One of Movable Type’s many features is the option to send an email notification for a new post. I’ve known about the feature ever since I installed Movable Type, but never bothered to do anything with it. You see, there’s the issue of unsubscribing. When a person who was at one time subscribed wants to […]

The French want Americans to stop picking on them. Global warming theory may not be true. Spammers being sued by FTC. I was going to make a joke about how these new items were related, but couldn’t come up with anything.

In an old Simpsons episode (The Otto Show) Homer is waiting for Bart and Milhouse in his car and turns on the radio. Spanish Flea is playing and he sings the following lyrics. There was a little Spanish flea. A record star he thought he’d be. He heard of singers like Beatles, The Chipmunks he’d […]

Today’s Pearls Before Swine hit a little close to home. The convenience of ATMs mean I rarely see the inside of a bank or talk with a teller. I fuel up in silence now that I can use my debit card at the pumps. The automated checkout will eliminate yet another chance for human interaction […]

An American and a Russian will be returning to the space station later this month to relieve the current residents. The article caught my eye because the Clark Planetarium, which opened two weeks ago, has a 3D IMAX movie, Space Station. The movie describes how they built pieces of the space station in different areas […]

Always On has published part one of an interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. When asked why he bought Pyra Labs, creators of Blogger, he said, What we really bought was a team. With these little companies, the asset that you get is the knowledge in the people’s heads, and that’s what we care […]

In a magazine I was reading it discusses whether teenage guys or girls are more dangerous as passengers. According to two different studies, the higher risk combinations were male or female drivers with male passengers. The presence of one male passenger almost doubled the death rate per 1,000 crashes. The lower risk combinations were male […]

Andrew Carlssin invested $800 in the stock market. Within two weeks his portfolio was worth over $350 million. SEC officials arrested Carlssin claiming he must have had illegal insider information. Carlssin claimed the reason for his atypical success was simple: he’s a time traveler from 2256. SEC officials say it’s preposterous, but can’t explain why […]

Research on how spammers get your email address indicates the most common way is through high-traffic web sites. It also showed that masking your email address with HTML entities was an effective way to avoid spam. (via /.)

There’s a graphical boot process for the Linux kernel. (via hack the planet)

Free web site tools from Hitbox. They require you to register, but it’s free. Funny how the first tool has a spell checker, but under ‘Custom Meta Tag Generator’ it has a spelling error (“Createing meta tags has never been so easy…”). They should use some of their own medicine.

As a followup to my earlier post about true type fonts in Linux, Bitstream has released the fonts. I downloaded them and had to read up on xfs, chkfontpath and xfontsel. The permissions were the problem. Once I made them globally readable, whammo, I had slick fonts for all my apps. (via /.) The instructions […]

Here’s a fun puzzle to test your powers of observation. How many F’s are there?

I typically learn through examples, so the three column CSS examples using float and absolute are ideal. The CSS support charts are also useful to determine what browsers will render certain styles. (via zeldman)

Opera has released version 7.10 beta for Linux.

Do you remember what toys you used to play with as a kid? I remember toys like the lite brite, G.I. Joe action figures and Star Wars ships and figures. I had forgotten about Simon, Hoppity Hop and Speak & Spell, but toys of the eighties brought back some fond memories. MeFi has even more […]

Exercise myth debunked. “Moderate exercise such as half an hour of brisk walking five times a week is unlikely to prevent an early death from heart disease, say researchers.”

The Psychology of Programmers (via roberto via slashdot)

I’ve been reading Dave Barry’s blog since its inception, bunnies and all, and I’m disappointed. His column continues to amuse me, but I had hoped the blog would do the same. Instead of writing his own humor, he simply publishes strange and humorous links that are sent to him. Although it doesn’t detract from the […]

Listen to music written and performed by members of MetaFilter. The original idea was met with enthusiasm and the site was launched today. “Electronica, rock, folk, it’s all there.” — Matt Haughey

The Internet Anagram Server can provide hours of amusement. Find out what words exist in your name, your blog title or any number of other phrases. Also, the folks at wordsmith are trying to determine if the Jabberwocky poem by Lewis Carroll, is one big anagram. I don’t think they’ll ever be able to tell […]

I bought a new pair of windshield wipers about six months ago when the old pair began to chatter. I decided to go with the Bosch Micro Edge Excel wipers, as they appeared to be the Cadillacs of the windshield wiper line. So far, I am very impressed. They have not chattered once, even if […]

A side-by-side comparison between Mozilla and Internet Explorer. Which would you pick?

For someone with a web site, traffic is a double-edged sword. At first, you like to increase your traffic and are ecstatic when people visit your site. You write a witty essay or create a funny movie and visitors begin to come. It makes you feel like you’ve been able to give something back to […]

In Going nuclear over nucular, Andy Lamey sticks up for George W. Bush’s pronunciation, but not his policies. I have been guilty of considering myself superior because I noticed someone’s grammatical mistake, but Lamey makes a good point. Language is evolutionary and those who refuse to change are not necessarily correct. I have resolved to […]

The Webby Award nominees have been announced, and you can vote for your favorites.

When I visit a web site for the first time, there are a few things that will keep me from returning. One is auto-refreshing the page, ostensibly to boost page views and increase advertising revenue. I don’t mind banner ads, but having the entire page refresh every minute or so shows they are willing to […]

Jakob Nielson wants users to be able to control their own font sizes, but that’s easier said than done. I made all of the font sizes relative on my site, but it was a different size depending on the browser and OS. I don’t like the idea of forcing a certain size font on everyone, […]

If you live in the US, remember to adjust your clocks one hour ahead before going to bed tonight. Or you could wake up at 2am, adjust your clock, then go back to sleep. I would recommend the former.

Ole Eichhorn comments on how to manage your email and still be productive.

How to write a plugin for Movable Type. (via movabletype.org)

Being a juggler myself, I can assure you that this flash juggling tutorial is not the same as juggling, but it’s a novel use of flash for educational purposes. (via mefi)

If you create a new web site and want to get listed in Google, it would be wise to fix any potential problems. How can you tell what problems there might be? By using the poodle predictor of course. (via evolt) One of the reasons I prefer not to use frames, javascript, images, or flash […]

Now there’s a slick way to show you’ve taken the time to validate your pages without using images. Slim W3C buttons, done entirely with style sheets. They look good in all the browsers I’ve tested so far (except Netscape 4.79 on Linux, but that’s no surprise). (via mark via zeldman)

I’ve already seen a few mentions of the day of practical jokes, but there are three variations of the spelling. 1. April Fools Day 2. April Fool’s Day 3. April Fools’ Day My newly purchased dictionary and dictionary.com say April Fools’ Day, but my almanac says April Fool’s Day. Two sites about the history of […]