Asides

Ah, computer nostalgia! If you have a Gmail account and have been using computers long enough to remember monochrome monitors, go to Settings and then Themes, and check out the Terminal theme. It's almost perfect: Green on black, fixed-width font, even fake ASCII art for the borders and Gmail logo! The “High Score” theme has areal old-school Nintendo feel to it as well.

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Is this Orange County, CA, or Orange County, FL? Bright sunshine, 90 degrees…and rain. in July.

http://maps.google.com/

Want to see what LA traffic looks like on a typical Friday evening? You can. A co-worker just pointed out that you can view statistical traffic on Google Maps in addition to live traffic. Enable Traffic, then look at the map key and hit “change,” and you can choose the day of the week and time.

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That was a surprisingly long earthquake. When it started, it was mild enough that I thought it was just someone walking heavily across the office. (I wonder how many small quakes I don't notice because of that?) After ~20 seconds, the shaking got stronger…and it just kept going. 60 seconds? 90? USGS rates it at 5.4 near Anza-Borrego.

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BBQ with the in-laws Friday night, Westercon on Saturday, fireworks at the beach on Sunday. Today I think I'm just going to hang out at home.

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Stayed late to work on a project, which meant I was already in the office to deal with a catastrophic server problem. That's *mostly* done, but I'm keeping an eye on the last stage since it ran into some more problems about 5 minutes before I expected to leave.

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Just got back from seeing South Pacific & set the program down next to Westways magazine…with the headline, “Shall We Dance?” on the cover. Right composers, wrong show.

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Tip for when you ask someone for tech support: If they ask you a series of questions in response, there's probably a reason for each question. Please try to answer *all* of them, not just the ones you feel like answering.

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Oh, great, the new Flickr/Facebook integration posts an update for *every single photo* you upload instead of sending out one notice for the whole batch. Sorry about the picspam.

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I like open primaries in theory, but what CA just passed actually *reduces* choice on the final ballot: only the top 2 from the primary. How long until the first election where both candidates are the same party?

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I hate misleading ad campaigns. CA Proposition 16 is NOT about “your right to vote.” It's about keeping local govermnents out of the electricity business.

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