Month: April 2005

Celtics kick Pacer butt

Game 4 tonight was great. The Celtics destroyed the Pacers. This is playoff basketball baby!

The Red Sox also had an impressive win against the Rangers.

It is absolutely amazing to be in the center of the sports universe these days.

Contacts

1-800 Contacts is awsome. I ordered contacts for the first time online tonight because of them.

The contact I use in my right eye was impossible to find online…I actually had to e-mail customer service to ask them if they carried it. Turns out, it’s name had changed. No wonder I couldn’t find it. Customer service was great though making sure I had all the right details before I ordered.

I saved nearly $25 by ordering online instead of getting them from my eye doctor and I got free shipping. Well worth it.

Shoes

Something is wrong with me.

For the second time in a week, I purchased a pair of shoes. The first pair last week was some shoes for work. Today, I purchased some sneakers for when I am at home.

To give you an idea on how rare of an event this is…my previous pair of work shoes lasted for over two years of constant uses. My previous pair of sneakers? They lasted well over a year and were falling apart.

I just hate shoe shopping. My shoe size doesn’t help things either, as all the good shoes appear to be size 10 or higher (while I’m around a size eight). This time around, I was lucky and was able to get some good deals.

I hate shoe shopping.

iTunes annoyances

Neil has a great little post on iTunes and what is annoying about it. This is from a loyal iTunes user who like any piece of software has a few issues with it.

Here is my annoyances list since iTunes has been my default audio player since it came out. A lot of these Neil mentions too, but I have a few additions.

  • CPU Usage & Memory: iTunes is currently taking up between 1-3% of my CPU and 43.9 MB of memory right, minimized to the system tray. I can understand a heavy GUI taking up CPU and memory when its open, but that is sad when it does it minimized.
  • Sound Check: Sound Check works fairly well. Winamp has nothing like it that works remotely as well. In fact, that is why I don’t use Winamp. But it maddens me beyond belief when it doesn’t get the volume right and a song ends up sounding very low on my car stereo. I turn up the volume to hear that song and then of course get blasted beyond oblivion on the next song. Adopt ReplayGain please…I never quite figured out why Sound Check was developed when there was a much better alternative already designed.
  • Startup times: Slower then Winamp, but worth the wait. Still, it should start up a tad faster, especially if you happen to have an audio CD in the drive.
  • Lack of notification windows: It would be nice if iTunes popped up and told me what song was playing. When you have a big library, sometimes it takes more then a few seconds to recognize a song.
  • Plugins: There is an SDK, but I really wish there was an easy way to find, install, and use plugins. Doesn’t it sound counter intuitive to go to the Visualizer menu to turn on Audioscrobbler?

    • Foobar would win me over if I had a much easier way of customizing it and if I could get it to play iTunes Music Store songs without cracking the DRM. But all of those free songs via the Pepsi caps are too important to not play.

    Let’s hope iTunes 5 or even better, 4.8 has major improvements in these areas.

Edit: I’m dumb. Added a link to Neil’s post.

Amazing

This week’s episode of 24 was simple amazing. Who knew Cloe was a badass? Any show that has me missing most of the 2nd half of Game 2 (Celtics/Pacers) has got me completely hooked.

Pisses me off though the Celtics lost. These Pacers played tough tonight, but I doubt they can do that for the next 5 (max) games.

Hello Thunderbird…again

Well…a week or so ago I decided to switch to Gmail. Well, it didn’t last long and I came crawling back to Mozilla Thunderbird.

I guess it boils down to that I am never satisified 100% with anything computer related. I try to force myself to use say a particular program, but it turns out that something makes me crawl back to what I used to use.

Why I switched back to Thunderbird is easily broken down to:

  • I missed using my e-mail address.
  • I missed having basically limitless filters. Gmail allows you to create up to 20, although with some tricks you can use one filter for multiple purposes.
  • Google Desktop Search doesn’t work with Gmail (yet).
  • Switching e-mail addresses can be a pain in the ass, even if you forward the old address to the new one.
  • Gmail is revolutionary for webmail…but I can’t help but feel limited by it using it as my sole e-mail client. The pace of change is dicated only by Google. Meanwhile, I could customize Thunderbird to my heart’s desire with extensions and updates. After the novelty of conversations and everything wore off…I was bored.
  • Many more little things that Thunderbird does great that Gmail either can’t do well or can’t do at all (yet). There is just something with using a real e-mail client that makes you feel you have total power over your e-mail.

Until next week, Thunderbird is my e-mail client of choice…again. Now hurry up with version 1.1!

Support multiple address books in Thunderbird

I asked a question on the MozillaZine Thunderbird forums that I thought would have an answer. Simply, I want the ability to whitelist multiple address books in the Junk Mail Controls Window. This would allow me to separate my personal e-mail contacts from my mailing list e-mail addresses, while both are whitelisted so they won’t get caught by the junk mail filter.

However, it looks like it is currently impossible to whitelist multiple address books. I have filed Bugzilla Bug 291661 with hopes that this feature will be added to Mozilla Thunderbird.

Update: Oops, looks like I duped a bug. Bug 187771 is the one that deals with whitelisting multiple address books.