I don’t think I’d be accused of being a fan of horse racing, but these videos of Big Brown winning the first two races of the triple crown are just breathtaking - especially the blimp view of the final stretch in the Preakness.
134th Kentucky Derby, 3 May 2008:
133rd Preakness Stakes, 17 May 2008:
The Belmont Stakes race is a little later this afternoon and if Big Brown wins, it will be the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years.
This flash animation is fascinating. It depicts the degree to which voters in different states and across varying demographic lines favored Obama or Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
In other news: Fuck Hillary. Obama clinched the nomination on Tuesday and she still refused to concede? I heard pundits on NPR who very correctly completely dismissed the notion that she would complement Obama’s “Dream Ticket” and basically said that his challenge now is to figure out how to get her out of the picture without completely alienating her supporters because it would show a clear lack of discretion (or weakness of leadership) to ask her to be his running mate. To me, the most mystifying aspect of the race for the Democratic nomination has been the inability of the Clinton supporters to recognize (or perhaps the incapacity to care) how negative and divisive her campaign was, up until the end.
I don’t know whose need to read poetry is so dire that they are willing to wade through T.S. Eliot in PowerPoint fashion, but it’s nice to know that they can find comfort from readatwork.com.
I’m in heaven. I don’t know what part of Linux is broken but since this never happened to me before when I only worked with my Evolution (keyboard) in various multi-Windows machine configurations working with the (up to now) excellent software based keyboard/mouse sharing application, Synergy, I’m going to blame this on the introduction of Linux.
Symptom: after some unspecified period of time or apparently very hard to capture key sequence, my keyboard starts behaving as if the ctrl key is locked. “w” becomes “ctrl+w”, etc. which sux0rs.
Old workaround: unplug my Evolution, plug in a separate PS/2 keyboard, press the ctrl key a couple times, reconnect the Evolution.
New workaround: in X (on Linux) press ctrl+alt+F1, then alt+F7.
This seems to be a pretty well known workaround for whatever the problem is and now that I’ve found the better workaround I can eventually research what’s causing this and finally - make - it - stop. Or I suspect since I’ve maligned linux there might be some fanboy out there who might come to its rescue and tell me exactly how easy it is to recompile my kernel and make everything work 
But for now, I don’t need to climb under my desk six times a day to work around this, so my mood is describable as “transcendent woot.”
gmail’s ad relevance is not as good as it once was. Not that trannies don’t need ads, too, or that I might not know someone who would like a running skirt, but I suspect the good people at skirtgoddess.com would probably rather that they pay google to show their ads to women.
My old co-workers and anyone who remembers keyboardshortcutguru.com will rightfully tease me for not knowing about this until now, but the above option is officially my favorite preference in Office 2007.
If you’re like me then you get your knickers in a kerfuffle when you have to deal with processing lots of email. Here’s my approach when I’m doing this in a desktop application. I haven’t really had to do this with personal mail in a while.
The net result is that your mail is all neatly labeled (by the categories you defined and applied in step 1). Mail which is addressed directly to you always stays in the inbox since this is more likely to need your attention. And other mail gets filtered to some appropriate folder.
Here’s one other tip to consider in the “Move” step: consider having some rules which move mail from high volume discussion lists directly to the trash. Lists like this tend to frequently be time sinks and if you have the time you can go find them in the trash pretty easily (because those messages are categorized, too) but they are less likely to suck away your time (since they’re already in the trash) and less likely to make you hit an inbox quota (since they’re already deleted).
But I’m sure there’s more than one way to do it - comments are welcome!
I think I’ve ranted before about how I think bluetooth is a giant disaster that works terribly for consumers. I still believe that - the different features supported by different vendors and different bluetooth stacks and the varying experience you get when you mix and match different, supposedly compatible devices with one another makes getting a bluetooth a complete grab bag.
Also, bluetooth almost always means “costs WAY friggin more than it should” - this holds for computer peripherals like mice or keyboards (where a bluetooth version typically costs ~2x what a regular device would set you back) and cellphone kits or headphones which cost even more than their non-bluetooth counterparts.
Finally, basically every bluetooth peripheral just screams out “I’m both a weenie and a dick.”
BUT…I’m suddenly incredibly happy with my HT820 headphones. I bought these headphones years ago to use with a WindowsMobile phone (the HTC Wizard / T-Mobile MDA) and it always worked
<terribly>
The headphones work decently as a handsfree calling kit, but the other core features (working as headphones) was terrible because of a compatibility setting between the headset and my specific phone which made the audio quality completely unacceptable. That was really disappointing because I wasted all this time researching and getting to understand that A2DP is a bluetooth based technology which is supposed to give you stereo audio which sounds totally awesome (except for when a bitpooling interoperability setting makes the end result worse than bad AM radio). And not only that but I learned that both also supported AVRCP, which means that using buttons on the headset I could adjust the volume on the music I was listening to or play/pause fastforward/rewind. Sweet, huh? Except that the implementation of that on my MDA was to emulate screen taps at specific screen coordinates, so pressing “play” wouldn’t necessarily play - it would tap the screen at a specific coordinate (and one that would only work with the build in Windows Media Player and not necessarily whatever player I wanted to use).
</terribly>
But now I’ve got the same headset hooked up with my blackberry curve and everything works. Audio (A2DP) sounds great. The music controls (AVRCP) work great. And the interoperability between switching the phone between music player or calls or anything else all a) works b) well. And it was good. But they still definitely make me look like a dork, and probably a jerk, but I avoid the typical usage behaviors which usually confirm that status.
I’ll take “Things that are awesome” for 1000, Alex
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
