After a bit of a lazy day I’m off to enjoy a bit of the sun and wander in Harvard Square for a bit. Even if it isn’t extremely warm out. I feel the need to recharge my solar batteries.

Oh yeah, and I am still hitting the movie tonight. I’m going to the 7 showing, so if you feel like meeting me, drop me a line (you can also send email to my phone from here). There will be a review later hopefully.

This whole skipping an hour thing always throws me for a loop. There’s something about going to sleep at 10 and it really being nine. I always find that I’m staying up a little bit later at first because my body isn’t used to the change and isn’t tired. I’m going to force myself to go to sleep early tonight though.

Mornings I don’t find quite as bad. Though I did sleep in this morning and it was very nice. Time to make myself a nice puff pancake.

Habeas Sues Spammers
Habeas, the company that aims to stop spam by embedding copyrighted and trademarked material in the headers of e-mail, is springing into action with cases against alleged infringers. [Antipixel]

I’ll be watching this to see how it turns out. I remember hearing about Haebeas when they first appeared and thought it was an interesting idea. I actually just signed up this morning, and also set my mailer to colortag any message that uses it. I’m kind of curious to see who else is using this.

Mae West: “You’re never too old to become younger.” [Quotes of the Day]

Hikaru no Go has been a bit slow for the last bunch of episodes. I just finished watching episode 68 and things look like they might start to shift into gear again. In many ways I’m hoping this show hasn’t jumped the shark. They removed a major character and it has thrown everything into a kind of paused state. The last episode or two have done some interesting things as far as moving characters into place for something interesting to happen, but I wonder how it will affect the series.

I really need to get back into reading the manga, I’m only like two volumes into it at the moment.

While I was at my parents I wasn’t able to check email through my mail server. Then, I remembered that AT&T lets you read email on their servers via the web (in fact, remotely this is the ONLY way to read mail. They don’t even support using POP from a machine not on their network (bastards).

So I fire up the web interface and check my mail, delete everything and see I’m still using up 10% of my mail space. Looking around more I find a folder called ‘screened mail’. Looking in it I see days of spam mail, including one real email. I was annoyed.

I actually think it is cool that they offer email screening. But, if you’re going to offer it in this way I think you have to do a few things. (1) Make sure the user knows about it. And including information about it in an HTML is not good enough. Because I can’t read half of what they include in it (I have HTML turned off, so all those promotional emails I get from them have these big blank spaces where there are images telling me things). (2) Offer the user more than one way to check the screened mail. The only way to check the screened messages is via the web. Come on folks, IMAP isn’t new. At least let us use IMAP so we can easily check stuff like this. Or send it to a different mailbox that we can use POP with. What a pain in the ass.

I’d mentioned before that I got a Canon Scanoscan N650U a while ago (I think I got it around a year and a half ago). I was with my parents at the Apple store while they were buying their mac and asked the sales guy if the printer would work with OS X. He said it would. He was wrong. In fact he was so wrong that Canon is still only just barely supporting this printer in OS X. I checked back again to see if they had drivers for it and indeed they did. As I finished downloading them I started reading the documentation. The drivers they supplied, they only work with Photoshop. What the hell. Haven’t they heard of things like TWAIN? My parents got an Epson scanner for Christmas and even though it didn’t have full OS X support at least it had TWAIN support. Which meant I could use Image Capture (which comes with OS X).

So, I decided to check back into VueScan, a piece of software for OS X (and windows) that supports an insane number of scanners of all types (SCSI, USB, etc). I’d tried it once before when it supposedly first had support for the N650U, but it didn’t work. This time. It did! I still feel a little weird spending any money on a scanner that was so cheap and should just work, but I’ve got a ton of pictures I really want to scan in. I have to say I’m really disappointed with Canon. I don’t see why it takes that long to release a scanner driver.

So, I think I’m going to buy a copy of VueScan later this week and get to work scanning in a bunch of old pictures I have. I can then archive them off to CD so that I can have easier access to them on the computer.

Now, what I really need is a rendezvous enabled scanner. So I can drop something on the flatbed and go back to my laptop and do all the scanning from there. That would just plain rule.

I went down to my parent’s place last night because some relatives were in town and everyone was going to be getting together for dinner today. Unfortunately, I completely spaced on the fact that the electric company was going to be doing maintenance and they were going to be cutting the power once or twice last night. I discovered this morning that none of my machines were online, something that made me a little worried.

I excused myself from things a little bit early so I could slip back home and make sure that there was nothing extremely bad. I had images of my apartment having been broken into the reason I couldn’t get to any of my machines was because they weren’t there. In the end it turns out that one of them was just off, and the other needed me to run fsck on a partition. Phew.

So I’m back now, the visit was good, though stressful. My parents are great, the provide a ton of support for me as I’m going through some difficult times, even if I’m a bit to bull-headed to ask for help. I really am glad they are there for me.

I’m in a much better mood today. I’d blame it on being overtired, but I really didn’t sleep much last night. I seemed to have a bit of insomnia. When I did finally sleep it was like I was watching some show about someone flying an ultralight plane around their farm. But I was kind of in the show, and at the same time the one flying the plane. I never quite get my dreams. I keep thinking I should keep a pad by my bed, or maybe a small tape recorder and record them. But I’m too afraid that I’ll discover that I am actually insane.

I have a craving for something sweet. I’m off to hunt through the house to see what I can find.

Dave asks: Does it snow in Cambridge in May?. Hopefully not. If it does I’m gonna go out and find the person responsible and hurt them. It’s been funny this year. I have a few people I know who just moved here and I keep telling them, “It really isn’t this bad usually!” Of course, the current weather is not helping me prove my case at all.