I use Gmail for my personal email and Outlook 2003 at work.

Once I'd been using Gmail for a while, I started displaying my work mail in Outlook by conversation, which is somewhat similar to Gmail. One difference, however, is that in Outlook sent emails are not added to the conversation, only received ones. So, at work I still find myself frequently digging through my 'Sent Items' folder to find emails that I contributed to an email thread.

In Gmail, I use tags for organizing my email. At work, I organize my email by putting it into folders. But in Outlook, if a new reply comes in for a conversation that I've moved to a folder, the reply goes to my Inbox and is not displayed with its entire conversation until I move it to the same folder. Frustrating.

...for every time I've helped someone sort out domain registration and web site hosting issues (explaining how name servers work, how to get the domain registrar to change name servers, etc.), I'd have, well, at least $20. What a pain for a non-geek to manage. (I just did it again, if you couldn't figure that out)

Back in October, I blogged about one feature of iTunes/iPod that I didn't like, in regard to podcasts. And then, a month later, I blogged about a solution, which was really a workaround.

Today I received an email from a new iPod owner who had run up against the same problem. He found my original post in his search for a solution. After he ran across the intended, solution, he emailed it to me:

On the iPod's 'Podcast' panel in iTunes, I had totally overlooked the options in the "Sync ... episodes of" dropdown. The solution to my problem would be to select on of the "X most recent" options. Since this is one setting for all podcasts, it might result in more podcast episodes being synched than I need for some podcasts, but at least it avoids the issue of an episode being removed from my iPod as soon as I've listened to any part of it.

When I walked into the office kitchen the other morning to get my coffee, several of my coworkers were huddled in front of the snack vending machine, talking excitedly. It seems that one of my coworkers, let's call him Ray, wanted to buy a Pop Tart for breakfast, but the Pop Tart in the front had slid to the side and looked like the coiled steel thing might not push it all the way out.

The group discussed whether they thought "Ray" could shake the machine enough to make the Pop Tart fall if it didn't come out, whether he could possibly get his arm through the slot up into the machine, etc. I thought they were going to take bets.

Finally, "Ray" deposited his coins. There was a tense silence in the room as the Pop Tart moved toward the edge but not all the way. "Ray" shook the machine a few times and it fell. The group cheered.

That drama was the highlight of our day at the office.

I've owned my iPod Nano for almost a year, but I've just recently started listening to podcasts. I've found one annoying behavior. I have my iPod settings for podcasts set to 'Sync unread podcasts.' But as soon as I start to listen to a podcast, it gets marked as listened to. So, the next time I sync, this podcast gets removed from my iPod. Apple mentions this issue and suggests a workaround:

Once an episode is finished downloading, a blue dot appears to the left of the podcast, indicating that it has not yet been played. As soon as you begin to play the podcast, the blue dot disappears. When the blue dot disappears, it’s a reminder that the episode will be automatically removed from your iPod the next time you sync it with your computer. If you want to make sure the episode stays on your iPod, right-click it and choose “mark as unread”.

OK, that gets the job done, but every time I sync, I have to remember which podcasts are partially listened to and make sure that they don't get deleted from my iPod. I wish there were some way to indicate "Only sync podcasts that I've listened to to the end"

Update January 11, 2007: Please see the solution to this problem.

Sprint sends a free mobile phone to well known geek blogger Joel Spolsky, in hopes of generating some positive buzz. Joel tries out the phone and then posts his review: he rips it to shreds.

After his shredding, Joel concludes that maybe the phone was just not designed for an alpha geek like him, rather for a younger audience--he says 4 year olds, more likely for teens. But if that's the case, then why in the world did Sprint send it to him, not to some well known teen (or four-year-old) blogger? I suspect that this morning, someone at Sprint marketing is dreading the request from his boss to come to the boss' office.

I'm the guy who always points out how irrational many people's fears are. Fear of terrorists while flying? You stand a far greater chance of dying in your car on the way to the airport. I'm the life of the party, I tell you!

Anyway, along those same lines, Christopher Null has compared the chance of dying because your Dell laptop battery caught fire to other common risks. Long story short: if you're hysterical about your battery, don't get out of bed (though, according to the post, your chance of dying by falling out of bed is higher than dying due to laptop battery failure).

So, whenever I get a new computer, one of the first things I do in setting it up is to install the evaluation version of WinZip. I've never run across anyone who has ever bought a WinZip license. If you have done so or know someone who has done so, let me know. I'm doubtful that WinZip has ever sold a license.

If this story is true, it is a case of astoundingly poor application development.

This is why you need testing, people!

I'm no great technology predictor, but I've been saying for some time that flash-based drives will be replacing traditional hard drives in portable computers soon. Well, Samsung has introduced a 32 GB flash drive that's being positioned as a challenger to traditional hard drives. I can't wait for a laptop with one of these things!

I got a 4GB iPod Nano earlier this week (thanks, Uncle Jim!), and I have to say, I understand the success of iPods/iTunes: Apple simply got a lot right. Just as with their computers, Apple took advantage of being able to control the entire experience: music management with iTunes, the seamlessly integrated iTunes Music Store, and of course the iPod hardware and software.

I'm a big geek, so I'm not fazed by occasional complexities and difficulties of hardware and software, but I can see the Apple appeal: it just works with fewer problems. I guess that's worth the higher price point for many people.

As a card-carrying geek, Firefox is my as my browser of choice, and I use it to access my personal email via Google's Gmail. I really like Gmail, but there is one little issue that was bugging me: a lack of a 'delete' button. A couple of the most commonly used actions get their own buttons in Gmail, but others, including Delete, are relegated to a dropdown. To delete a message, I had to either check it on the list page or view it, and then select 'Delete' from the actions dropdown.

The other day I thought: I have Greasemonkey installed on Firefox. I wonder if anyone has created a user script to solve this problem. Sure enough, it took me about a minute to find and install a Greasemonkey user script to insert a Delete button into Gmail!

I really want a remote controlled lawnmower! I can picture myself sitting on the deck and sipping a cold margarita while I mow. Unfortunately, it's still a little out of my price range.

I just remembered that this year is my 10-year anniversary on the web. Unbelievable. In 1995, I was working at Logos Corporation in New Jersey. I remember when we got dial-up internet access for the office and someone at the office started showing us web sites on Mosaic. A contractor working for the company then started developing an interface for our company's application to allow users to submit documents for translation via the web. Pretty cutting edge stuff at the time.

As soon as Windows 95 was released, Katie and I bought our first Windows home PC (We'd had a Macintosh SE since 1986 or so), and we got dial-up Internet access at home. We lived in the sticks in New Jersey, and at first, the only ISP that had local dial-up numbers was Compuserve. Shortly thereafter, a local ISP started offering local dial-up numbers and we switched to them. I used 'tippiedog' as my login for that account, and I've been using it as an online identifier ever since.

A couple of months ago, I did some research and polling of my fellow geeks, and decided that it was finally time to move to broadband telephone service for our home. With AT&T providing our local, toll and long distance service, our monthly phone bills were $80-100.

I signed up for a VoIP account with Vonage--unlimited calling for $25/month. Vonage promptly sent me a LinkSys router, assigned me a temporary telephone number, set up my 911 emergency service, and started the process of having our existing home telephone number moved from AT&T to Vonage.

Well, after dragging their feet for two months, AT&T finally came through a few days ago on the number transfer. When I got home from work that day, I went outside and took the very satisfying action of unplugging our house from the telephone grid. Then I went back in, plugged the router into the phone jack in the study, and voila, it was done.

Katie is our primary telephone user (as in 99%! I hate talking on the telephone), and I was concerned that she would be displeased with some unforeseen differences in our service, but so far, she hasn't detected any changes at all.

We're saving a lot of money and we no longer have to have uncomfortable conversations about the amount of time/money Katie spends on long-distance calls with her mother. I call that a win-win situation!

Ed Felten has an informative blog post about the U.S. government's proposed radio-enabled passports. After a short discussion of some of the potential problems with this technology, and why the government didn't go with a technology that reads passport info only on contact, Ed concludes:

It seems that the decision to use contactless technology was made without fully understanding its consequences, relying on technical assurances from people who had products to sell. Now that the problems with that decision have become obvious, it's late in the process and would be expensive and embarrassing to back out. In short, this looks like another flawed technology procurement program.

Paul Rademacher created an application that combines real estate listings from Craigs List with Google Maps. It's really cool.

But Dan Hartung points out one cool feature of Paul's application that any real estate site could benefit from: overlapping price ranges. On most real estate sites, the value ranges on the dropdown are discrete prices ranges, e.g., $50-100K, $100K-150K, $150K-$200K. In Paul's application, however, the ranges overlap: $50K-$150K, $100K-$200K, etc.

I remember when we were house hunting a couple of years ago, our price range was right at one of the price borders for one of the real estate sites. It was a real hassle to have to check out two complete price ranges. Paul's solution would have helped us.

Somehow I ended up at the web site for some movie that's supposed to be released in 2006, and the geometric shapes at the bottom of the page caught my eye: mystery meat navigation! I know it's still around, but I hadn't thought about the term 'mystery meat navigation' in several years.

OK, so Google AdSense context-sensitive ads are not always perfect:

I sure hope those refer to two different types of organs.

I was just reading a blog post about how threatened 'credentialed' journalists feel about bloggers--in particular, since bloggers were given passes to the Democratic National Convention.

Some of the people who commmented on this post postulated that 'objectivity' is the heart of the matter. Traditional journalists offer 'objectivity' and criticize bloggers for their subjectivity.

But in a post-modern world, objectivity is a questionable concept. Bloggers appeal to us precisely BECAUSE they are subjective and admit it. We suspect traditional journalists because they claim objectivity, but we know that true objectivity is not possible. At least we have a good idea what biases a particular blogger offers.

This is great!