I just found out that Loudcloud changed its name to Opsware, 11 months behind the news.  Duh.  I still have no idea what the hell they do other than it being Marc Anderseen's company.  On the other hand, I know that Mozilla 1.4 was recently released.  *Yawn*

Hah!  Tim is mad as hell because I claimed my roses are fatter than his.  If he wants Blogging War of Roses, I'll gladly give it to him.  Just look at the size of his rose compared to the leaves.  Not even close, Tim.  Besides, your roses are funky looking.  Your pictures look much better than mine though, particularly that White Astilbe.  I got a tiny 3.2MP, you got a 5MP.  No competition there.  At least mine is cheap enough for me to look unconcerned convincingly when I lose it.

I can get same amount of details as you can by making my flowers bigger.  Just wait until next year when I'll have roses the size of watermelons or maybe even bigger, big enough for me to get a warning from my Nazi home owner association for endangering the safety of the community, big enough to be invited to David Letterman Show, big enough to squash me like a bug.  Oops.  Time for my medicine again.

Just in case, I instructed my son to hang up immediately if any ill-mannered skinny roses call.

SmartBars are just applications that cling to a side of your screen like the way Windows Task Bar does.  I typically use it to quickly access folders and applications instead of navigating the Start Menu.  I found two SmartBars via Scoble, SmartBarXP and Desktop Sidebar, and decided to try the SmartBarXP (looked better than the other one).  Nicely done although it's not quite commercial product quality yet.  It comes with 14 gadgets ranging from MP3 player and system resource monitor.

SmartBarXP's main problem is that it is too big and slow for a program intended to be running all the time.  It eats up 24 to 32 meg of memory and responds slowly when interacting with it.  I thought it might be written with .NET, so I took a look at the binaries and found that it was written in Visual Basic 6.  You can build nice programs with VB, but not when you need minimum impact on memory and CPU.

Google accepted my blog for AdSense so the AdSense trial is on.  I opted to put horizonal ads after the last post of each day.  I appologize if my ad-enabling my blog offends you and I'll understand if you decide to stop visiting during the trial.  BTW, there will be no ads in my RSS feed (unless I made a mistake in my Radio configuration).

Please don't click on the ads for my sake.  I know this is what was happening with the high click-through rate at Tim Bray and Russell Beattie blogs.  Trial means exactly that, a trial, and not a tip cup.  Also, don't forget to send me feedback not just on how it looks or annoys you.  Tell me how it changes your view toward the blog and ideas on how a blog might display ads harmoniously.

Thanks.

Update 1: Well, the learning process continues.  It turns out Google wants only one ad banner per page.  Since a blog home page shows more than one day of posts, I moved the bannder script down up to page level.  The ads haven't shown up yet though and it might be visible only if you are coming from Google.

Update 2: Ads finally showed after an HTML bug was fixed.  Horizontal ad stuckout like a sore thumb no matter where I put it.  So I switched to a vertical one and placed it below the blogroll so it won't appear too intrusively.  Nothing comes up in the stat page though.

Update 3: Obviously, there are some problems with AdSensibility.  I mentioned some Korean baseball players just a few days ago and Google decided that my site should show 3 baseball-related ads out of 4 ads.  Hmm.

I installed Google Toolbar two days ago to see how BlogThis! works.  Not bad for a first cut.  While using it, I noticed the Popup Blocker.  In the past two days, it block 37 popup ads.  Yesterday, I had to override the blocker to access some Comcast popup windows.

IMHO, popup window is a bad design choice.  It is unfortunate that 3D-Secure accepts PIN in a popup window which just opened a can of worms like conflict with popup blockers.  But it was a marketing decision and you know how little leverage engineers have over marketing decisions.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that Google doesn't do popup ads and its Popup Blocker have the potential to degrade effectiveness of popup ads sold by others.  I am sure Google engineers added this feature with only the Google users' benefit in mind (engineers are incredibly innocent by nature), but I think the effect have the potential to be become significant if Google Toolbar becomes really popular.

Just in case Google-haters misuse this post, I want to make it clear that I like using Google the product and respect Google the company's good intentions.

How we interpret what we read is subject to our biases.  At the extreme, total blindness occurs, fabricating something entirely different.  I am no exception and had many embarrasing moments when such blindness strikes.

Yesterday, it happened to Sam Ruby.  Upon reading Rogers Cadenhead's description of SSF activities in which he wrote that his goal was to develop a new specification from scratch, Sam concluded that Roger was developing a new protocol from scratch even after going back and checking to make sure.

Human mind continues to amaze me in how it works and I am left to wonder what evolutionary purpose these type of blindness serves.  Other than suffering from occasional intellectual blindness like Sam, I suffer from inability to see things right in front of me.  It usually happens when I open the refrigerator looking for something to eat.

Another weird thing is that I seem to organize things far differently than my wife.  She likes to store things in pre-assigned locations.  I tend to just remember the location where I see things last.  This train of thought begs me to ask this question:

Will there be Men and Women versions of Longhorn?

Update: This is my theory on the differences in the way men and women organize things: women change location, men remembers location.  When luxurious caves were popular, women usually stayed near the cave and stored food in the cave.  Since caves are finite in space, they had to organize storage efficiently.

Meanwhile, men had to travel long distances to catch animals which means travelling lightly and having to memorize locations and distinguish directions reliably.  So, women move things to organize while men just notes where things are and move on.  Is this too simple?

Dear Dave,

 

Assuming that you are calm down now and it is my turn, I would like to give you a sermon.  I am posting on my blog because you didn't return my recent e-mails.  Don't be surprised if it comes at an angle you didn't expect for I have had this thought for a while now.

 

Where the f**k do you get off asking questions like "Who is Ben Trott?"

 

Ben is just a guy who was doing what he liked to do and voicing his opinions timidly like everyone else.  I gave him my feedback for his own good and not for your benefit.  He did a good job with MT and now he got something going with Six Apart.  I don't know him and I don't care if ever do.  I have met you several times and I liked most of your personalities except the part where you tear people apart by asking condescending questions like you did with Dave and criticizing friends for having their own f**king opinions.

 

Dave, what do people have to do to have opinions of their own and still be your friend or have a civilized conversation with you?  Is there some unknown minimum requirement?  Knowing you, I don't think so.  Being pissed off out of your mind is no excuse to tear apart people like you did.  Is RSS that f**king important to the world?  I don't think so.

 

If Ben is a nobody, so are you for no one cares for people who will sacrifice people over technology.  RSS is like that cherry on top of the ice cream.  People would like to have it, but are not willing to lick the floor to get it.

 

Turn back the dials on your pissed-off meter, sit back on your chair, and show the world that you are worthy of our respect for you, Dave.

 

PS: Don't poking the Selfish Pig again.

I wanted to play with AdSense so I applied for it just now and started obfuscating four letter words in my blog so Google won't think I am a porn site.