Thursday, March 30, 2006

Traffic

I wasn't feeling well today so I headed home at about 4:40 pm. I assumed that traffic would be light - I was leaving work early, right?

Uh, no.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Blogger comments

Why the heck can't you use your Google account to leave messages on blogger? Why hasn't Blogger been rolled into Google accounts yet?

Most of the people who read this blog have gmail accounts but don't have blogger accounts. I prefer comments from logged in people instead of anonymous posts with a sig.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Rooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooomba

I ordered a Roomba today. For those of you who must know, I ordered the Discovery SE.

This robot has 2 purposes:
1. It will vacuum my bedroom floor, and possibly the floor in the hall, my closet, and the living room.
2. It will force me to keep the bedroom floor, the hall, my closet, and the living room floors clear of cords and junk.

But they're cool, and they really do work.

Firefox

Firefox 1.5.01 is seriously broken on OS X, or at least on my work machine. It hangs temporarily, it ignores keyboard input, etc. It reminds me of a Windows 95 machine that needs a clean version of the OS. Though reinstalling Firefox isn't doing anything for me.

But it's fine on my personal laptop. Sad.

[Update] It might be FaultVault dumbness.

Wednesday musing continued

Maine has highways, routes, and a turnpike.
Maine definitions:
Highway: a divided road with multiple lanes (usually 2 or 3) in each direction, and no stop lights.
Route: 2 lanes, usually one in each direction, may have stoplights or stop signs occasionally, but meant for long, back country trips
Turnpike: A highway with tolls

New York has Highways, Expressways, Throughways,
Expressway: See Maine, Highway, but with more lanes
Highway: Like a Maine route, but with more lanes and more stoplights, and not usually back country
Throughway: See Maine, Highway.

Southern California has The Roads:
The 5, The 101, and The 405. I think they call them Freeways, which are really just Highways. Not sure about The Definite Article on it though...

Northern California has HIghways, Expressways, and Routes:
Route: See Maine, Route, but more curvy sometimes due to mountains
Highway: See Maine, Highway, but with more lanes
Expressway: A road with fewer exits/roads and fewer stop lights, but 2-4 lanes in each direction. The Lawrence Expressway has really long greens if you're going the main way, and they're nicely timed!

Wednesday shorts

What ever happened to changing one lane at a time? I see people shift 2 lanes at once frequently around here.

Clearly Pepsi One and Coke Zero are competing in the same market - but Coke Zero is clearly meant for those who zero index.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Another thing I want to see out of OS X Dashboard

I'm posting this from Google's Blogger widget. I'm posting from my personal 12" PowerBook. 

I love Apple's Dashboard. It creates an excellent mental separation from what I'm doing and what I'm trying to keep track of, and helps me check out what I want to check out. What I hate, however, is that I have such limited real estate on my small monitor, and I always have to shift widgets around and close some if I want to track a couple flights or monitor another ski resort. They need an auto-arrange feature for Dashboard that tries to keep things about how the user had them, but lays things out so everything's visible.

In posting this, I realize that the Blogger posting widget isn't great - it expands every time I type a new line, instead of having a scroll bar. Now that's annoying.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Satellite radio

I flew AirTran Airways this weekend to Pittsburgh to see Helen perform in performed by The Pittsburgh Savoyards. And to go to the Beaux Arts Ball.

AirTran provides XM satellite radio in each armrest. Now some other airline provides DirectTV in each seat-back. But I argue XM is a better choice, especially for red eye flights, because on red eyes the TV selection is limited, they charge for movies, and it's much easier to sleep to music than either TV or cabin noise. Plus I would prefer to read on flights, instead watching TV. Maybe if I had kids I'd choose TV over radio.

Plus, XM is better than the canned 12-channels 80-minutes of music that most flights have, because XM has 50+ channels of music, and then more of sports, talk, etc. And they have 2 electronica stations! So I can listen to a similar selection of what I'd listen to on my iPod, but without using battery. On normal flights with normal in flight music, I can't even find a station I like, and then on a 4 hour flight I hear the whole set 3 times.

Now don't get me wrong, AirTran isn't really convenient out of the bay area - they only have 2 flights from SFO, one to Indianapolis, and the other to Atlanta. But XM satellite radio is a great choice. Plus, XM wins: this weekend I realized how cool satellite radio is, and I just might have to get it in my next car. I still love you, Live 105. But I am not always in range.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Features that should be turned off

I think all school systems should disable auto-correct on their computers, and all students should too.

I think auto-correct is actually the root cause of why we have a lot of poor spellers in the US. People don't realize that they're spelling incorrectly because the only thing that knows they're spelling correctly often auto fixes it.

I used to think I was a good speller, until I started using Adium (an OS X chat client). Adium tells me when I spell something incorrectly by underlining it.

I then decided to disable auto-correct in Word. I now am learning how 'ridiculous' is actually spelt.

That reminds me, why do I have to go to a program with spell checking to write out my blog posts, instead of Firefox having integrated spell checking in all text areas? What about Blogger offering spell checking?

Wikipedia is a prime example of this: most articles I've found have at least a few misspellings. They need interactive spell correction in order to help gain more credibility.