If you have spare Gmail invites lying about, here’s something to consider:
http://www.gmail4troops.com/
http://www.gmailforthetroops.com/
Seems like a good idea… Given that I mentioned it in my feedback to Gmail. 
Monthly Archives: June 2004
Late comment on Reagan
I was always ambivalent about Reagan. As a small-c conservative, I never thought replacing “tax and spend” with “spend and borrow” made much sense. On the other hand, he did have that famous line from the debates:
“(A)re you better off than you were four years ago?”
But an awful lot of current day “conservatives”, when they bother to pay attention to Reagan at all, tend to quote that line by itself. In the recent rush of Reagan articles, I saw the whole paragraph Reagan said at the time, and you can readily see why supporters of the man I call the Anti-Reagan, George W. Bush, tend to avoid it:
“Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls… and make a decision. I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?”
As far as I can tell, Dubya is 0 for 6 on Reagan’s checklist.
Absolutely amazing CGI.
While I’m referring to folks from MSFT, even if elliptically, Robert Scoble points to the jaw-dropping home-made computer-graphic animation movie This Wonderful Life. I’m not 100% sure if I understand the ending, but this was a 23-month labor of love by a guy with off-the-shelf software, an AMD Athlon-based system, and more patience than Job (probably). The results will amaze you.
Note: The movie is big (26MB), longish for online (I think about 10 mins), and in QuickTime (click the link if you need the player).
The dedicated web site for This Wonderful Life, which has info on its creator, Liam Kemp, and stills (but not the movie itself) may be found here. Note again: That may be the most intensive web site I’ve yet seen for the Flash Player by Macromedia. Given the movie, what a surprise, eh?
Joel Spolsky tells us why MSFT is doomed…
…and it has nothing to do with Linux. (Or Open Source more generally.)
Great quote, which Joel puts on his front page:
“There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp.”
Geeky, but very much worth it if that’s your kink.
Feedback I recently sent to Gmail
Anyway… OK, guys, I dig the 1000MB of storage. I dig having
Google’s search engine being able to search that potential archive.
But to make that storage useful *today*, and not years from now, I
really think your next step should be to develop ways to import –
*and export* — archives from other programs into and out of Gmail.
My e-mail archives go back to 1996. They take up about 200MB of space
– easily fitting Gmail’s 1000MB. But they’re in Eudora, and I can’t
import them in. More than that, Eudora’s search routines are clumsy
and slow. Making my e-mail “google-able” was a big attraction for me
of Gmail.
I also emphasize the ability to *export* because, in my years in the
computer business (since 1980), how much a vendor will let you *back
out* or unsubscribe from their service shows just how confident they
are of their product. Microsoft, back in the days when they were
trying to catch up to Lotus, WordPerfect, and Borland, clearly learned
this lesson in how they built their filters into Word, Excel, and
Access.
Here’s a suggestion list for programs to support for imp/exp filters:
Outlook, Entourage, Eudora, Pegasus. Online services and competing
free e-mail services should be supported as well — Hotmail,
Mailblocks, Lycos, Yahoo, AOL. For that matter, there’s a *huge*
captive audience in the US military, who has a web-based program for
the Army called “AKO” (and I just sent an invite to an Army buddy of
mine).
So, I hope you get the basic idea. I’ll bet it’s among your Most
Requested Features, but hey… here’s one more vote in the ballot box.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Yours,
– Hal O’Brien
Listen up!
Happy birthday to pecunium!
All of you, right now… To the birthday boy, march!
Your tax dollars at work.
Lance Knobel at http://www.davosnewbies.com/ makes this extensive quote. I think the travesty it appears to be speaks for itself:
“As some of you know, I (Beverly Schlee) make artists books as a member of a group called Critical Art Ensemble. Besides books, we also make videos and do performance art. Lately, the topic of much of our artwork has been to make people aware of genetically modified food. Recently, Hope Kurtz, who wrote most of the text for the books, died suddenly of heart failure. Her husband, Steve, is also in the group, called 911. The paramedics saw some of the props for our performance art in his house, including petri dishes and a machine that analyzes food for genetically modified ingredients, and called the FBI. The FBI, armed with the Patriot Act, searched Steve’s house, office, took his artwork, his wife’s body, and even locked up his cat. Steve is a professor of art at SUNY Buffalo. He is going to be indicted before a grand jury on June 15 on charges of possessing materials that can be used for bioterrorism. The rest of the group has been subpoenaed. So far, I have not, but the FBI was in my neighborhood on Saturday, asking the neighbors about me. The whole story can be read at http://www.caedefensefund.org/ .”
Long lost college days
The thing about breaking a leg, see, is that it means you have to hobble about balancing yourself on the other foot.
Which has been reminding me lately that I wish I’d been able to stick it out with Francis Zold, the longtime fencing coach at Pomona College. I took fencing for about 3 weeks before dropping out, and I really wish now I’d learned a bit more.
{lunge, parry, whip-around of the walker}
