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Let Me Come On Home.

Monday, April 30, 2007

o/' One thousand miles away

This is all I'm sayin.

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who knew

I'm not surprised to see the Miami Heat lost their first-round series against the Bulls, but c'mon, Dallas down 3-1 to the Warriors? That doesn't even make sense. But it's awesome.

I don't see Golden State making it past round 2, but I sure would enjoy seeing them beat the Mavs.

Update: Holy crap, they won! The Warriors were barely over .500 and they beat the best team in the league!

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Google Homepage notes & criticisms

Thursday, April 19, 2007

I've been trying to put together a list of ideas and criticisms I have for and about the Google Homepage to eventually send to them as a list of suggestions. Spurred on somewhat by Lifehacker's "Homepage Showdown," I've been comparing netvibes and google homepage a bit (and raiding netvibe's list of rss content to steal for my GHP). I'm too embroiled in the GHP at this point to switch, i think, but there are definately some things that Google could do to improve, based on my comparisons with netvibes and just on the ideas that come with use:

individual refresh btns - simple enough, right?

integrate reader / homepage - the ability to read rss feeds in the homepage is nice... netvibe's and original signal's floating boxes are ok (still kinda small), but being able to open a bigger version within a layer over the page would be best. (it's not about getting your reader feeds on the homepage, ie. via the reader gadget, but about the larger display of the articles)

more google-created modules, esp a comprehensive flickr module - the ability for anyone to create modules is great, but the quality of modules varies so widely that you often end up with modules that are good ideas with bad executions. I would like to see google create more good modules with good executions.

a good note taking module - this is definately something netvibes does better with their "stick a note anywhere you want" functionality. something else i like about their note module is the lack of a header bar where it's not needed. i think google could stand to lose header bars on some of it's modules.

do something about the clunky header bars on every module? - funny, when i added that comment to the last item, i didn't even realize that this was on my list. guess it's worth being there twice.

display favicons on rss feed modules - it's a little thing, but gotta be easy to implement, right? it could make such a difference

Send module to -> tab / top - I've been rearranging things and adding tabs lately, too see how i like the tabbed structure as opposed to one big page. so far the jury is still out, but i will say that adding key modules to differnt tabs may help drive you to check those tabs. That being said, it sure is a pain to get something from the bottom of one tab onto another... though I will say that i really like that you can drag a module and drop it on a tab to send it to that tab. Smart.

edit, send to a friend, etc. menus pop up under flash content - this is really more of a (dys)function of the embeded flash. perhaps Google should make an official recomendation that flash content be embedded in windowless mode so that layers can appear above it. cause right now, all my flash modules screw this up.

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So it goes.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

I just found out Kurt Vonnegut died.


So fitting - him with them Pall Malls -- Photo Matthias Rietschel/Associated Press

I read my first book by him, Breakfast of Champions, during the year that I spent waiting for life to start -- between high school and my first semester at LSU. I read it in a day and was ready for more. I wound up reading almost everything that he wrote (that was fiction) and even liked the movie adaptation of Slaughterhouse 5. But probably only because I'd read it three times and already knew the parts of the story that were left out.

I'm not going to write a eulogy here, I need to go to sleep, but I will admit that when people tell me they're not really into reading, I tell them it's because they haven't read any Kurt Vonnegut yet. He's a great author to begin with, though trust me, save Breakfast of Champions for later and start with Slaughterhouse 5 or Cat's Cradle.

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