2002 March

Guess who I met today? Steve Jobs. No kidding. I didn't have any business cards on me, and he was rushing out of the store at the time – but I did meet him and shake his hand at the Palo Alto Apple store. Ask Gretchen if you don't believe me. I shall meet him again – come hell or high water. And next time, he'll know who I am. Now, to further prove that I'm not abandoning the wonderful world of Windows, here's a video documentary I created with my Canon PowerShot G2 and XP's crappy-ass Movie Maker. Here I am, iBuying an iMac.

Read more on Meeting Steve Jobs…

Yahoo Groups – “opt in” marketing settings set to “Yes” without customer notice, resulting in large increases of spam. Apparently, when Yahoo was “down” recently, in addition to whatever else they did, they also reset everyone's marketing preferences back to “Yes”. These settings not only apply to Spam, but also to junk snail mail and phone solicitation as well. Below are the instructions on how to reset yours back to your original settings. Here's what you need to do:

Read more on We Love Yahoo Spam…

“These are the people who stand in line at McD's staring at the menuboard with their mouths gaping because they don't have enough brain-power to keep their mouths shut and think at the same time. Next time you are in a fast food place, take a look around at all the gaping mouths and scrunched up noses staring at the menuboard. You'll be amazed. Now close your mouth and be thankful you aren't one of them.”

Read more on The Commander's Thoughts…

I am a clinical psychologist so maybe a little info on OCD can help. First, many people confuse Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). With the O-C Personality disorder, we are taliking about long-standing personality traits of orderliness, cleanliness, etc. These people tend to have a personality that has traits that significantly interfere with functioing (i.e., they consistently experience problems – usually in interatctions with others- due to their excessive traits of perfectionism, orderliness, and need for control. They tend to be preoccuppied with details, lists, rules, and order. They may be unable to complete a task because of overly strict standards, and can be excessively devoted to work (to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships), and are often described as overconscientious, scruplulous and inflexible. They may have difficulty throwing out old/worn-out objects and be reluctant to delegate tasks to others. A general rigidity and subborness is noticed.

Read more on From Robert (Bob) H. Bean, Ph.D….

I'm getting the M8535LL/B (high-end) iMac tomorrow in Palo Alto. Can ya join me, if only for kicks? Especially if you have a digital video camera on hand; we can record the process and get it on my TV show. I have a luncheon at noon, but plan on being down there around 3:00PMish. If anyone thinks they can make it, let me know ASAP.

Read more on It's Official…

“I'm sure I won't be the only one of your South African subscribers to point out that, in this country, the 5 1/4 inch floppy is referred to as a 'floppy' and the 3½-inch floppy is referred to as a stiffy / stiffie. So, a new PC may be advertised as having, among other things, a 1.44 Meg stiffy drive.” [Conrad Baudin]

Read more on I've Got A Stiffy…

Now's as good a time as any to tell you what I've been up to for the past week or so. Of course, a few women WHO I WILL NOT BE NAMING IN THIS SENTENCE have already leaked the URL. Big sloppy wet kisses to Cheyenne,
Christine,
Robyn, and
Meryl. They understand there's a madness to my method. So, anyway, the new resource is something called GnomeTomes. The idea is simple: eBooks. Yeah, so? 50 tips, 7 formats, 5 bucks. The Q&A links in the sidebar should explain everything. And yes, it's being driven by MovableType. Right now, we're only accepting PayPal purchases. However, by this time next week, we'll be able to accept credit cards and other forms of electronic payments. We hope to have more GnomeTomes soon. Most of which will be submitted by people who don't work for Lockergnome. And most of which will not be tech related. And yes, we'll have an affiliate program – so those of you with Web sites and newsletters can actually benefit from the success of this new project, too. How's that for tasty? Regardless, I hope you take a look, pick up a Tome or two, and then submit your review for the world to see.

Read more on Who Let The Cat Out…

The ProScope brings unprecedented flexibility and excitement to the learning process. Gone are the frustrations of conventional microscopes. Finally, the teacher and student can focus on what is important. Find something you like? With the press of a button, the camera captures the image and stores it as a file in the location of your choosing. The powerful software included with The ProScope provides sophisticated video capture as well. With these options, the possible uses of The ProScope are endless.

Read more on This Thing Is Awesome…

Ev is on tomorrow. Watch or die.

“In today's newsletter, you mentioned a popup / ad blocker called Pow.
Seems interesting, but I found an app a while back that I think is
really just the best I have ever seen. I use Windows on my desktop
machine, but in my heart I am a UNIX geek. I have been looking for
something that can do ad / popup blocking on my Windows box for a long
time, and one day I found The Proximitron. Not only is it (essentially)
free, but it can block anything & everything. AND, its entirely based
on Perl style regular expressions, so adding your own exceptionally
powerful filters can be done. I even have mine set up to block popups
that don't come from my clicking the mouse (meaning, if I didn't click
it, it doesn't popup). I think your readers might be interested. Its
available here. [Matt Cowger]

Read more on The Proximitron…

Auction Informant sits quietly in the system tray and monitors the items you (or any seller) are selling on eBay. When any item receives a bid or a bid retraction, it will send an email message alerting you. It can even send text messages to your wireless phone or pager. The program can monitor the accounts of multiple sellers simultaneously (keep track of your competitors), and can send messages to any email addresses you specify. Always know when you receive bids on your items. This application updates itself automatically from the internet when a new version is available.

Read more on Auction Informant…

The object of this game is to guess the sequence of a number of colored pegs the computer has selected at random. You can select with how many different colors and how many columns you want to play (3 – 7 each). With the number of colors and/or columns you can raise the degree of difficulty.

Read more on MasterMind by Christine Moerth…

I wasn't expecting to spend so much time setting up a new Web site (which hasn't gone live yet). Once the template is in place, everything else is cake. Jake and I were mulling over our options this afternoon. We were lamenting the fact that we couldn't add some type of “Ratings” feature to this yet-to-launch resource. He brought up my blogging tool, Movable Type. Duh. Why didn't I think of that? Worked like a charm. Almost. I may not have been using the software correctly, but it kept clobbering templates when I'd link to direct files. It's difficult to explain exactly what happened. Suffice it to say, I lost two hours of productivity tonight. Live and learn. Now, I'm a little behind, but quite determined to get this out before I head to bed. I'm nutty that way. I'm also very tired.

Read more on Sleepy Squared…

Zzz