My daughter was playing Legacy today (one of the few games I’ve bought lately) and wanted to know how to save a game. I was across the room and I explained what to click on. She shot me a puzzled look when I told her to click on the save icon “…you know, the thing that looks like a floppy disk”. Plaintively she replied, “I don’t see that, and what’s a floppy disk?”.

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I like using gmail, it’s interface is slick, its web-based so I can log on anywhere, and its calendaring is powerful and easy to use. BUT, I don’t like having all my mail stored on a server I don’t control and may possibly go away someday (or worse become subscription only so I use an email client to keep a local copy of my email on my own machine. The email is available even if I’m offline (which is pretty rare I’ll admit), and I have the peace of mind that I have a personal backup of all my email. Over the years I’ve kept important email from family and friends and it would suck to lose any of them. I use a Mac but my email client of choice has always been Thunderbird (Tb) mainly because it works on all the operating systems I find myself shifting between, but also because it keeps all archived email in plain text files which conform to an open standard. ie: I can read my old email in a text editor if I have to - and believe me, if you keep local copies of your email - someday you may wish you had done the same. That’s fodder for another article though… today’s story is about syncing gmail’s contacts with Tb.
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Is having a technologically literate president important if we want to remain a technology leader in the world? I think it is. Many of the “founding fathers” of this nation were keenly interested in science and the advancements that applied science could afford their new nation. This interest (and competence) helped form and plot a course of direction for our nation.
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My company hasn’t embraced Vista. We have been ordering Windows XP “downgrades” for months and staving off the inevitable as long as possible. Today I received in a machine that I needed to set up for engineering, and it came in with Visa Business. A mistake, but I figured as long as I had it here, I might as well mess around with it. So far I am not very impressed. There hasn’t been any crashing to speak of, so that much is good news, but annoyances abound, and many of the things I hated about XP are still there.
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Its been more than a year since I first wrote that Street View had quickly turned Google’s otherwise slick and useful 2D web-based mapping into a 3D street-level peep-show par excellance. Since then I’ve had an image in my mind of a white van with the Google logo on it cruising around imaging all those streets for some reason. I guess if I had been really interested I would have found some stories like this one that revealed early on that they were actually using a VW bug, but I didn’t know that. When I discovered a couple street view images with the car still in the image, I thought I had discovered some big secret…
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I’ve been hearing from a guy at work over the years about Bill Gates’ philanthropy and how I shouldn’t be such a Microsoft-hater since he’s obviously such a good guy as a philanthropist. Today when I read that one of my heros Richard Stallman was asked by the BBC to write a column about Bill’s recent step down from M$ and that he was less than generous to old Billy boy, I had to do some investiGate-ing. Stallman’s article is mainly about how…
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I’ve been using Firefox 3 beta on the Thinkpad (the machine running ubuntu) for about a month now, and I like it. It’s a lot faster than Firefox 2, which is certainly welcome since Ff2 isn’t even as fast as IE in my opinion, and since we’ve been standardized on Mozilla for many years at work, its been a common complaint (I really don’t care since we also haven’t had any virus problems in all these years either). Firefox 3 is due to be released in the next couple weeks, and if you’re already using Firefox, you might enjoy taking a look at what’s new in the next version. If you don’t use Firefox already, here’s a good time to try it out. The plugin architecture is fantastic, offering all sorts of neat addons that help you do the jobs you need to do, as well as blocking ads and malicious scripts.