...more recent posts
I do my daily surfing from the links in the left hand column of this page. But of course I also have a huge list of sites bookmarked in my browser. I keep new sites there for a week or so and see if I keep going back. If I do then I add that site to this page. Gizmodo: the gadgets weblog has made the cut.
We've been getting a lot of hits from the TurnitinBot. This comes from the Turn it in site which provides anti-plagiarism services to educational institutions. I don't get a real happy feeling from them so I blocked their robot. I'm not exactly against them, I'm just not for them enough to give them so much bandwidth (they are second in total requests to the much more lovable googlebot.) If anyone else here wants to debate this move, feel free to speak up. (Or if you have any other candidates for blocking...)
I live about a block from the Williamsburg bridge and this creates a good bit of noise. The worst offender is a particular kind of truck. It's the size of a regular 18 wheeler, but instead of the standard container, these trucks carry the large sized dumpsters you see at big construction sites. The reason they are so bad is that the dumpster is not firmly attached to the bed of the truck. If the truck goes over a bump the dumpster can actually be bounced up into the air. That's not the bad part though. It's when it comes back down into contact with the truck. Ouch. I mean loud. Like a bomb. A particularly loud one happened last night while I was asleep. In one moment I sprung out of bed and covered the few steps to the window absolutely sure another building had been brought down.
Things like this make me realize I am constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's not overwhelming. I can go about my life. But deep down I expect another event. Not logically, but in my bones. I still don't have an adequate expression for what I felt watching the towers fall. I can remember the whole thing perfectly. I can still feel what I was feeling at that time. I just can't describe the feeling in words. Even to myself. It's not english-able. And I think this makes it stay with me. It's as if, since I can't say it, I have to live it over and over.
I wonder if it will always be this way?
Blogs hit Doonsbury. (I guess this is what is being blogged in the strip, if you're not up on such things.)
Of course I'm much too busy (*cough*) for such things, but I have some friends who are absolutely mad for the game Snood. I seem to remember them playing on OS X, but it must have been running in Classic or something because yesterday I saw that a beta for the OS X version is now available. I can't even figure out how to play, but that's probably for the best. Only problem I noticed in my brief try was that you can't get to the top menu bar to quit (command-q will do it from the keyboard though.)
Viridian design contest winner: The global civil society laptop. Really cool prototype. Don't expect to ever see this. (via the Xeni Jardin boing boing side blog)
In audio world news: Logic platinum released for OS X.
Back from a nice weekend with my mother on Cape Cod. The monitor on my iMac has apparently died and this is making me very unhappy. More later when I return to normal. Good to be in NYC.
From 8/24 through today I have received 71 emails. 23 of those were NOT spam. (And thanks to the barrage of Austria planning from the Wheel that's actually a very high ratio of real messages!)
The junk mail filters in the new (10.2) mail application flagged 46 out of 48 of those unwanted emails as junk. With NO false positives. Hallelujah. Thank you Apple.
They ship it in "training" mode. If mail thinks a real message is junk you can press the "not junk" button to correct it. If mail thinks a spam is a real message you can press the "junk" button to correct it the other way. The more you correct the more accurate it will become.
But it's already plenty accurate for me. Spam be gone! I'm taking it out of training mode. Now I won't be notified about spam, it will just silently go into a junk folder where I can check from time to time for false positives. But I don't think I'll have to double check too often.
That's worth the price of Jaguar right there.
Mozilla 1.1 is out. Supports Quartz rendering in OS X, so it should look (even) better.