Jay McGavren’s Journal

Getting distracted by too many e-mails during the day, but don’t want to close the client in case your boss wants something?

Create a rule in Outlook (or a filter in GMail or Thunderbird) that finds e-mails from your boss/wife/friend’s address. Have it forward them to the SMS address for your cell phone (usually number@provider.com). Then just ignore or turn off the new mail indicator for your mail client. You won’t have your workflow interrupted just to read about new specials in the cafeteria, and you can impress your boss by responding immediately to his e-mails at 8 PM on Sunday (from the comfort of home).

Be cool.

Be nice.

Of course, if you don’t know what “cool” or “nice” are exactly, or *why* you should be cool and nice, you may want to read the Gita:

Jack Hawley - The Bhagavad Gita: a Walkthrough for Westerners

I heard it is one of the core texts of the Hindu religion, and encapsulates the wisdom of all India over thousands of years, so I picked it up. And as long as you filter out the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo (”Atma”, etc.), it really does seem like a recipe for better living.

But in an effort to drill that wisdom into harder-headed readers, the Gita does repeat itself quite a bit. So if you don’t purchase it, meditate on the above two lines. No, seriously, close your eyes and think really hard about them, preferably once a day. You’ll come to many of the same conclusions the book does.

In the next decade or so, I expect humanity to discover whether the same forces that gave rise to life on Earth exist on other worlds as well.

If we find that they do, then the fact that we haven’t discovered intelligent life on other worlds (or rather, that they haven’t revealed themselves to us) is rather worrisome.

Here’s why: humanity is developing several technologies that could conceivably wipe our entire race out. I’m thinking specifically of custom-engineered viruses, but experiments in super-hot plasma and miniature manmade black holes are worrisome too.

Now if life arises naturally everywhere in the universe, the question is, where are the other sentient races? My fear is that the natural progression of technology is such that, around the time a race develops weapons of mass destruction, someone somewhere loses control of theirs. Poof. Another civilization gone, around about the time they would have made contact with the others.

One encouraging sign, though, is that we haven’t seen any debris left by prior advanced civilizations on Earth. If there had been one, we’d have seen something by now. But what if planet-eating black holes or plasma or self-replicating nanomachines are the culprit on other worlds? Those wouldn’t allow future races (or any life) to evolve on the same planet twice.

Orbitz “customer care” has been e-mailing us every two weeks to notify us of changes to our flight itinerary to Omaha. Not a change in carriers or flight numbers, but arrival and departure times.

The average change is about 3 minutes. I have to carefully compare the new to the old each time to verify it, though. :P If buying this early weren’t saving us hundreds of dollars, I might be annoyed.

Lessee…

* AJAXey goodness.
* Management for photos, audio, and video as well as text/journal entries.
* A single RSS (er, Atom) feed for all my friends. (Not sure if that will contain their photos as well as their writings.)
* Bulleted lists. :)

I am definitely liking this Vox thing. If there’s a tool to let me import my LiveJournal posts, I’m switching and never looking back.

http://images.southparkstudios.com/games/create/

Hey, neat! Google has introduced hosting for open-source projects, complete with Subversion repositories! Getting started is a LOT simpler than with SourceForge, although they don’t let you customize your project page much.

Still, it’s perfect for a small project. As a trial run, I released my iTunes Perl control script under the GPL. (I’d been meaning to do it for months anyway.) Project page is here.

If you haven’t experimented with the online photo printing services, now would be a good time to start. I simply selected all my starred photos in Picasa, clicked the “order prints” button, and they were uploaded to the service of my choice (SnapFish) for printing.

$90 got us about 600 4×6 prints, and since it was only our best work, anyone flipping through them should be sufficiently wowed. (And no guilt for throwing away crappy shots that you paid money to have developed.) In one fell swoop, it eliminates the last remaining weakness of going digital: no physical prints for people to flip through.

Oh, and we also created a photo book of our honeymoon, with one for the wedding soon to follow. Not manually affixing photos into an album is a Good Thing.

We took Lenny over to his “girlfriend” Madison’s house to go swimming yesterday… I was very careful to apply sunblock, everywhere except my back. Ouch.

1. Join del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/).
2. Add del.icio.us bookmarks for a few of your favorite sites/articles.
3. Go to your bookmarks page, and click one or more of the “saved by X other people” links. Choose ones with the lowest number of matches, because that will weed out a lot of people with tastes that differ from yours.
4. Click one or more of the user names in the “posting history” on the right.
5. Review the articles they’ve posted. If you like what you see, click the “add X to your network” link at the top of the page. Favor people who have a low overall post count (less spam), and who have posted in the last month or so (no dead accounts).
6. Go to http://del.icio.us/network to view the articles posted by everyone you’ve added. There’s an RSS feed link at the bottom of that page, but I can’t get it to import to Google Reader at the moment.

My network:
http://del.icio.us/network/nephariuz