Matthew Gifford

I felt my first earthquake on Saturday. Jenn and I were sitting in the living room when I felt a jolt. I figured that someone in an adjacent apartment had dropped something really heavy. Or maybe someone had slammed a door really hard. Something like that. It wasn’t even enough for Jenn and I to say anything to each other.

IE7 Beta 2 is now available. And, unlike the last beta, it’s open to the public. Since this version does not support many of the old CSS hacks, they’re encouraging developers to test their sites.

I guess I should probably invest in a new copy of Virtual PC.

It seems like Gmail’s spam filter needs some improvement. I’m not the only one who has noticed (via Digg). The ironic part is that it seems to have a hard time with messages that have “SPAM” in the subject line.

I plan on writing something about my experiences with Gmail in the near future.

Kurt Cagle says it’s a good time to be a programmer. I agree completely.

Robert Scoble found someone who has tried to map the spread of the blonde joke meme. My post (and every post spawned from it) are not included in the map because it was created before my post was written.

Today, Lindsey launched her latest project, Shoebox Full of Tapes. It’s a weekly podcast of music that she’s recorded. Excellent idea.

My one suggestion is that she do herself a favor and look into distributing the podcast via Coral or BitTorrent. Those bandwidth overage bills can be really nasty.

The other night, while channel-surfing (something I don’t do very often), I stumbled onto an episode of the American Experience about John and Abigail Adams. I don’t recall learning much about John Adams in school. Most of the emphasis was on Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. I think I learned more about Adams from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Franklin than I had in school. Actually, I learned about Franklin’s very negative opinion of Adams. This program portrayed Adams as a loving, radical, brilliant man who found himself in many very difficult situations. Highly recommended.

One thing that’s always bugged me about most blogging apps is that they require you to think of a title for every post, whether its length or importance warrants it or not. My previous post is a great example. Does it really need its own title? No.

WordPress itself does not require that you add titles, but every theme that I’ve seen does. So, this afternoon I finally got around to fixing this problem with my templates.

Does the change hurt the quality of my main feed? Did I break anything?

Woohoo! I’m registered for Gnomedex.

Public registration started today. If you’re thinking about going, make your mind up quickly. At least 100 of the 300 seats have already been sold.

Bare Bones software, makers of BBEdit, are working on a new organization app called Yojimbo (via Brent Simmons). If I weren’t already using OmniOutliner to organize my life, I’d probably be using Yojimbo.

It strikes me that something like this would make an excellent replacement for the Finder/Spotlight mess that’s currently in OS X. It’s clear that Apple is moving toward turning the filesystem into a database. This is a direction that I, unlike some of my readers, think is a good thing. However, Apple hasn’t yet been able to build a good UI for this database. As much as I want to use Spotlight, I never do. It’s just not convenient enough. An interface like Yojimbo’s might change that.