When the huge HD-DVD decryption code rebellion hit Digg, people came up with a ton of creative ways to convey the code without actually typing it out. There were a few half-assed attempts to make it into a “song” (read: some guy with a crappy computer microphone that really should not give up the day job for a career in song.) Now, it turns out that a professional recording artist (I believe he mainly does jingles and advertising, but has also released a number of songs: Geoff Smith) decided to take a stab at it. Then Cali Lewis (of Geek Brief TV) collaborated to made a music video. I don’t know if the footage of her with the Digg guys is new (I’d guess not) or video of her interviewing them some time in the past, but it’s cool to see Kevin and Alex in there.
I have no idea how/if the embedded video will work on the LJ crosspost (normally, I’d use a picture and have that link to the video, but I cannot seem to find a permalink for the video in Podshow’s weird interface.) Here goes… I just used the direct link to the Flash file as a permalink. It is not the best, as it opens to the full browser window size, but it’s better (in my opinion) than an embedded video sucking up browser/system resources.
Yes, the music isn’t really my style of music–it’s a little too happy-bubblegum-pop, and the video is a bit (okay, a lot) on the cheesy side. It’s still good to see a well-produced song+video arise so quickly from all of this.
More information is available at Chilling Effects and on this Digg post.
The best part of the day so far: sitting at a red light, with the top down, with a shower of cherry tree blossoms raining down upon me.
I took the plunge and hooked up netninja to the Google Apps for Domains stuff last night. After a couple of hours of bounced messages (oops–Dreamhost shuts down mail receiving if you fiddle with your MX records and although there’s a way to override that, I did not notice it at the time), everything is working fine.
Some of the best helper apps:
Google Notifier - sits in your pulldown menubar-thinger and notifies you of incoming mail (and upcoming appointments, but I don’t use that part)
Gmail+Growl - Since I already use Growl for system notifications, this is just a nice way to make everything consistent
Address Book to CSV Exporter - I was fearful of the process of loading my OS X Address Book database into Google, but this seriously did the import successfully before I even realized there weren’t more steps to perform. It’s seriously two steps–export and upload–with no mapping fields, confirmations, or any of that stuff.
Gmail Notifier Firefox Extension - The same as the OS X Gmail Notifier, above, only I use it on my Linux desktop at work
The keyboard shortcuts sort of remind me of Pine, which was the mail client I used exclusively until about 3 (yes, as recently as three!) years ago.
I especially like how the Gmail pages become “lite” versions when I access them from my Treo. It’s so much easier than trying to monkey about with the built-in IMAP mail client–at least for viewing mail; I have not yet tried sending anything (with or without cameraphone attachments.)
I am thinking of taking the plunge and hooking up netninja.com to Google Apps, but am a little hesitant because it seems like a big change and was wondering if anyone else on my LJ friend-list has gone through such a migration.
Given:
Right now, I use Apple’s Mail application to talk to my regular netninja POP account as well as fetching mail from my Gmail mailbox (I rarely go to the Gmail website directly.) I have the latest greatest build of SpamAssassin with the latest greatest rulesets running on Dreamhost to flag spam. This is my own build, as opposed to Dreamhost’s built-in SpamAssassin, which is a bit dated. Apple Mail, in turn, has its own spam filtering that catches things that SpamAssassin misses.
Questions:
* Presumably, the actual migration is pretty simple, consisting of tweaking an MX record. Right?
* Like my regular Gmail account, I can presumably access mail through the web interface as well as an offline “shadow” in my Apple Mail application just like I’m doing with Gmail, right? What about sending? Can I also compose and send from Apple Mail if I need to?
* I’m not totally hip on the Gmail label mechanism. Is there a way to set up a “view” (if that’s the right word) to show only messages with no label? With Apple Mail, I let messages come in to the general inbox, I read them, then I delete or drag them to a folder once I’m done (with done meaning “understood” or “taken action.”) 99% of the time my actual inbox is empty. With labels roughly equaling folders, I’d like a way to look at the “inbox” folder (i.e. stuff with no label in Gmail’s paradigm) and instantly know that I have no actionable (buzzword!) items because the list is empty.
* Other than no ads and bigger storage, is there a compelling reason for an individual to upgrade to Premier Edition? (feature matrix)
* How well does the spam filter work?
* How well does the Gmail interface handle super-chatty mailing lists? For instance, I am on a couple of developer mailing lists that I rarely read, but like to have around for searching/reference or to ask the occasional question. I’d really rather NOT see those by default.
* Can I put more than one domain under the same “account?” Let’s say that I move netninja.com to Google now and later we decide to move the email for Kim’s domain to Google Apps, too. It’d be great to have a single administrator and crossover for docs, spreadsheets, etc. across the two domains. I believe that this FAQ answer implies that, yes, this is probably possible.
Have there been any other “gotchas,” quirks, or tricks that you’ve run across that I have not addressed in the above questions?
April is here and the fool is me! Half of the clocks in the house have set themselves to the wrong time (including the alarm clock) because today would have been the traditional day to adjust for daylight savings time, had Shrub not signed the Energy Policy Act a few years ago to shift that date around.
See also: my previous rant
There’s an addendum to the bad pet food announcement that’s been in the news recently. Science Diet is also affected. It looks like it is a bunch of canned stuff with one particular type of dry food (which scared me for a second because out cats get both raw food and Science Diet Sensitive Stomach dry food, but that’s not part of the recall.) Our little critters used to get one of these affected Science Diet canned food flavors (Ocean Fish Dinner in Sauce), but we dropped that about 6 months to a year ago once we started with the raw diet.
Today, in WTF Google Alerts:
I didn’t make the URLs into links because I wasn’t too keen on bumping up the PageRank of a few of them by doing so. I added the rel="nofollow" thinger to the links, with the hope that it won’t add to their PageRank.
That was one f’ed up episode of Lost. Nice Forrest Gumpery with inserting Nikky and Palo into the crash scene, though. And the end had a satisfying, if disturbing, old-school Twilight Zone episode feeling in how it all got resolved.
P.S. …and it was cool to see some of the old (deceased) faces in the flashbacks.
Bad idea: upgrading your system from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 6 using nothing but the online updater (”yum”). In theory, this is supposed to work. In practice, not so much.
Bad idea: upgrading your broken system from Fedora Core 4-ish to Fedora Core 6 using scratched CDs and/or a drive that thinks perfectly fine CDs are scratched and halts half-way through
Bad idea: Burning a brand new Fedora Core 6 DVD to upgrade your half-Fedora-Core 4-ish-half-Fedora-Core-6 system to a full Fedora Core 6 system.
Best idea: deciding long ago that the /home directory should be on a different drive, reformatting the root filesystem, leaving the /home filesystem intact, and installing a fresh Fedora Core 6, a fresh set of ARM and PPC cross-compilers, and whatever else that might have gotten wiped away. With this scenario, I didn’t even have to reinstall my Firefox add-ons since they’re safely stored in my home directory.
Of course, because of all of this, lost about a half-day of time on Friday and a half-day today, while waiting for percentage bars and crossing my fingers and such. I can do some things on my laptop, but there are still a number of things I can’t do there because I don’t have trusted OS X versions of the tools.
Growing up, I had several Vietnamese and Chinese friends. When going over to any of their houses, I always encountered a strange smell that I had not known from anywhere else. Much like old folks homes have a particular smell and hospitals have a certain smell, I assumed this was Asian-house odor and never really mentioned or questioned it.
In my [late-]teenage years, I learned that “Asian-house smell” has a name and that name is “garlic.” I was no stranger to garlic as a kid, but all of the garlic my family used came in spice canisters: garlic salt, garlic powder, and the like. It would get tenderized into steaks that would be grilled on the barbecue. It would get added to margarine-covered bread to make “garlic bread.” I honestly had no idea what fresh roasted garlic smelled like until I was nearly an adult. It smells quite different than the dried, powdered form. It smells like Asian houses.
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