vasudeva

That strikes me as a particularly wierd thing to do in the absence of attribution or explanation.

The default is 72, in my understanding, because of the historical use of email.

As folks successively quote each other in a thread, the prepending of '>' to the quoted text requires something narrower than 80, else it'll hit the 80-chars-wide limit and wrap.

72 would allow 4 or 8 quote-levels, depending on if your client decides to insert spaces around the '>'.

I've been really enjoying sup -- http://sup.rubyforge.org/ -- in fact, that really wordy quote about five down is mine.

Funny, I was just referencing this issue the other day.

When people ask me what I do, I say "computer stuff", and occasionally I'll lift my hands and kind of type at a non-existent keyboard. They invariably go "oh" -- to date, not one has said "ok, but what KIND of computer stuff?" which would be my own personal response.

This tells me I'm either consistently gauging their level of computer savvy pretty accurately, or that occasionally I come off like a bit of a dick. YMMV.

Not working for me in Chrome or Firefox. It's like a Mac-only splinter of the Internet.

I've been looking for a decent mouseless wm for XP. The choices seem extremely limited.

Nope, just little blocks. Some interfaces display it as one solid dark monolith, some as empty squares, and a special few as festive little glyphs with mysterious markings inside. (XP SP2, every browser under the sun and then some.)

It's probably telling that I can't get the character to display properly in any interface... but whether of the practicality of the suggestion, or the level of my char-fu, I'm not sure.

Mine was 299961. I still remember it despite having forgotten the password several lifetimes ago.

Tech projects ZS thinks about: pretty awesome. :)

Social problems ZS blogs about: days of our lives. :(

I usually just wait for the RSS feed to re-announce it later on and remind me, but I like your method better. ;)

Can't really agree with the examples as provided.

[Information in c:\danger\wipeout_test.reg has been successfully entered into the registry as a result of your accidentally hitting Enter in explorer.exe]

"It gives the information without annoying me. Very good."

I use irssi (CLI Linux IRC client) for a ton of things -- it's basically my dashboard -- and have eventually hit upon the strategy of running an rbot (a Ruby infobot-alike by linuxbrit) and using its RSS plugin to monitor about 60 feeds in a private channel. It sits in a separate irssi window along with IRC, email, AIM, and stocks, and is nice because I can use irssi's controls (or rbot's) to do things like highlighting or ad-hoc scripting.

These I see all day, skim almost all (especially in the morning) and hit quite a few. Keeping it confined to my little dashboard area makes it accessible, while keeping it ignorable/attendable the same way I manage email et al.

I also use mobile Google Reader on my BlackBerry when bored.

This is a really useful trick.

Does anyone know of an Oracle analog?

1) Read intro about how fucking awesome some document is.

2) Find link to the document; click link.

3) Error detected -- surely this loathesome-looking PDF isn't the fucking awesome document in question!

4) Hit back, re-parse intro looking for link to real document.

Surprised no one's mentioned IMDB.com; it's the first thing that leaps to my mind.

Also occasionally surprised to consider I get people to pay to use http://linkswarm.com/ -- not complaining, though.

I once was going through a headhunter -- a rather pushy and 'slick' one -- for a gig at IBM. During the initial phone interview with the hiring manager, it became clear that the position was not as described, and I wasn't a good fit for that piece of the project.

As she described the scenario, it turned out she had a gap in a related position that was much more suited to my skillset. I told her so and she indicated interest.

A few days later, the phone rang, and I picked it up to a torrent of profanity from the headhunter, who was accusing me of 'backdooring' him and swearing up a storm, promising I'd never work in this industry again and calling me all sorts of four-letter things.

I was taken aback, and set him straight on what I had intended, not to mention how I did and didn't expect to be spoken to by a headhunter.

The phonecall wrapped up with him unctuously promising to find me a 'real nice position' somewhere... but judging by the treatment I had gotten from him, I'd have to be retarded to have any further dealings with him.

A few years ago, the girlfriend and I spent some time carefully building and configuring a MythTV box, which was fun. Then we proceeded to not actually watch any TV. 6 months later, when we realized we were only keeping the cable subscription so that our Myth project wasn't purposeless, we cancelled it.

We still watch a decent bit of downloaded TV content -- we'll sit down and watch entire seasons in a few evenings. We watch nothing in 'realtime' and we see zero commercials.

(I actually miss commercials and wish people wouldn't cut them out of what I download.)

Annoying and redundant. I often find myself clicking on a page to either force focus to that window, or to select text to act as a highlight so I can find my place easily later on.

This means any accidental doubleclicks are launching new tabs or windows that I don't want.

If I want a definition of a word, I have more global, convenient ways of handling that.

Now, if instead double-clicking did something like spawn a topic search through NYT or news.google.com or something, without the hassle of underlining every word, I can imagine that would at least seem useful.

RSS feed that sorts by age, not popularity. The current RSS feed is all sorts of chatty, showing me a ton of repeats. Its annoyance factor is about to eclipse its usefulness for me.

If what I'm looking for already exists, I can't find it.

Email's in my profile.