On my latest wilfing spree I came across the blog of Tim Ferriss (of “The 4-Hour Work Week” fame), whom I first had heard of on some audio from SXSW. On one of his posts, called How to Live Like a Rock Star (or Tango Star) in Buenos Aires…, he goes into detail on why he thinks Buenos Aires is one of the best cities you can live in. Some of his points are valid, some are not so valid (“…I have never felt threatened on the street, even after 2am…” - yeah, right; there some places in Bs As I wouldn’t want to walk on at freaking noon), and some he’s completely missing, but that’s not what caught my attention. It was this:
Created by immigrants from Spain, Italy, and Germany, you get the best food, architecture, and culture from all three. This mix of genetics also produces some incredible physical specimens. In fact, I rank Argentines right up there with Norwegians as the most beautiful people in the world.
Aw come on, you’re going to make me blush…
Technorati Tags: Tim Ferriss, 4 hour week, Buenos Aires, argentines
Version 9.20 of the Opera web browser has just come out and in addition to fixing some Flash and Javascript issues (no more going to Firefox for certain sites!) it includes a fantastic feature: Speed Dial. Whenever you open a new tab or window on Firefox you get a blank window. That’s normal. IE loads the same page you were viewing when you opened the new tab (wich I’ll refrain from commenting on for I don’t want this to become a rant - let’s just sat that if I wanted to read the page I had open I wouldn’t have opened a new tab…). But Opera 9.20 takes advantage of the empty space on a blank page and lets you put up to 9 bookmarks, all with a big screenshot of the site.
Genius. It’s an extremely simple idea but one of those that makes you wonder how come no one though of it before. Not only you have links to your most visited sites everytime you open a blank tab; on a true speed-dialish way, Command/Ctrl + 1-9 will open the speed dial bookmarks as well. And it’s when you add this to Opera’s mouse gestures feature that it becomes really brilliant. A mere flick of the mouse and I’m checking Twitter or my feed subscriptions on a new tab.
But you know what? Even if at first Speed Dial seemed like the best feature of 9.20, I think that the best feature is probably the small Javascript and Flash fixes. Unlike before (“You should try Opera!… but keep Firefox around for such and such site… “), now I can fully recomend Opera.
Here, give Opera a try. It’s free and it will run on pretty much anything you can get connected to the internet.
Technorati Tags: Opera, speed dial, firefox, IE, browser
One day, Dave from Chub Creek thought “hmm, hey, it’d be cool if there were some Dave and Gary dolls and we could mail ‘em around the world”. Luckily they have a lot of knitters on their audience. The dolls were made and mailed; from the UK to Canada to Australia to Canada again to Germany to South Korea to the US and now to me in Argentina! I went pick them up this morning (waited in line for an hour only to have the guy tell me I was in the wrong line…) so we’ll surely be doing some cool things soon. I may even keep them till June and bring them with me to PAB 2007. They’ve been to Canada already but it’d still be a cool trip for them to do.
It’s not the first time I’ve been involved in a project like this. Back at the Grant-Lee Phillips forums we had mailed a disposable camera around the world (Chente we called it; if you know who’s Chente you’re probably laughing right now), and everyone who got it had to take a couple of photos and pass it on. I managed to get the first camera, wich ended up dissapearing somewhere in europe I think. The second time it didn’t go too well wither. Attempt #3 had the same fate as the previous two.For #4 we decided to make it virtual and have people upload their photos to an online album. Worked, but definetly not as cool.
Here are some photos of the package opening. There were all sorts of cool stuff in there! Whoever gets it last will have to get a huge box to fit all the stuff that’s getting accumulated.
Technorati Tags: Chub Creek, Chub Creek dolls, Grant-Lee Phillips, PAB07
I use gmail for my both my personal and SnowyDay email. In fact, I use the same account for both, and have it set to be able to send email as my SnowyDay account. Works pretty well; all my email comes to the same place, I have the Google Notifier so it tells me right away when I have new mail, and I can check it anywhere I am, even from my cell phone. Great, huh?
Well, not so much.
Turns out that if you use your Gmail to send email as some other address, some email clients, don’t display the address you’re using, but the original one. So some people see something something like this when I email them:
Not good. Outlook does this, and Yahoo mail does something similar but without displaying the original Gmail address (it just says it’s from a Gmail account). Here, Google it to find more info.
It could be blamed on Microsoft instead of Gmail:
Actually GMail DOES NOT ADD “on behalf of …” The email has the From: address you specified. Every email client I have used then renders it correctly.
Except … MS Outlook & Outlook Express. MS does not render the specified From: field but replaces it with an artificially constructed result of the From: field and Sender: field. This is plainly wrong and IMHO breaks the net convention. But then this is food & drink for Home of the HTML Email.
So go easy on Google. They are the good guys here. It is MS who are the problem.
-source-
As much as i like to blame Microsoft for everything, I don’t blame them 100% for this. The original email is sent on the “sender” field anyway. Displaying this info on the “from” field is a bit too much, but it’s not like it was secret in the first place. You could have easily seen it by looking at the email header. The problem was always there, Outlook just made it more obvious.
That’s why I decided to try OS X’s Mail. I’m currently testing it with another email accout, and if it works like I want it to I’ll be dropping Gmail for my work email. Mostly I want to see if I can get a notifier a la Google Notifier, that works without the need to have Mail open all the time. And the abbility to be able to check it from my cell (wich I’ll be able to do once I get a phone that supports the good version of Opera mini).
Technorati Tags: Gmail, on behalf of, Yahoo mail, Mail, Opera mini
What would happen if one of the world’s greatest violin players gave an incognito performance on a subway station in Washington D.C., during the morning rush hour? Well, find out for yourself on this Washington Post article, and enjoy a great read.
…each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?
On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made….
Technorati Tags: Joshua Bell, washingtonpost.com
Two separate people today told me how much they still appreciate the work I did for them a long while ago. :) I love my job. 
