was a lie, because it's Daylight Time right now, and they went down at 4 pm PDT. So I wrote to them, being a timezone freak and all. And today their scheduled outage posting is for 4 pm PDT. I feel so vindicated.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Thoughts on Software
So yesterday I was signed in on a computer where I am not a local administrator, and I tried to use what I call the "calendar" in Windows that you can access by double clicking on the taskbar clock. I was confronted with the error message "You do not have sufficient privileges to change the system time." Huh? But I want to look at the calendar!
I thought it was kind of funny because it occurs to me that it really is the "control panel" to change the system time, and I doubt when they programmed it that anyone was thinking of it as "the calendar". But I use it that way all the time. So does one of my coworkers. I mean, if the developers were thinking of it this way, they would make it so you can still use the calendar features but not be able to commit any time changes.
This happens to me CONSTANTLY with software. In fact, now that I've realized there are "actual humans" programming these things, I often send in feature requests when I bump up against something in software that drives me crazy. For example, in Microsoft's FrontPage, you can't use their hyperlink tool from code view. Well, maybe I imagined that or am losing my mind, but I swear you used to not be able to, but I just did it a minute ago when I went to confirm it. Thunderbird doesn't have a "send this message at a certain future time" feature, and as far as I can tell, there's no extension that does it either. I can't find a single calendar app that does what I want it to do (easy to create events from email, multiple to-do lists, email reminders/confirmations, indexed search - I hope Google is listening since they have 3 of the 4 already). In fact, off the shelf products can be so infuriating sometimes, I totally understand the impulse to just come up with your own solution. But I'm not really up for writing a calendaring application, so I'll just sit here whining about it instead.
I thought it was kind of funny because it occurs to me that it really is the "control panel" to change the system time, and I doubt when they programmed it that anyone was thinking of it as "the calendar". But I use it that way all the time. So does one of my coworkers. I mean, if the developers were thinking of it this way, they would make it so you can still use the calendar features but not be able to commit any time changes.
This happens to me CONSTANTLY with software. In fact, now that I've realized there are "actual humans" programming these things, I often send in feature requests when I bump up against something in software that drives me crazy. For example, in Microsoft's FrontPage, you can't use their hyperlink tool from code view. Well, maybe I imagined that or am losing my mind, but I swear you used to not be able to, but I just did it a minute ago when I went to confirm it. Thunderbird doesn't have a "send this message at a certain future time" feature, and as far as I can tell, there's no extension that does it either. I can't find a single calendar app that does what I want it to do (easy to create events from email, multiple to-do lists, email reminders/confirmations, indexed search - I hope Google is listening since they have 3 of the 4 already). In fact, off the shelf products can be so infuriating sometimes, I totally understand the impulse to just come up with your own solution. But I'm not really up for writing a calendaring application, so I'll just sit here whining about it instead.
Saturday, April 08, 2006
OMGWTFBBQ!
I'm so pissed off at Thunderbird right now. Its "adaptive spam filter" has been catching my Orbitz deal detector emails. So a week and a half ago, my plane ticket to Sarah's graduation would have been $214 - had I actually gotten the email and booked my flight. This week I bought my ticket for $286. How exactly is it $72 more to book a ticket this week than last week? Sigh. I really shouldn't complain. I'm flying out of Tucson and using a bizarre configuration of airports into and out of DC and don't have to fly in or out of BWI. But still, what exactly prompted my spam filter to catch that of all emails? It hates me, that's why.
A while ago I was talking to Sarah and she told me her New Year's Resolution was to "stop attaching excessive meaning to inanimate objects". I thought that was the funniest thing I've ever heard, but I guess if I'm pissed off at my email software, it wouldn't be a bad resolution for me either. Except I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions - apparently I was so vehement about it when James and I were first dating that he's been afraid to make resolutions and tell me about it ever since for fear of me thinking he is "feeble minded" or something like that.
A while ago I was talking to Sarah and she told me her New Year's Resolution was to "stop attaching excessive meaning to inanimate objects". I thought that was the funniest thing I've ever heard, but I guess if I'm pissed off at my email software, it wouldn't be a bad resolution for me either. Except I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions - apparently I was so vehement about it when James and I were first dating that he's been afraid to make resolutions and tell me about it ever since for fear of me thinking he is "feeble minded" or something like that.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Windows on Intel Macs
Ooh, two consecutive Apple posts.
I spend a decent amount of time at work doing Macintosh desktop support. I have this duty based on the fact that in college, I was a Mac user. So even though I used to love my Mac, I currently have a lot of disdain for Macs and their users. Especially since as tech support, I rarely encounter a Mac that is working correctly, leading me to believe that Apple is selling a bunch of permanently broken computers.
But the other day I had a Mac user ask me for a text only HTML editor, and I got to wax rhapsodic about BBEdit, which is hands down the single best piece of software I have ever used. It's SO GOOD, I've been thinking about moving all my web development work over to my Mac. The only thing stopping me is that my Mac is kinda sucky in comparison to my Windows machine and the PITA factor of working on two different operating systems constantly can't be overlooked. Oh, and my boss would mock me mercilessly. And all my database stuff is stranded on Windows, at least for the time being.
But now that Apple has announced that their Intel Macs will be natively dual bootable into Mac OS X and Windows, I think it's fair to say I'll be seriously considering a Mac as my next non-work computer. I'm not even sure I'd boot it into Windows that often.
I spend a decent amount of time at work doing Macintosh desktop support. I have this duty based on the fact that in college, I was a Mac user. So even though I used to love my Mac, I currently have a lot of disdain for Macs and their users. Especially since as tech support, I rarely encounter a Mac that is working correctly, leading me to believe that Apple is selling a bunch of permanently broken computers.
But the other day I had a Mac user ask me for a text only HTML editor, and I got to wax rhapsodic about BBEdit, which is hands down the single best piece of software I have ever used. It's SO GOOD, I've been thinking about moving all my web development work over to my Mac. The only thing stopping me is that my Mac is kinda sucky in comparison to my Windows machine and the PITA factor of working on two different operating systems constantly can't be overlooked. Oh, and my boss would mock me mercilessly. And all my database stuff is stranded on Windows, at least for the time being.
But now that Apple has announced that their Intel Macs will be natively dual bootable into Mac OS X and Windows, I think it's fair to say I'll be seriously considering a Mac as my next non-work computer. I'm not even sure I'd boot it into Windows that often.
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