Day: October 17, 2007

Forgot my mind reading device again

You know, if you’re going to send email to a person who runs a mailing list, don’t assume that he only runs one mailing list. Generally the skills for running one list are transferrable to other mailing lists, so the person in question might run more than one. Take me, for instance. I run probably 2 dozen or so lists. Which is why I get so annoyed when I get email like this:

To whom this may concern:

I am from [Clueless Wankertech] Inc. and we have an event coming up that we feel
the members of your mailing list will benefit from. Below is a post
which we are wondering if you could post to your mailing list or allow
us to do this. Thank you for your time and consideration.

The post is as follows:
[etc]

WordPress plugins

Every now and then, the WordPress OpenID comment plugin I use goes mental and starts taking people’s comments and posting them to a non-existant post, and also stripping out all the text of their comments. I suspect it’s an interaction with SpamKarma2 and/or Akismet, but there is no way I’m going to do without spam protection, so I guess at times like this, my only option is to deactivate the OpenID plugin.

So sorry pir and jdev, but your comments were lost. Please feel free to submit them again.

Today’s iPod discovery

I’ve had this iPod since April. (One thing this blog is good for is that I can use it to check on the petty details of my life.) All this time I’ve had it in an incase leather case, which puts a rubber membrane on top of the scroll wheel. That membrane kind of slows down the scrolling, so I usually use the new “Search” function because scrolling through however many hundreds of artists or thousands of albums to find the one that’s been running through my head all night is too damn slow. But today I took it out of the case for some reason, and something amazing happened. I was scrolling though the list of artists, and suddenly I got a gigantic “A” in the middle of the screen, and each tick of the scroll wheel moved one letter instead of just one album. Once I got to the first letter of the artist I wanted (Captain Tractor, btw), I paused and it went back to slow scrolling through the individual items. This is very cool – it really speeds up scrolling to where I want. Once again, Apple pleasantly surrprises me with user interface delight.

Now if only they’d make it so that going fast goes to scrolling through the first letters, then one quick pause and you’re in quick scrolling through second letters, and such.