In honor of Valentine’s Day, check out this bizarre sight we found at (of all places) Borders a while back:
Yes, it’s Star Trek perfume inspired by the Vulcan mating urge.
But, wait, there’s more!
Apparently, they want you to believe that Starfleet Medical has isolated the factor that made Captain James T. Kirk a 23rd century Casanova (in SPAAACE!) and have bottled it to sell.
Office Park Ponds (2/3), originally uploaded by Kelson.
There are still a few empty lots in the Irvine Spectrum office park area, and the recent rains have turned them green…and for the first time I remember noticing, filled hollows with water to create temporary ponds. There were even a half-dozen ducks milling about while I took these pictures.
Update: I went back a month later, after the rains had stopped, and took some more photos.
I’ve been hoping to try out Google Buzz, but it hasn’t hit my Gmail account yet and it won’t run on my phone*…even though it’s a web app. Comments at Android and Me and at Mashable show that I’m not alone.
It turns out that Buzz uses HTML5 features (specifically appcache, database and location) to store local data and to detect your physical location…and those capabilities were added in Android 2.0.
The support thread mentions that they are “working on another version that will make Buzz for mobile accessible on older Android OS versions (and some other smartphones as well).” The browser in Android 1.6 and below supports similar capabilities through Gears, so they may be planning a Gears-based workaround.
This would be a lot less of an issue if it weren’t for the fact that most of the Android phones out there still run 1.6 or even Android 1.5. IIRC only the Droid and Nexus One have officially been updated to 2.0 so far**, so unless you have one of those two models, you’re more likely to get Buzz to run on an iPhone than Android.
Funny, that.
*I’ve got a G1. It can only access Buzz through the updated Maps app, which brought up a bunch of people in nearby office parks posting things like “Testing Buzz” and “WTF is Google Buzz?”
**A few other phones have had updates announced, but I don’t think any have actually shipped yet. I could be wrong.
I finally found out what’s been taking up so much space on the Android web browser on my G1: Gears!
Whenever the low-on-space warning* icon shows up on the phone, I open up the list of applications. Then I sort it by size, look for the largest apps that I don’t use anymore, and start uninstalling.
“Browser” is always high on the list, but it’s all data. While I could free up the space by telling it to clear everything, I want to hang onto things like bookmarks. Each time the icon popped up, I’d go back to the app, open up More and then Settings, and clear the cache, or the history, or cookies**, one category at a time.
Then I’d go back to the App list and it would still be using up several megabytes of space.
Yesterday, it occurred to me to check the Gears settings. Months ago, I’d set up two WordPress blogs with Turbo mode, which uses Gears as a permanent cache for the admin area. It’s great on a desktop or laptop with lots of local space and a slow or flaky Internet connection. But it wasn’t helping me much, because…
So I removed both sites from Gears, along with a couple of other sites that I’d added, but didn’t need anymore, and freed up about 3 MB.
It should be a while before I see that low-space icon again, and I shouldn’t have to ration my installed apps quite so closely!
*This wouldn’t be a problem if they’d given the G1 enough memory for apps in the first place, or if they’d let us install apps to the SD card (where I still have gigabytes of free space), or if I were willing to root my phone, or if I’d just bite the bullet and buy a Nexus One.
**I’d really like to be able to selectively delete cookies — or rather, to selectively keep a few cookies and delete the rest — but that’s another issue.
Lately I’ve started getting spam for academic essay-writing services on this blog, and for some reason it really bugs me. I mean, more than the usual pills, porn, personals & fake antivirus crap.
Is it just that I’m more accustomed to the other stuff? Possibly, but I think it’s a little deeper than that. I think the reason it bothers me is that, beyond the spammer himself being dishonest, this is encouraging the target to be dishonest as well.
Yesterday I received an e-mail newsletter from WebRing. The major story: guestbooks and counters are now available.
Yes, guestbooks and counters. For WebRing.
The 1990s really are back!
Here are some of my contributions to today’s Twitter meme, #greatquoteswithdear. You can probably figure out how the game works…
The final season of Lost is off to a good start. They found a way to follow through on the cosmic reset button that didn’t bug the heck out of me, explained some things, and set up an intriguing direction for the final arc. It will be really interesting to see how the two narratives relate.
The only downside is that it looks like ABC has decided to throw Better Off Ted under the bus. I was really hoping that it was only preempted for the two-hour premiere, but there’s no sign of it next week. It would be nice if they’d at least let the show finish out the season.
Also: really angry at ABC News’s scare tactics of “OMG Al Qaeda intends to attack us!” Um, yeah. We knew that. We’ve known that for over a decade. We’ve known that since before 9/11. Trying to scare your viewers into a panic at every commercial break is not what I’d call responsible journalism.
Anyway, Lost spoilers below…
A Lot of Effort to Disguise Some Spam
I found a comment in the spam folder for Speed Force that, on first glance, looked like an actual, relevant comment…to a different post. It was a coherently-written paragraph about how someone had “considered getting a second Captain Cold” action figure to customize it, but it was posted to an article about stalled miniseries. The author’s name and link were obvious spam, though (seriously, “watch full movies” is the best you can do?).
My first thought: They’d copied the text from another comment on the site. I’ve seen that happen before, but usually it’s comments on the same post. A search through existing comments didn’t turn up any matches, though.
So then I did a search on the rest of the web, and found the original comment on a review of an Atom Smasher toy.
Someone had gone looking for a site with a similar topic (comic books about super-heroes, action figures made from super-heroes), copied text from there, and pasted it onto mine…and yet they hadn’t bothered to match up specifics (like pasting it on a post about action figures or Captain Cold). So it’s not quite as sneaky as the one who followed a link in my post and pasted in text from the other page, but it’s pretty close.