zelph.com

Thanks to my friend Alex , I am the prowd owner of a gmail account. I know, I know… they are just a lame kind of status symbol right now, but I was more interested in how they did things. Working in a User Experience group at Sprint, I was curious as to what methods they used for intereaction, the “discussion” concept, and the like. I just got it a day or two ago, so am still learning what I like and don’t like about it, but I’m sure a lot of that will changes as it is still only a “beta” product and will have many changes on the way.

Dislikes so far are:

• Filters don’t work very well. They don’t explain how they work, so there isn’t much “help” to go with it. I tried just experimenting with it to figure out the syntax that is allowable, and found a few things out. But when I do a test search it comes up with X number of messages that match the filter. But when I apply it, only Y messages are listed.
• Labels are nice, but folders have perks too I love being able to assign a given message to 5 labels. But I hate that unless I want to archive a given message, everything shows up in my inbox. So the daily status emails I get from my server that I don’t want to really read right off the bat… are just sitting there staring at me, taking up prime realestate. It would be nice to have both folders AND labels, so I can physically move a message to it’s “main” category, but still be able to find it as associated to other labels

Gotta get back to work, so I’ll make this short. Just wanted to link to a few cool places:
Gmail4Troops.com - Donate your invites to those defending our country. A small but valueable way to say thanks.
Pop goes the GMail - A hack to download your gmail to a pop account.
Gtray (sporatically working link) - A desktop application that sits in your tray and checks for new GMail every X minutes. It uses Internet Explorer as a conduit to do the checking, and can only open IE directly… so as a FireFox user, I just see the bubble popup saying I have a new one and know to go look, instead of going through that bubble to see what’s new. This is a very early program, so hopefully things will get better.

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Introduction

This lengthy article is here to describe the process of how Shaun Inman’s IFR technique came to be used on Sprint.com and SprintPCS.com. This is my first write-up of the process involved in implementing a major new standard, and I didn’t take the notes I should have along the way… so please bear with me.

(Read the article)

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I’ve been wanting to go to the zoo for several years now (starting back in Utah) and just never got around to it. So Friday night I decided that we’d go to the Kansas City Zoo on Saturday morning… Weather was supposed to be in the upper 60’s and overcast the whole day so figured it would probably be one of the last nice weekends before the summer heat came.

The zoo is layed out kind of in continents. You have baboons in one area, chimps in another gorillas in another, so it’s kinda weird not being able to see all the similar kind of animals at once, but also kinda interesting to see what is from where.

Overall it was a fun day, with a LOT of walking. I won’t go over each little detail but there were two that were really cool. First was a bird show that we went to watch while waiting for the second thing. I know, bird show shmird show… which was kinda what I thought going into it. During the show they asked for two adult volunteers and if they had a camera all the better. So I held mine up and got picked. We were told to go sit on these chairs. Then they bring out this big ole owl that they are going to send to a stand that is inches behind us. Luckily my camera has video, so I switched to that thinking it would be cooler to get the full action instead of one shot at a picture that I would probably miss. I wasn’t mistaken… this huge owl comes flying at us and lands basically on our heads. Having it come right at the camera is pretty sweet. Then they sent it off to another stand across the crowd, and then back to us, before going back up to the stage.

The second part was the best. They have a cage full of lorikeets that they allow 25 or so people into feed every hour. They give you a small plastic container of nectar (which is the majority of their diet) and you just hold it in your hand. You walk into the cage and they just come right up and land on your hand to start eating. There were some people that had 4 on each arm, Kaylene (my wife) had one keep landing on her head. The most I got was 3 on one arm, but had several on my shoulders a couple times. We hung out for like 20 minutes just having these beautiful rainbow colored birds flying all around and landing on us just to check things out. It was such a cool experience and worth the price of admission itself. It may be a worth a return trip to go do that again when it’s not overcast just to get some better shots with the brighter light.

The rest of the zoo was pretty cool, got some other cool shots. A large part of me wanting to go was to get some fun pictures and to play with the camera which I seem to be wanting to do more and more lately. They had a number of walk through bird aviaries which was nice to be able to get the pics without glass or wire between us. The kangaroos are just out in a field where they could walk up to you if they wanted (but naturally don’t).

Several times we had the whole “is a zoo cruel?” discussion as we would run into a particularly pathetic looking animal in a bland cage. It seems the “big ticket” animals get it pretty good, and a few others just get the shaft. We still don’t know how we feel about it, but it was just sad to see a few animals in a bad setting. While others seemed to be just fine, and you never know the back story of how maybe these particular specimens would have already died were it not for human intervention.

Anyway… good times were had and to anyone in the area, I highly recommend a visit for the lorikeet feeding alone. It was a blast and we will enjoy the pictures and video for some time.

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Can you say “Sweet!!”?? This case mod is definately one not to be shoved under your desk to gather dust. Make sure to click through all of the closeups as they are truely astounding. I think that I read that it was around 7 months of mod time.

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France sent me a cool link the other day to musicplasma : the music visual search engine. Basically you enter in you enter in a band/artist name and it create a list of bands/artists with similar style, and other genres that also are of similar tastes. No clue where he compiled the info that said what related to what, but for me it seemed pretty accurate and gave me an few other people to try and listen to.

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