Switching to Outlook from Thunderbird was one of the biggest computer related mistakes i've ever made. It took almost an entire workday to make the transistion, and Outlook has been beset by performance problems ever since (see below). To make matters worse, returning to Thunderbird has become almost impossible as it crashes every time I try to import my email back from Outlook, which is going to force me to continue using Outlook until I have time to switch, and thus loose a huge number of archived emails. Worse still, MozBackup seems to fail to restore my older Thunderbird email because I upgraded to version 1.5. Awesome!

Confusing? Use Gmail. If you're a casual user, it looks like Gmail is the way to go. If you're like me and want an offline client, then Thunderbird is clearly still the winner, just NEVER EVER try to mess with Outlook or you'll be up the creek.

I recently because frustrated with Thunderbird’s lack of a task list feature, occasional bugginess, and most importantly – lack of a calendar. So I bit the bullet and spent an astonishing 6 hours migrating my email from Thunderbird to Outlook. The outlook calendar does indeed seem to work pretty well, and the task list has been useful. I also like the *idea* of the vcf calendar cards, though no one seems to be using them. I also like the spell checking. The problems, however, keep mounting….

1) Junk mail filters are a disgrace. Utterly useless. I don’t even want to start explaining other than to say that I have outlook 2002, and that’s probably the main problem, but I’m certainly not going to pay for an upgrade given the following.
2) Zero support except the god-awful paperclip creature from hell. Thunderbird has amazing community support – for free!
3) SMTP (Outgoing Server) problems are even worse than with Thunderbird, You have to change them in multiple places instead of just one (if you have more than one account) and if they fail, your messages do not remain in the outbox, but rather fall into an ether from which it is extremely difficult to retrieve them. At Denver airport I paid $8 to send a bunch of emails. I played with the settings for 20 minutes until the last call for boarding all to no avail.
4) Just as buggy as Thunderbird, Outlook has crashed twice recently and took over 20 minutes and multiple restarts to fix. Sometimes takes 5-10 minutes to start up.
5) Does not have nifty “junk button” to toss unwanted emails without a click-drop down menu
7) Email look up is incredibly slow, and often “lies” to you, claiming someone is in the contacts list when they are actually not, and you have to go digging around for their email. Thunderbird, unfortunately, has the habit of remembering too much and giving you loads of bunk addresses. So this is a toss up.
8) Won’t show image attachments in the email so you have to open them in another application
9) For some asinine reason, uses Microsoft Word to edit emails, as if I wanted to open a word doc! This is slow and repeatedly crashes. Then word “recovers my documents”
10) Labeling is no good. Thunderbird lets you label things with various colors easily
11) Send/Recieve with Outlook takes 5 to 10 times as long as with Thunderbird, especially at start up.

The Junk Mail and the Outgoing Server problems are really the only two that are destroying my affection for this program. The question is… do I bite the bullet and invest MORE time in outlook to try and solve those problems, or go back to Thunderbird and continues using post it notes for my calendar?

True, Thunderbird is a massive memory hog. And it lacks a Calendar. This is a horrid, horrid flaw. But I'm not sure how much longer I can take the added agony that Outlook has given me. What to do?

When I first discoverd Firefox I was ecstatic, and I still am. It is clearly a superior web browser to Internet Explorer, and pretty much anything else, except, perhaps, Safari. But Mozilla's other open source projects, while clearly filled with good intent and backed by the brilliance of a multitude of developers far more talented than I am, are so filled with bugs that I am slowly starting to run away from them. Thunderbird has been hanging. Both FF and Thunderbird sometims stall for 5-10 seconds. The Mozillla Calendar (sunbird) is completely uselss because it does not run within either application and therefor has to be launched separately which I never think to do. I hate to say it but Outlook is the way to go when it comes to organizational software and email clients.

Anyway, the main source of my ire today is N|Vu - an open source webpage editing client sorta like dreamweaver. Basically it dosn't work. It stalls out after a while and won't save changes or close documents. I have no idea why this is the case, but I do not have the patience to figure out why, nor should I. Software should not be released that has this many bugs. It's a pity that it's come to this, but that's that.

I'm really close to throwing my laptop out the window. I mostly blame SBCYahoo for this, but I cannot tell if they are entirely to blame. Here's the problem - I hate web based email... it's slow, hard to navigate, and dosn't work unless I'm connected to the internet, which I'm frequently not (like when I'm on a plane). Problem is, at home SBCYahoo forces me to use "smtp.sbcglobal.net" as my outgoing mail server, even though my actual email is from other domains. That's fine as long as I'm at home.

Problem is, whenever I leave the house, I have to change my SMTP server to something else... typically it takes a mission to figure out what works depending on where I'm sitting. Right now, I've wasted 30 minutes just trying to send a *%&$* email. One email. Why is this so difficult? Why is there no "universal" smtp thing that just works?

This is rather odd. I've been using Urchin on one of my client sites for a while now, and it's been pretty good. As an experiment, I installed Google Analytics on the site last Thursday afternoon. The Google Analytics stats were a little buggy (something about not being able to "confirm" the presense of the tracking code) but they seemd to be pullling accurate numbers when I graphed them (similar to the ~20-25k visits a day that the site gets). But, when I went into Urchin to compare the results I was rather dismayed to see my traffic was not being counted at all! Except for a strange 150-odd people that somehow got tracked. So I killed Google Analytics on Monday, and Urchin instantly sprang back to life.

Anyway - there's clearly a problem with installing Google Analytics when you're already using Urchin, but I can't see any good reason why this should be the case... can you? I'm debating leaving Urchin on as-is, or killing it and going solely with Google Analytics, but I probably won't do anything until the bugs get worked out.

For those who've had their heads in the sand, there is a new internet boom going on. Possibly leading the pack is Andy Finnegan's new site - www.fullpint.com - currently in Beta mode. It's a feature-packed London pub review. The best feature, currently not live, is a way to locate nearby pubs with high ratings should you find yourself in an unsatisfactory one. Very cool.

I figure I might as well have some kind of showcase for some of the work I've been doing, and I'm too busy to whip up something formal. So - two cool new Movable Type powered sites that I've done recently that can give you some idea of the power of this fantastic piece of software:

1) The Lazy Environmentalist - this is a pretty standard "blog" layout that you probably recognize, with a few special features, such as a "highlight" category which always appears suspended in the upper right corner. Special thanks to Bob Gower for creating the green chair logo.

2) Net Impact Conference 2005 - I'm quite pleased at how well this one turned out. You would be hard-pressed to tell that this is, in fact, a Movable Type powered site, but every element of it is actually a modified blog entry of some sort. The pop-out menu navigation on the site is entirely CSS based, which is especially cool.

Google maps is no offering a moon map! Rather cool... the best part happens when you zoom to maximum. Give it a try to see the Moon's true consistency.

And speaking of new Google products, the classic, clean homepage will finally see a change. Here's a sneak preview. A customizable page, similar to myyahoo but a little less cluttered. Good idea or not? You can always bring the classic page back by setting preferences. Will be interesting to see how this evolves.

A while ago I discovered "Keyhole", an unbeliveably cool piece of mapping software that lets you zoom around the planet and look at very detailed satelite maps of the earth's surface, along with basic political and road outlines, and in some cases topography. Keyhole was the first stage in what is truely the ultimate earth resource, a piece of truely revolutionary technology.

Anyway, I'm sitting here right now, liveblogging at the Googleplex listening to founder Sergey Brinn annouce the next version of Keyhole. The product will be called "Google Earth" and it's essentially the same thing, but with massively upgraded quality. Sergey just flew us throught the grand canyon with full 3D topography, and then to Santigago Chile with the same quality that was previously only available for small parts of the US. Amazing. Scheduled to launch in a "few weeks". You heard it here first!

ED NOTE: Never mind a "few weeks". I just fired up Typekey and things are incredible. If you like geography and have $29.95 to shell out, I hightly recommend it.

Every once in a while technology fails in ways that can cause me to want to punch holes in walls. Tonight's experience with Skype was one of the all time worst.

Skype is a fantastic way to allow people to have two-way voice chats over the internet. If you pay them a little money, you can call phones around the world for next to nothing (although the quality is pretty iffy). Anyway, I wanted to use Skype to dial-in to a few conference calls I have to sit through, which is a lot cheaper than using my cell phone. Skype dials through ok, but when it comes time to use their dial-pad to enter the conference code, it fails to work about 50% of the time. Sometimes it's a total loss, as in the 20+ times I tried to get it to work tonight. I think this bug is related to the length of the tones the dial pad sends. At anyrate, I suggest you DO NOT give them any money until they address the problem.

And the genius award goes to... Paul Rademacher, who managed to hack together craigslist property listings (presumably using RSS) and Google Maps to create a magical interface that maps the apartments, while simultaneously displaying photos and descriptions on a little bubble popup. Check it out.

My laptop is nearing death. As a result I've had to back everything up and wipe the hard drive completely. Reinstalling everything you lost is normally a major chore, especially when it comes to email, bookmarks, mail rules, RSS feeds, saved passwords, and all the zillions of little things you probably forgot about. Well, since I'm using Firefox as my browser, and Thunderbird as my email/RSS client, I was able to run a program called "MozBackup" to back up everything imaginable - even the myriad of rules I set up to organize my email. This is the way catastrophes like laptop meltdowns are meant to be handled. Plus it only took 10 minutes. Awesome.

Without further ado, it is time to reveal a new project I've been working on.

It is called "Triple Pundit".

http://www.triplepundit.com

It's a resource for "business types, MBAs, republicans, democrats, treehuggin' hippies and entrepreneurs" to get inspiring business-focused news to satisfy their triple bottom line of "People, planet, and profit.

I'm still looking for a better tagline, so please email me if you have any ideas. But please bookmark it, subscrive to the RSS, and pass it along to everyone you know who has any interest in Business and the environment.

This is of very obscure interest, but I found it quite fascinating: If you accidentally type "http://" twice, like this: "http://http://www.thoughtsonthings.com/", then you are automatically sent to Microsoft's home page.

This is a fairly common typo when you're pluggin' in URLs, especially with generated page content, so I'll bet they manage to get a lot of traffic this way. What other major companies are scoring traffic this way?

Pay per click advertising has been the savior of many a website, not to mention a handy way for popular bloggers to earn a few bucks. Unfortunately, as with every good thing on the internet, the scammers eventually start hitting hard. Just google "earn rupees" to see what I mean. Imagine entire Indian villages sitting around clicking on advertisements all day long. (via SVW)

I've been subscribing to RSS feeds like crazy lately, and it's been giving me an incredible new resource for news and information. And - because I've been using Mozilla Thunderbird and organizing everything meticulously, I'm not actually overwhelmed, I just feel like I have everything at my fingertips. (though you have to get over the fear of having piles of "unread" stuff in your folders) Kinda like discovering Google all over again.

Then I got to thinking - most people don't know the difference between a browser and a tennis racket, so if RSS is really going to live up to it's potential as a mass information tool, someone has to slow down and explain it all.

Here's the laymans scoop -

RSS stands for "Rich Site Summary" or sometimes "Really Simple Syndication"... nice huh? But all you need to know is that it's a way for you to subscribe to a website that publishes periodic information, like weblogs or news magazines.

Next Fifteen Communictions is one of Europe's biggest PR firms. When someone mentioned their name to me, I naturally turned to Google to find out more. I searched and searched and found absolutely nothing, which really baffled me. A few minutes later I realized my mistake: I had been googling for "Next 15" and not "Next Fifteen".

My guess is that there are so many websites with "Next #" linking a page that Next 15 just get's lost in the void. Nonetheless, this is particularily troubling because they happen to own the domain www.next15.com which I would have thought might help them out. Does Google do something tricky when numbers are in the search phrase?

Nick D and the gang have launched two new Gawker titles, Lifehacker - a techy software and hacker review, and Gridskipper - an ubercool urban travel guide. Excellent stuff as always.

Moreover, my old company, has embraced the weblogging phenomenon one step further by allowing pings on their server. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you really don't need to know, but if you do - check this out. (or just add "api.moreover.com/ping" to your Moveable type ping list.

Right, so free wifi does exist in NYC after all, but it sure was hard to find it. It seems the main WiFi locator sites, or at least anything you try to do using Google lead to nothing but half-wit sites taken over by commercial spaces.

San Francisco seems to be more easy to work with, which, I supposed isn't surprising. There must be a proper map of New York WiFi spots, but someone needs to properly google-bomb it.

Bizarrely, I cannot find a single coffeeshop in New York City that offers free WiFi, with the exception of one way uptown. Plenty of Starbucks with ripoff T-Mobile abound, but that's it. Am I missing something?

The last thing I should be doing right now is messing around with web servers, but nonetheless, that's what I did today. I finally upgrdaded this site to a new location and Moveable Type 3.1, which is pretty cool, and which means no more comments spam.

Of course to leave a comment, you must register with Typekey, which is kinda annoying. Still, over time, I think the Typekey system will turn out to be quite useful. Give it a try!

...and not to be outdone, I must announce another excellent site by Graham Hill (put together by me) called "Treehugger". It's a hip and hot product review focusing on environmentally responsible products for the home. Excellent stuff there, check it out!

RK and I have teamed up to bring you another fine weblogging title, this one totally related to gambling and the world of casinos, poker, betting, etc... without further ado, I present to you: Casino Hawk.

Occasionally when I turn on my laptop, the WiFi connects to something called "Library". The signal is usually excellent. Thing is, it's not a WiFi network it's some kind of interference. I've found it in buildings, on airplanes, on moving vehicles... whatever it is, it's completely useless.

Stuck in traffic somewhere near New London... So I opted for the luxury method of getting to Boston, rather than the economic. The main reason was that Limoliner advertises itself as having internet on-board, and therefore I could work and thus justify the expense. Unfortunately the speed of the connection renders it completely useless. If this actually gets posted I'll be impressed.

Still, they are very nice and appologetic, and claim the lack of speed is unusual. They also have very comfy seats and all sorts of goodies, including films. I just watched the new version of the Italian Job, which was ok, but a pale imitation of the original.

DOH!!! Just when you thought it was safe to shop online, a numerical search on Google pulls up hundreds of random people's credit card numbers on websites with really lousy security issues... bad news. [behold] (click a few links down).

via newyorkish

Went to a fabulous blogger party last night at "the delancey"... well, it was funnier than fabulous, but I can't get over how successfully networked people are here in New York, all over a bunch of generally innane rantings on websites. Cool stuff anyway, people were very nice.

MSNBC now has a news system to comptete with Google News, it's called Newsbot. It's definitely more "consumery" looking, so that might a good thing in terms of the average user liking it, but time will tell if it really works better. Oh, one other thing, it's completely powered by Moreover, my old company, so it better work well.

Mesothelioma is a condition that affects people who have been exposed to Asbestos. It's also the most highly sought after ad-word on the internet, commanding an astonishing $100 a click according to overture. This is fascinating for a number of reasons:

1) The sheer fact that a one-click ad could possibly be worth that much to anyone.

2) The demonstration that there is so much money tied up in asbestos litigation (not to mention countless other areas) that lawyers will pony up that kind of cash to get clients.

For more information check the links on the left side of this page. Or read what Andrew has to say.

Just did a very cursory makeover of 646industries, in connection with a grander career makeover. Since I spend so much time working on people's Moveable Type powered weblogs, it's only logical to market myself as an expert in it. The site will get a lot more detailed, but I think it will suffice as a quick fix.

[Weblog Consultation & Design]

I get an enormous amount of spam posted to this weblog, which I promptly delete using MT Blacklist. Anyway, a while ago I got fed up and used "whois" to figure out the owner of one of the domains that keeps spamming me. I wrote this guy a flaming email using one of my many old, unused email addresses, scutfarcus at Yahoo.

Within a day, I was recieving twice the amount of spam, and it was coming from my old address. Not only that, but it seems my address has become the new favorite for this spammer and innumerable strangers are now getting spammed from what appears to be my address. Sorry folks, it's not me.

There are very few things for which I would advocate physical violence, but these spammers need to be beaten severely.

The wave of the future, or just a geeky obsession? I'm posting this entry simply because I can - sitting in Cathedral square park in Milwaukee on WiFi - granted I've done this before, but the sigificance of this park is that the city itself set up the network specifically to be used for free. Totally excellent investment in civic infrastructure if you ask me.

Of course, it's pretty hard to see your laptop screen when the sun is shining so I don't know how many big business deals actually go down here.

[MILWIFI]

Silly pay per use internet! I just paid 6 bucks for the SFO internet, which really isn't very expensive, but I needed to find out a certain piece of info, which of course turns out not to be as urgent as I had thought. Glad it's only 6 bucks. Anyway, wifi should be free, plain and simple. This is lame.

Nice to be back in San Francisco! In the meantime, speaking of the other side of California, the new Gawker Media site, Defamer, has launched... for all your L.A. gossip needs.

Being down here in Arizona, the alluring bubble of internet stocks and well, everything about the internet, seems a long way away. Despite that, I have been following the Google IPO hype for a while now. Is it something to jump on with the vigor of a hyena, or a complete wast of time?

Either way, it's fun to watch. People have even registered domains about the IPO (www.google-ipo.com). I wonder how much this guy is making in adwords?

So I'm doing a report on permeable parking surfces, and turning to Google, I realized again how truly powerful the internet is. I havn't been in a library in ages, and I got almost everything I wanted in a matter of an hour or two.

Of course, getting loads of raw data is still difficult, and much of it is unavailable.

Today's challenge:

1) Find the average percentage of cities that is covered in pavement.
- I've found two - Toronto 40%, and L.A. 60%, but need something more general.
2) What percentage of that pavement is:
a) Roadways
b) Shoulders of roadways
c) Parking lots (broken down into heavy use and lightly used)
d) Walkways
e) Other.

I think I've finally pushed Google to its limits. Thing is, I doubt the library will have this info easily available either. Time to make some phone calls.

New website project launched - If you're into old-school golf humor, check out Fred Larsen. (I put the site together with a friend of mine, Fred's son Craig)

Wonkette is live! The 4th title in the mighty Gawker media conglomerate is an irreverant DC based gossip mag, and it's pretty damn funny. If anything looks technically wrong, it's probably my fault, so tell me before Nick finds out... ;-)

What's so bad about torturing and killing the people responsible for penis enlargement spam? Ok, I wouldn't go that far, but I know how this guy feels.

My favorite quote is when the spammers blame their dodgy Russian rivals, saying "such firms gave a bad name to the penis enhancement business". Um.. yeah.

You know you've been using the internet too much when you misplace something in your room, like your left sneaker, and the first thing that comes to mind when looking for it is... "Oh, I'll just use Google..."

Jay Allen's MT Blacklist is the greatest Moveable Type plug in ever. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, basically Weblog Comments have been rendered practically useless because of spammers who program robots to visit weblogs and leave notes that say thing like:

"Hey, great site! By the way, wouldn't you like a larger Penis? Just click here!"

The Spammers engineered a sneak attack, but Jay Allen has issued a phenomenal counter attack. It appears comments spam has had its 15 minutes of fame... for now.

MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin

Oh yeah, that means comments are back! (not that I ever got too many)

Travelocity boasts what should be a brilliant tool: The ability to search for the best priced airfare between two cities, assuming your dates are flexible. Trouble is, after getting a nice long list of what appear to be great fares, the system gives you an error 95% of the time when you click on one.

"Sorry, that fare is no longer available". Well, then why did you tell me about it? I would happily wait a few seconds longer for my query to process if it meant I didn't have to click on 9 consecutive false leads. Bah.

No sooner was I blessed with DSL here in Barcalona, than I found out the ISP here apparantly caches pages to improve speed. The problem with this is that when I'm working on a website and make changes to a page via FTP, I don't see the changes for hours. This is especially infuriating when working out the kinks in a new stylesheet. Damn. Anyone know a way around this? Funny thing is, new Moveable Type entries show up fine. Perhaps the ISP notices a ping or something. Arrrrrgh.

Well, speaking of projects I do when underemployed, here's the latest. Outdoor Escapade is going to be a collaborative weblog featuring primarly product reviews for outdoor gadgets, but also trip ideas, and trail reviews. There are a few other authors involved and it may actually make money, which goes straight into a trip fund of some kind. There are a few more things up my sleave, then I'm going to stop working for a week and go to the Pyranees, or maybe Ibiza or something... we'll see.

Thank you Carlos, whoever you are. It's so great when internet resources work. www.nodedb.com led me to two false alarms and then I found a wifi network out here on Belen Street. I'm sitting on the sidewalk between two motorcycles typing in this entry. It's not exactly comfy, but at least I was able to send and recieve my emails. This may force me to evolve a new super efficient work ethic where everything is done offline, at home, then organized and sent during a few minutes sitting here. Although I'd rather find a proper cafe.

Confronted by Starbuck's extortionate rates for wireless internet access, this Wired article makes a great analogy: "Charging for online usage would be like charging for salt and pepper." Because of the high cost of setting up and managing a pay-per-use network, it's a better investment for a cafe to just give it away.

Now I just need to buy one of these nifty "Wi-Finders" and wander around London for a while.

Recognition of a user's geographic location has finally become common on websites. Despite the fact that this is a rather fascinating development, I'm finding it more and more irritating.
That aside, Google is doing a great job of taking advantage of geographic recognition by returning Google keyword advertisements that are specific to the user's location. That's great for everyone involved - higher relevance to users, better clicks for advertisers, and more money for Google.

However, I sincerely hope Google never changes their main search results to reflect geography unless users specifically pick a filter. (This is now possible at google.co.uk, .fr, etc...) Leave that to AOL.

I've been embarking on a project over the last couple of weeks wherein (for one of my email addresses) I have been hitting the "unsubscribe me" option on every piece of spam I get. From porn, to mortgages, to high school diplomas, I have dilligently asked to be removed from every mailing list I appear to be on. After doing so, I am appologized to, and assured that the penis-enlargement scheme I was offerred will never be sent to me again.

After two weeks, I actually seem to be recieving more spam than I was before.

Paypal has always been one of my favorite conveniences on the internet. Unfortunately, they've just made a move I find incredibly irritating.

A "basic" paypal account is free, but if you want to receive credit card payments you have to upgrade your account and pay a certain fee. This is fair enough, as credit card companies will be charging paypal. However, once you've "upgraded" your account to be eligible to receive credit card payments (which I did as a one-time favor to a friend who owed me some money), you are forever trapped with a "premier" account and paypal will dock you 4-5% for ALL payments regardless of their origins. There is no way to downgrade back to the basic account.

I don't mind paying for the privilege of receiving credit card payments, but paypal makes enough money off the interest on my account. They don't need to screw me on regular contributions. If you owe me money, please DON'T paypal me.

The last few times I've moved, one of the first things I've done is turned on my laptop and wandered around to see if there was a Wi-Fi in the neighborhood. It never worked, until now! Courtesy of the local neighborhood council! I have free broadband! At last!

Unfortunately, my apartment is so old-school you have to buy "electricity tokens" from the gas station and put them in a machine downstairs. We ran out tonight and I'm typing this by candlelight. Looking forward to a cold shower tommorow! Good grief!

Watch out: I got some weird spam that appeared to come from Paypal this morning. The email states: "Dear Paypal Customer This e-mail is the notification of recent innovations taken by PayPal to detect inactive customers and non-functioning mailboxes...The inactive customers are subject to restriction and removal in the next 3 months...Please confirm your email address and credit card information by logging in to your PayPal account using the form below:"

Among other things, I am asked to fill out a form with my credit card details and my ATM PIN, supposedly for bank notification.

That's where my scam alert kicks in. There's no way in hell Paypal would ask for my ATM PIN, nor my credit card details. The email looks deceptively legitimate otherwise.

So... analysis of the source code behind the form shows that the form info is sent to:

http://www.paypal.com0..tons of zeros and ones...1@robinsonhost.port5.com/..more zeros and ones...1.php

So the question is... who is that?

I've noticed recently that when I read CNN, the advertisements are directed at a UK audience and the spelling on the site is adjusted to UK style. I've been anticipating this, and it's quite interesting, at least from an advertiser's point of view. It's all made possible by a little program that figures out where you are based on your IP address.

Anyway, I was clicking around on someone's website and, trying to reach a page on the "Showtime" website, got this error: "Sorry: We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States." [link here - might only show error if you're out of the US]

Now that really irritates me.

There must be a way to mask where I'm coming from. The anarchist in me wants to defeat this system, despite my appreciation of its utility.

Furthering the discussion of geographic tags on websites, someone has now created a London weblog tube map. It's a list of personal web sites based on the owners' proximity to a particular tube station.

I read an interesting article in the latest Economist entitled "The revenge of geography". It's premium content, so you have to go buy the magazine to read it, but the main point:

"It was naive to imagine that the global reach of the internet would make geography irrelevant. Wireline and wireless technologies have bound the virtual and physical worlds closer than ever"

By associating users' IP addresses with geographic information it is possible to locate them physically with a fairly high degree of accuracy, and thus websites can decide which language to display, whether to allow people to gamble on casino sites, and most importantly, to target advertisments. Furthermore, websites that are mostly relevant to a particular city or region can be identified readily when conducting a search.

I found a rather neat resource called "GeoURL" which is a database of the longitue and latitude from which people maintain their websites. Click the little green box below to learn about websites geographically close to this one:

Again, talking about "blogging" is something I rarely do, but I've stumbled upon a new resource called "Blogstreet" which purports to be a blog search enegine. Dosn't seem to be very complete, but it's a pretty interesting start, and there are all sorts of nifty statistics to check out. Now, I'm starting to regret starting my second blog in a wacky double format because it messes up all sorts of things. Oh well, maybe I'll combine the two, easier to update that way.

In terms of its being a great database of information, one of the internet's most glaring shortcomings is the complete dearth of maps available online. Granted, you can get pretty good street maps on mapquest, and streetmap.co.uk, but general physical and political country maps are very few, and very hard to find.

When searching for a map of northern Italy, for example, I either get listings of wall maps I'm supposed to pay for, or really lousy maps. The only decent repository I've managed to locate is the fabulous Perry-Casta�eda Library at the University of Texas.

But even this well organized collection is fairly limited. I wonder if there will ever be a more complete collection. If so, I fear it won't be free.

I never really write about blogging, but the bandwagon is too irresistible right now. The current hype about blogs is akin to the hype surrounding WebPages when they first came into the mainstream. Remember circa 1996... "wow! you've got a website? cool!". The difference is simply that blogging provides an easy and incredibly well organized way to publish to your website. It's still a website though, and the hype will probably fade fairly quickly. At one time people thought everyone was destined to have a personal website. I still doubt that will happen. Anyway...

Generating this hype is the big announcement that Google has bought Blogger, one of the original blogging tools. It's quite fascinating to see everyone jump on this announcement, and hypothesize about what Google will do next. Pretty much every newspaper in the world covered the announcement as a monumental affair, even though most people still wouldn't know a blog from a fog.

Here's a synopsis of the most interesting points made recently:

Wired Mag: Why did google want Blogger? - To improve their search accuracy by analyzing what people were talking about.

The Guardian: The Genius of Blogging. - To beat the mainstream media to the juiciest online content. Great article.

Forbes: Google Goes Blog-Crazy. - Not much of a clue, but suggest Google might enter the "build your own website" arena.

Danny Sullivan: Ad distribution. - Google may plan to place ads on (presumably) free users weblog sites.

Dave G: Dosn't matter. - The important thing is that it legitimizes the medium. And the medium is huge.

Incidentally, most of the best blogs use Movablye Type these days, which sorta downgrades the quality of content that Google may be able to exclusively analyze. In the meantime, I'm inclined to agree with Dave G that the most important thing at the moment is the hype itself. Blogging takes us back to the general idea that the internet should be a great democratic place where anyone can publish thoughts on anything at negligible cost for the benefit of all. Anything that promotes that is good.

Thanks to Kristin who suggested killing a .dll file! I did a little research and found the following:

http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/SubSearch.html

Works perfectly, no more "enhanced search results!" Apparently the culprit is some spam company called High Traffic Ads. The software gets into your system via a popup ad. This is easily the most insidious infiltration I've ever suffered, and I recommend writing nasty letters to those 'high traffic' guys. On the other hand, the generosity and good nature of the web still lives on. Thanks for the replies.

PS - Apparently, Ad-Ware does not yet protect you from this one.

It seems this problem is not Google. It's some garbage I accidentally installed. I get "enhanced results" now after searching on all major search engines. It is really infuriating when this kind of thing happens. Still can't find anyone else who's got the same problem. oh well.

Has anyone noticed the "enhanced results" that are appearing when you do a Google search? Am I the only (un)lucky recipient of this?

When I do a simple search for "Heathrow", a side-frame suddenly appears containing what are purportedly "enhanced results". They just look like ads to me. This is the first time Google has ever annoyed me. No one else seems to have the problem, perhaps I inadvertently downloaded some crapware that caused this. Could it be related to the Google search bar? I want it gone.

I want a "PDF Warning System" on my browser. Often, I click on a link and it turns out to be a PDF document. My computer then essentially freezes for 3 minutes while Acrobat Reader loads. Very annoying. I know that I can look in the status bar and see if the link in question is a PDF, but it's not instinctual to do this. Even the [PDF] marker on Google search results seldom prevents me from clicking on one.

I want a popup warning that says "you just requested a PDF, do you want to continue, Yes or No".

Fascinating. I've just discovered that Google search results are slightly different when you are using Netscape as opposed to IE. Why in the world would this be the case? I think that the Netscape cache is lagging behind IE in time. I will try this test in a few weeks and see if it changes.

The example I used is a search for "Peotone Airport". If you are using IE, notice that "Beyond Stupidity: The Peotone Airport Proposal" is number 3 on the list. Using Netscape 6.2, that page does not appear at all, though most of the others do, but in a different order.

In the Netscape URL bar, "&lr=" appears in the search URL, probably some kind of browser notifyer. That's the only difference. Very wierd!

Well I still don't understand Trackback completely, but I've overhaules my other blog so it archives properly. (here) and (here). The last things to do are to get the categories working correctly, then make a few things look a little nicer and get myself an XML resume. (copying Dave G here). Then I'm in business. MT takes forever to rebuild itself though. Anyways, it's late. It's time to go home. Gotta do some real work first though so I can sneak out a bit early to prepare the British for Thanksgiving.

There's another new feature in Moveable type called "Trackback". If I make a reference to Karens "Fotos" here, then it should show up in the trackback section of her Round the world blog. Let's see if it works.

Ed note: Hmm... didn't work. I'll have to look into this.

I am drowning in Moveable type. I have been working for a while on getting this site properly set up, with archives that function properly and categories, etc.. Just learning the MT tags is like learning a whole new branch of mathematics all over again. It's phenomenal. For a great implementation, check out Dave G's weblog (at left). If I can get this thing running properly, then the Beyond website will be a masterpiece. Time to take a break though.

Blogrolling is incredibly cool. It allows you to keep a list of blogs that you read handy on any website. If I have it properly set up you should see my list on the left hand collumn. As a bonus, recently updated blogs should be indicated as well (assuming they are properly registered with weblogs.com). I'm slowly getting better at understanding the incredible new features out there. Mastery of RSS is next. All in good time.

I"m not sure how often I'm going to be updating this page. It needs work anyhow. Do be so kind as to direct your attention here...

Alright! Here it is. The new project, destined to save the world. 646 Industries has a new purpose, mainly because I can\t get the new domain names I want. I've embarked upon a project to write about all the great things I see and heap praise upon them, while at the same time, keeping track of mediocre things I see and heaping publicity and crtisism on them. Most of these things concern urban issues, though there will probably be an overlap in to environmental and internet related issues. I'm going to try and make it a weekly thing. [Enjoy]

easyEverything is truely amazing! For one Euro I can have 60 minutes of internet time at any of their cafes anywhere in Europe. Truly brilliant. Well that's enough for me, now back to M�nchen.

Here's a deep link. Well not really. That's just a hyperlink to an article on Wired's website, which is like linking to a magazine article. Why in the world would a publisher oppose such a link? After all, the more links there are to an article, the more people will be directed there and the more eyes see the advertisements on the publication's page.

This article concerns a court case which has ruled it illegal to 'deep link' which is a rather vague term that describes searching through a publishers content and then providing links to it.

This kind of legislation wrecks the very purpose of the internet. If you don't want people finding your articles, then put them behind a firewall. Ridiculous.

Craigslist is truely amazing... I have a big pile of old CD jewel cases that I don't want because I bought one of those 'case logic' things for my CDs. So, what to do with hundreds of empty jewel cases? I posted "Massive Pile of CD Jewel Cases - FREE!!!" on Craigs list, and in 20 minutes I had 4 people begging for them. 20 minutes! And a guy came by this morning before work and took the whole box! It's amazing!