Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center

Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center

My youngest daughter started using GMail as her primary mail tool. After taking note, I forwarded all her paulbegley.com mail to GMail and noticed that it did a great job as a SPAM filter, even though the mail was forwarded.

My first GMail extension was GTDMail, which adds a lot of GTD functionality to GMail.

This article takes things a step further, with notes about extending GMail with Twitter and IMified.

White House Disaster Drill Supposes 10-City IED Strike - washingtonpost.com

White House Disaster Drill Supposes 10-City IED Strike - washingtonpost.com

I have had a difficult time putting my finger on exactly why George W. Bush annoys me so much. Until today, I would have said it was because he is the least articulate president in my lifetime. Listening to him speak is physically painful for me.

But no, after reading the Washington Post article, I had a revelation. The reason Bush bothers me so is because he never seems to do the 'right thing'. He does whatever he wants to do at the time. I believe this is the way he was raised and he believes his priorities, like running and now riding a bike, take a priority over things like a White House disaster drill. I guess he felt like it shouldn't apply to him since in the event of an emergency *someone* would tell him what to do.

I'm also disappointed that every where I look the administration which has consistently disappointed me, is headed to new lows on a weekly basis.

MAKE: Blog: Talented teen transforms cooking oil into fuel

MAKE: Blog: Talented teen transforms cooking oil into fuel

I'm thrilled that a high school geek is getting attention for doing a great job in his own backyard. Maybe this will shame our elected officials to figure out that we should be funding a little more grass roots research (and maybe engineering students).

The Make link above also includes information to make small batches (liters) of biodiesel. Remember, this isn't the same thing as a 'grease car' which burns filtered veg oil, this is creating high quality, clean diesel from non-oil sources.

United Press International - NewsTrack - Disney loses legal battle for Pooh rights

United Press International - NewsTrack - Disney loses legal battle for Pooh rights

This suit has been brewing for quite a while. I don't like Disney. It probably started with Eisner as the head, and it peaked with the Copyright Extension Act (Sonny Bono Act) that extended copyrights for Mickey Mouse, Superman, and tons of other IP that was due to become public domain a few years ago.

This is a story I will follow closely. Disney has made a bundle on Winnie The Pooh and it's derivatives and if they have cheated the copyright holder, then they should be spanked.

5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies - Paper

5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies - Paper

This is the second comprehensive storage review in the past week. Google researchers published a paper based on detailed analysis of thousands of drive failures among it's server farm(s).

The most recent paper, "Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?" was presented at USENIX by Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson of Carnegie Mellon.

Windows Home Server Blog

Windows Home Server Blog

I have been running a Windows Server in my home lab for years, mostly for education, but also as a model for how to implement certain features and develop my view of what a home server should be.

From what I'm reading, a Windows Home Server might be a good solution.

The features I like best for home are the following:

Roaming profiles - this let's the kids log onto any computer and still find their data
Print Server - all printers should be networked
Single Instance Store - server should only store one copy of data with links to copies
Network Infrastructure - DNS, DHCP
Web Server - provide search for data, tools to publish data (pictures, files, etc)
Remote access - management, network access, authentication
Backup and Restore - automated archive of server data to CD/DVD, image desktops to server

Congressman says evolution is a myth spread by Jews « Yiddish Phrase: #!@$

Congressman says evolution is a myth spread by Jews « Yiddish Phrase: #!@$

This is pretty amazing, not only is this bone head undermining evolution and science, but he is some how 'blaming' Jews.

Why don't we have some form of IQ or other standardized test for members of Congress. You have to take a test to drive, why not one before we let you take a seat in Congress? It only makes sense...

WordPress database corruption problems

I'm back...

I had database corruption problems with WordPress after an aborted upgrade attempt. The fault is all mine, in my haste, I didn't note the database upgrade constraints, and suffered the consequences.

I'm back to using Blogger because I already have the account and infrastructure and hopefully the posting issues I encountered with Windows 2003 are behind me.