babbling blue

If you use gmail (if not, why not?) and Firefox 3 (If you use Firefox, you should upgrade. If you use IE you should use Firefox! Why, because I freakin’ said so! Plus, it’s better.) you can set up Firefox so that mailto: links will open in Gmail, rather than Outlook Express or whatever stupid email client you probably don’t use.

To see how, go to this post on the Gmail Blog. It’s easy!

This took me several minutes to figure out this morning, and it was frustrating me to no end. I figure as a technology person, this should have been easy, but it was not.

So you want to send an SMS text to a recipient not in your address book on your Blackberry Pearl 8100. Maybe you’re texting in a vote for some reality show or you see some SMS number on a billboard or whatever. What do you do? Here it is! (Note BB Pearl software versions may vary. This works for me today on my T-Mobile 8100.)

1. From Messages, click the Blackberry softkey and select Compose SMS Text.
2. You will be taken to an instance of your Address Book. (Depending on what is in focus in your Address Book, this step may or may not seem obvious.) Scroll all the way to the top, and select the “[Use Once]” entry.
3. Type in a phone number on the One Time SMS Text screen.
4. Click the trackball.
5. Enter your text message and send as usual.

The problem is in step 2, it’s not obvious what to do. I had some entry halfway down the Address Book in focus at the time. Trying to type in a number results in doing an Address Book search. Only if you’re already at the top of the A.B. does the “[Use Once]” jump out at you. I did a google search on this and didn’t come up with any clear instructions, though a couple people asked the question. So I’m providing this in hopes that it helps someone else figure this out. I wish Blackberry would have made this a bit more intuitive.

In a frenzy of updating, I decided to update the photo gallery software I use as well. The new software is more powerful and the results are more modern-looking. However, the configuration is much more complex, and I’m still figuring it out. This blog software integrates with the gallery software rather nicely, but I’m still figuring that out as well. I can’t imagine someone who’s not computer savvy getting this stuff to work. I guess that’s why it’s good sites like blogger and flickr are in existence.

I did not yet upload my European vacation pictures, but I’m getting there. I did upload the pictures from my trip to Mexico for Thanksgiving. Clicking the image to the left will take you there.

Note: The gallery/blog integration keeps breaking the gallery links, so if you find one that doesn’t work it’s not a dead link, just a dormant one. It’s easy to fix the links once I discover they’re broken. The real challenge will be finding out how not to break them in the first place!

You may also notice the “Random Photo” to the left (unless I’ve moved it since this posting). It is just what the name implies. . . a random photo from my gallery. You can click on it to see the full image.

Disclaimer: Some images may be rated “PG” but I don’t believe there is anything blatantly NSFW.

You can visit the gallery by clicking here.

I’ve been rather derelict in my blogging duties, but at least I’ve kept true to my word in not posting when I don’t have something to say. This will be a post of brief mini-updates just to keep all 2-3 of your readers apprised of the exciting goings on in my life!

First, how do I love gmail? Let me count the ways… No there are too many. But in addition to the constantly growing mailbox size limit (I’m using 6% and I have “thousands” of emails), they keep adding cool new shit. For one, I think the new color tagging is nifty. But it is nothing compared to the ability to sign on to AIM through gmail! How cool is that. For those of us “secured” behind overzealous corporate firewalls during much of our day, gmail’s chat can be our only communication with the outside world. . . and link to sanity. But I didn’t know many people who used gtalk/gmail chat. However, that’s rather moot now since I can chat on AIM right in the gmail web client, firewalls be damned. Thanks, Google.

Second, we got our second real snow of the season last night. It was pretty but a minor pain to trudge through this morning before many sidewalks were shoveled. I’m sure I’ll be tired of the snow in . . . 8 minutes.

Third, I went to Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico over the Thanksgiving holiday. My Thanksgiving dinner was fajitas, and much of the day was spent at the pool or beach. I had a freakin’ blast! I love it there. All I have to say is: Pinga, pinga, pinga!

Finally, I knew it was only a matter of time before I did it. Yesterday I was trying to call my cell phone from my desk phone so I could check my voicemail (terrible cell reception in this high rise) and I dialed 911 by mistake. As soon as I saw the number on my display I hung up, thinking I had been fast enough and the call hadn’t gone through yet. But I was mistaken. The 911 Center called me back immediately, and I sheepishly told the operator it was a mis-dial. At least she seemed friendly.

Resizing images has never been a pleasant thing. Trying to make something bigger using interpolation rarely results in good-looking results. And resizing something to be smaller can often lose important detail. And these techniques really fall apart when you aren’t retaining the aspect ratio of your image.

But apparently someone has been working on a Better Way ™.

Check this out:

This is very impressive, in my opinion. I can’t wait for this “retargeting” technology to find its way into consumer grade image editing software!

I saw the movie “Zodiac“–starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey, Jr–this weekend. Interestingly (to me), when I typed “zodiac” into Google, Google helpfully listed nearby theaters showing the movie and upcoming showtimes and 5 of the top 10 links (including the top 2) were for the movie; 3 more were about the Zodiac killer, which is the subject of the movie. Only 2 of the top 10 links were for anything else, one for the astrological Zodiac and one for Zodiac watches. I wonder how different that list would have been a year ago.

Anyway, enough techno-geekerific musings on Google rankings. I thought the movie was good. I didn’t know much about it going in and was dragged there fearing a gory slasher film (I don’t like scary movies) but I was pleasantly surprised that it was more a of a mystery/crime drama. Sure we saw the killings, but you could generally see those coming. There wasn’t really any excessive gore. But there was still a good amount of suspense. The movie was fairly long (158 minutes), and I would like to say it flew by but that wasn’t really the case. It didn’t drag and I was never bored, but I was definitely aware that it was a long movie. Despite the length, there were still a couple things that were never really adequately explained. I guess the story was complicated enough that even with 2 hours and 38 minutes to work with, they couldn’t squeeze everything in.

If you’re like me before seeing the movie (you may not be, as I tend to be rather out of touch. . . perhaps because I never watch commercials), you didn’t know that “Zodiac” was based on a true story and adapted from two books by Robert Greysmith (who was played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the movie). The Zodiac was a serial killer in California in the late 60’s.

I was intrigued enough that I may check out the Robert Greysmith books, “Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer”. Since the movie didn’t quite put all the pieces together, I’d like to know what I missed. Another interesting google-bit. . . the books didn’t show up at all in the first 10 links. I guess no one reads any more.

Anyway, I recommend seeing “Zodiac”. I think it’s nearing the end of its run, since I was a little late to the game here, but watching it on DVD should be just fine.

Most scientists (in relevant fields, of course) now seem to think that traveling back in time is either impossible or impractical–meaning the technology required would be far, far beyond what we’re capable of now. It’s extremely unlikely that someone is going to invent a time machine in their basement.

There are a handful of scenarios that theorists have suggested for how one might travel to the past, said Brian Greene, author of the bestseller, “The Elegant Universe” and a physicist at Columbia University.“And almost all of them, if you look at them closely, brush up right at the edge of physics as we understand it. Most of us think that almost all of them can be ruled out.”

I can’t say I’m surprised by this. I have always believed people couldn’t travel back in time, personally. Too much potential for cataclysmic paradoxes!

The good news is we might someday be able to travel forward in time, so to speak. Of course, we’d be stuck there…

“If you want to know what the Earth is like one million years from now, I’ll tell you how to do that,” said Greene, a consultant for “Déjà Vu,” a recent movie that dealt with time travel. “Build a spaceship. Go near the speed of light for a length of time — that I could calculate. Come back to Earth, and when you step out of your ship you will have aged perhaps one year while the Earth would have aged one million years. You would have traveled to Earth’s future.”

In a recent Dilbert Blog entry, Scott Adams writes:

Now for an exciting round of what I call “too frickin’ cool.” The way this is played is that you describe some technology that is so futuristic, so Star Trekish, you can hardly believe that you are using it. When you are done describing this technology, you must be so impressed with your own story that you pause and punctuate it be saying, “Too frickin’ cool.” Optionally, you can add a “dude” or a “seriously” to further elaborate your point.

I actually know a person or two who talks like that. But that’s not really the point of this post. Scott goes on to say:

Yesterday I signed up for Google’s free service, Google Alerts. It sends me an e-mail any time my keywords newly appear on the Internet. My keywords are “Scott Adams Dilbert.” Now, I usually have my Blackberry 8700 in my pocket. So check this out…

Any time that 11-year old Vijay sits at his Dad’s computer in Lucknow, India, and blogs about his favorite Dilbert comic, Google finds it, and sends that link directly to my left front pocket. I reach in, pull out the Blackberry, click the link, and Vijay’s blog opens. I read it, just to see what little Vijay thinks of me today. In India. Minutes ago.

So the entire point of this post is to try to get Scott Adams himself to read this blog entry. How will I know if he does? I probably won’t. . . but I will know that it’s a distinct possibility and that’s too frickin’ cool (dude)!

Now any self-respecting geek loser with a blog (like me) is naturally going to read this and try to set off a reaction in Scott Adams’ left front pocket. I hope he hasn’t gotten tired of those notifications by now and therefore shut them off.

Scott: Dilbert rocks, you’re hilarious. By the way, the moon hasn’t crashed into the Earth yet, so I guess it was just refraction after all. Say “hi” to your wife for me.

Big news! Pluto is no longer a planet. Forget what you learned in elementary school, as our solar system now has only 8 planets. Can you name them? Can you name them in order? (I could name them, but probably not in order.)

Anyway, astronomers got together to argue and fight and came up with a new definition of what constitutes a planet.

a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

Pluto doesn’t make the cut because it has an oblong orbit that overlaps with Neptune’s. But Pluto does still have a status…

Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of “dwarf planets,” similar to what long have been termed “minor planets.” The definition also lays out a third class of lesser objects that orbit the sun - “small solar system bodies,” a term that will apply to numerous asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.

In case you don’t think astronomers have a sense of humor, I submit this as proof that you’re wrong:

Although astronomers applauded after the vote, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - a specialist in neutron stars from Northern Ireland who oversaw the proceedings - urged those who might be “quite disappointed” to look on the bright side.

“It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called ‘planet’ under which the dwarf planets exist,” she said, drawing laughter by waving a stuffed Pluto of Walt Disney fame beneath a real umbrella.

(full story)

Some doctor is claiming that as many as 40% of World of Warcraft (WoW) players are addicted. I’m sure a lot of people are, but that number seems blown way out of proportion. Am I addicted? Eh, who can say? I haven’t played for the last couple nights, but I’ve thought about it. During the day I’ll occassionally read message boards about it. Does that make me addicted? I don’t know.

I think online addiction is real and MMORPG addiction is just a subset.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go click Refresh on the WoW board now…