The news tells me that, in light of the gas "crisis" caused by Hurricane Katrina, Bush warns against looting, gas profiteering. I wish he'd send take of our National Guard people away from the Middle East and send them to threaten the jerks at some of our local gas stations. Keep in mind now that I live in Maine—y'know, way up North?—and all our gas arrives by way of Canada! But one gas station near our house yesterday hiked the price by $.40 just while I was at work yesterday.

Thankfully, today I found an Irving station that hadn't changed it's price at all—and yes, Irving Oil is a Canadian company. Shoulda emigrated years ago...

Thank goodness: Professor Vinson found us more reasons to drink coffee. To your health!

My boss occasionally tries to throw me a nice bone (as it were), in the form of a really easy-breezy package that shouldn't take a couple hours to crank out. One of those recently was a little terminal emulator for the IBM iSeries boxes, which true to form was quite simple—until I remembered that I needed to deal with uninstalling the old version of the package. I glanced at the old version, and noticed that it had been captured into an MSI (per our previous operating orders), so I figured, "No problem!"

Yeah, right.

...have been greatly exaggerated. My lack of blog postings over the past few weeks is to blame entirely on these two things:

1. the recent loss of "free" wireless broadband at our apartment


2. lots of vacationing lately

I hope to rememdy the first of these situations ASAP. The latter, I'm afraid, has taken care of itself.

We're nearly done with the conversion of our company email system to MS Exchange/Outlook, and I couldn't be much happier... especially since our previous system was a severely out-of-date Novell GroupWise!

My newly-installed Outlook 2003 client has totally improved my ability to keep track of my projects and tasks. I've implemented my own organization system which is part way to the GTD methods, in cooperation with a tip from a Micrsoft webcast on customizing your Follow-up Flags.

Also, I wanted to implement a feature I miss from Lotus Notes: the "Send and Archive..." button. More specifically, I wanted Outlook to prompt me as soon as I sent an email as to whether I'd like to delete the sent item or file it somewhere. A little Googling led me to a post at VBForums.com, and then a fellow nicknamed RobDog888 helped me pull together some VBA code to make it happen... And it works like a charm!

Did you know that just 7 comglomerate companies own 70% of the media—from movies and music, TV stations and cable channels, local radio and newspapers? I suppose I once knew that, back in college when I had to take a Mass Media course and was appauled to look over the two-page spread in our textbook where, in tiny print, they listed hundreds of Viacom subsidiaries. Just as amazing—and scary—are the listings for News Corp. and Time Warner.

Does that worry you? Yeah, me too. It worried Nickey Robare enough that she made a film about it, cleverly titled The News Is What We Make It. Thankfully, there are others who are thinking about these matters too, including the people who organized MediaRights and the annual Media That Matters Film Fesitval, which visited Portland tonight. They want to make sure that independent and important voices are heard, particularly through film, which is such an effective genre for clear communication, speaking to the head and the heart at the same time.

Microsoft is really promoting some of their upcoming products, not the least of which is SQL Server 2005. Check out some of these great resources:

• NEW! Free eLearning courses
• A big series of Webcasts
• Full version "Community Technology Previews", a.k.a. "beta versions"
• Express Version "Community Technology Previews"
• Developer Resources
• And more...

Recently, Digital Web Magazine published a nice article entitled "Web Designer’s FREElance Toolbox for Windows". It includes a few tools I haven't tried before but am excited to—good stuff!

Of course, you could also pick up the book Web Design on a Shoestring by Jeffrey Zeldman's wife, Carrie Bickner, also of NYPL Style Guide fame. This book has plenty of tool suggestions, too, as well as instructions on how to use them all together.

Wow... just a few minutes ago I unwittingly stuck an uncapped pen, point-down, into my breast pocket. Within moments there was a one-inch circle of blue stain on one of my favorite wrinkle-free Oxfords. I though to myself, "I could walk around all day with this dried ink spot, and hope I can buy a bottle of special stain remover later to get it out... or I could Google how to remove ink spots right away, and see what I can do."

Google quickly pointed me to this page, which lists isopropyl alcohol (a.k.a. IPA or rubbing alcohol) as a solution. I asked around my co-workers, and sure enough Phil had a bottle on hand. A handful of paper towels and a couple of minutes dabbing, and the shirt is saved!

Both Ains & I have had our Letters to the Editor published this week...

My letter about MS Longhorn was published in the July 2005 issue of Redmond Magazine.

Ainsley's letter to the Portland Press Herald was published on Sunday, July 3rd [Note: link doesn't update.]