The New York Times Is Bad Medicine
In my opinion there aren’t many people who would argue that laughter isn’t good medicine. Experience has shown that people often use laughter to try and soften an uncomfortable situation. When the dust settles after a bad situation or a stupid mistake, there is nothing like a good laugh to heal a broken spirit. If you happen to be blessed with a well rounded sense of humor you probably find the comics in the Sunday paper to be of exceptional importance.
How can a world renown paper like the New York Times not have a comics section?
My observation and opinion of the Times may be frivolous but a thoughtful and humorous comic can shed more light on the world better than any well written piece of dry reporting ever could.
Running With The Fireflies
Through the dark,
under lofty tree tops,
across the night shadows
cast by the moon and the stars,
I ran.
The temperature,
wasn’t hot or even all that cold.
Invigorating, it spurred me on.
I ran.
Everywhere,
and yet nowhere.
The fireflies teased me with light,
Left, right, no… straight ahead,
Keep up, run faster if you can.
I run…
…. as fast as I can.
Running With The Fireflies by Jared Bratu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Thoughts of a Gmail Convert
Recently I converted my mail client from Lotus Notes to Gmail. Sure, I had a Gmail address but only so I could enjoy the benefits of Google Wave and Google Voice.
Lotus Notes has always had a soft spot in my geek heart because it pioneered mail file replication and provided advanced search queries. Unfortunately it lacked in a streamlined client and to run a Domino server for myself just wasn’t feasible.
Google Apps promised a solution to cover my email, scheduling, and more for only $50/yr. Considering an Exchange account from 1and1 is almost $84/yr the trade up to Google Apps seemed attractive considering all of the features available.
My initial evaluation of the Gmail interface have been surprising, negatively surprising. This isn’t a gripe session and overall I’m impressed with Gmail and Google Apps but I’m shocked at the lack of certain features.
Notably, how to keep labeled items out of the inbox. Thanks to David Tan for demonstrating the magical setup of filters to arrange the inbox.
Gmail supports Active Sync for connecting my outlook data to Windows Mobile phones but the connector won’t sync my phone tasks with the Gmail tasks.
Oh, and no HTML embedded signatures? Gesh.
One of the advantages to Gmail is the numerous and widely used methods of checking email, POP, IMAP, Webmail, Exchange, Active Sync, etc so in the long run the lack of features in the Gmail interface shouldn’t be a stumbling block.
More to follow as I probe the depths of the Google Apps world.
Brazilian BBQ
Technically it was an American Brazilian BBQ and it was in the New York suburbs… but hey, it was still a Brazilian BBQ. To validate the experience I tried grilled chicken hearts. Before you think “Eww, I could never eat that”, please tell me what part of a pig a hot dog is made from. Stumped? So don’t knock chicken hearts. Think of them as a fine piece of meat encased in a heart shaped sausage casing. *Mmmm delicious*
All kidding aside the BBQ was wonderful and I found myself enjoying the Brazilian style better than the American counter part. The American style is to cook a big steak and then slice it up on piece at a time. The Brazilian style is to have smaller finger picking size tasty morsels. *Smacks lips* tasty.
The company was as equally wonderful, if not more so! :) What a delightful time. Thanks Margot for posting some great pics. Check them out at her Interior Design blog.
How Many Petabytes?
A customer sent in a 15 gigabyte zip file and I was tasked with finding a place to store the uncompressed files. Using the standard Windows 7 zip folder to drag the files out onto a network share I was greeted with this lovely message.
A terabyte might not have been unreasonable but but 11 petabytes seemed a bit excessive. A second attempt with a proper unzip program resulted in a 67 GB uncompressed archive… whew!