Couple of other random news/notes that don’t deserve (or at least, aren’t getting) entries of their own.
- How to Get an Exit Row Seat on United:
If you’re over six feet or just looking for some extra legroom, exit rows are an absolute must if you’re not flying first class (and I never am, as I keep flying different airlines and thus have no status any longer). On United, however, unlike most of the other major airlines, exit rows come at an additional price – around $35, IIRC. But if you check in at the gate rather than in the terminal, you’ll more than likely be able to get it at no cost. It’s worked the last 4 or 5 times I’ve flown United (against my will). - Good vs Bad Phishing Attempts:
I’m not sure what this says about me personally, but I find myself more irked by bad phishing attempts than good ones. I received one the other day that was quite subtle, purporting to be a query on an item from eBay, and I couldn’t help admire the craftsmanship. It was perfect, and I hope that my parents and older family members never run across it, because there’s a pretty good chance they’d be fooled. Two minutes later, I received a crude, text only PayPal phishing attempt that wouldn’t fool anyone, and felt a bit disappointed. If you’re going to try and steal my money, at least do it with style. - New #1’s on Google:
Discovered to my amusement that I am now the #1 listing in Google for ‘greasemonkey steve‘ and ‘who the hell is steve-o.’ - The Perils of Working with Alpha Software:
For my Linux desktop search, I employ a very nice package called Beagle. A couple of weeks back, I received an error while syncing my email, informing me that I was out of disk space. Given that the last I’d checked I’d had well over 14 GB’s free, I was a little perplexed. Ultimately, I determined that the existing file space hog was the Beagle directory (used ‘du -h –max-depth=2 /home/sog’ – quite helpful). The culprit? Not the search indexes, as I anticipated, but the log files. For some reason I had 14 GB’s worth of log space, which is obviously less than ideal. - Do I Need a Blogroll?:
On the day that I cut over from Bloglines to Feedlounge, I eliminated my blogroll because it would have been out of date – Feedlounge doesn’t yet offer the expose your blogroll with a bit of JavaScript that Bloglines did. Given the importance that I personally accord to blogrolls, I expected this to be more of an issue. You know how many people have complained, or even mentioned it? Zero. - Firefox, Improve the Tabs’ Icon Handling – Please:
As a fairly serious user of del.icio.us, and one who takes the time to not just link but comment on what I’m linking to, it’s far from unusual for me to completely run out of tab space in Firefox with a bunch of open sites waiting to be waiting to be tagged. This is bad enough, but what makes it worse is that Firefox regularly loses the icon at the top of my tabs, so that instead of having, say, a Gmail icon signalling me that this is a tab with an open instance of Gmail, I get something generic. The result? I end up opening three, four and sometimes five Gmail tabs – wasting precious space. Could really use a fix for that, silly as it may seem.
Anyhow, that’s about it for this week. Enjoy your respective weekends.
