So I have the Cingular 2125 and I absolutely love it. It does have some quirks every once in a while though. One of the quirks happened today. My phone was in Flight Mode for some unknown reason. I'm reasonably sure I didn't do anything to cause it. Flight Mode means you have no ability to use the phone as a phone because it is not connected to the network. I Googled for a solution and found out there is a rather obscure way to solve this. Hit the power button quickly and release quickly and this will bring up a menu called “Quick List.” You should see an entry that says “Flight mode” or “Flight mode off.” In my case it said “Flight mode” even though it should have said “Flight mode off” since Flight mode was apparently on. Nevertheless I clicked on “Flight mode” then went back to the quick list menu and it said “Flight mode off.” I clicked on “Flight mode off” and this solved the issue.

Gee all of the spammers seem to think this blog is really interesting. Neeto.

This is just bizarre. I guess it's like hiring a safe cracker to help you build a better safe.

http://news.com.com/Adware+maker+joins+federal+privacy+board/2100-1028-5587653.html?part=dht&tag=ntop&tag=nl.e703 

Hey wait a minute!! I thought Firefox was supposed to be impervious to security issues.

http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-10-01-02.html

Here's a new one. The commenting feature of this site works just fine in Firefox right now but does not work in Microsoft Internet Explorer. In all of the time I have spent in software development projects it has always been the other way around. Internet Explorer is a far superior browser than Mozilla, Firefox, or Netscape. If you listen to the Firefox zealots you will hear a completely opposite story however. One of these days I'm going to post some specific examples that support my theories on this.

One example is staring me in the face right now. I'm using a blog engine called DasBlog to edit this blog site. DasBlog has this really cool Word applet that allows you to post without having to know HTML. You can switch to the HTML editor at any time if you want to edit that way too. Here's a screenshot:

This functionality is very cool and essential for the engine to really function the way it needs to. Well this doesn't work at all in the beloved Firefox. Here's a screenshot:

I've been kind of slow in adding entries to this blog in the past week. Commenting isn't working right now and I think it's kind of lame to add entries that people can't comment on. I should be able to look at the issue this coming week and get it fixed.

Today Google announced a beta desktop search application that enables users to search their email, files, web history, and chats. Click here for the press release from Google. I thought this looked really cool and decided to download it.

This is a Beta release so it is not surprising that I had a fairly poor installation experience. The first problem was that this program was not compatible to the Microsoft Firewall Client I had installed on my machine at work. Google lists a number of non-compatible products that you can see by clicking here. 

After removing my firewall client the program entered into the installation process. During installation it needed to close Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Internet Explorer. I allowed the program to close those programs automatically since it offered this option. That was probably a mistake.

After installation I needed to re-launch Microsoft Outlook. When I tried to re-launch Microsoft Outlook I received the following error message:

I had to re-boot my machine in order to get Microsoft Outlook to launch again. After re-booting and launching Microsoft Outlook I received three registry error messages while Outlook was starting. Outlook did successfully re-launch and now everything is fine.

In fact, it's great!!

Google Desktop Search is one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time. I won't go into the full-blown review here but you have to try this (once they work out the installation bugs.) Essentially Google installs the same type of search engine that it uses on the Internet directly on to your local machine. It searches email, files, Internet Explorer cache files, and all kinds of other relevant stuff. The ability to use the Google interface to toggle between local content and Internet content is phenomenal and seamless. Google has done a really cool thing here. You can download it here:

http://desktop.google.com/

I'm so proud of this. If you go to http://www.google.com and enter the phrase “Techy Geek” without the quotes I am number one and two out of 7,470 results. Does that mean I am the number one techy geek in the world? Can I just show this to a prospective employer as proof? Shhhhhhh....don't tell Google this site isn't really all that techy or geeky.

Annoying.

It was working. I was also getting emails on referrals but that stopped working as well. If anyone knows how to fix this please comment. Oh yeah that's right you can't comment. Annoying.

Check it out here.

<RANT>

If I have to read the letters IMHO in an email one more time I think I am going to scream. For those of you who are fortunate enough to not know what I am talking about, this is a rapidly growing trend in modern email communications. People are too lazy to actually type the words “in my humble opinion” so they throw some meaningless acronym in there as a substitute. I see this being used on a lot of large distribution lists at work and I know that there are probably many people that have no idea what the acronym actually means.

The thing that's particularly annoying about most of these is that they are meaningless even when they aren't reduced to an acronym. Why does someone even need to say “in my humble opinion?” We know it's your opinion because you are the one writing it. Just write your opinion and be done with it already. Chances are you aren't even all that humble about it since you chose to send it to hundreds of people.

The event that got me thinking about this happened the other day. I was reading someone's email that was posted to a large distribution group and he used the acronym FWIW not once but twice in the same email. I sat there for about 5 minutes trying to figure out what FWIW meant. Even in the context of the email I still wasn't getting it. So I went to the Acronym Lookup Tool hosted on our company Intranet (some team actually spent time and money developing a technology to help people understand these things if that tells you how bad the abuse has become) and I found out that it means “for what it's worth.” Again, a meaningless statement even when expanded to proper English.

</RANT> 

In reference to my earlier post to the increased traffic due to the recent release of my blog here is the final tally for the day. Well as of 9pm anyway. We almost broke 400.

I just launched this blog yesterday and the traffic is already surging. Check out the graph below. The 92 hits on the 8th are attributed to the fact that I had something for sale on my site that I announced to a large group of people. Earlier in the day I thought I would be doing great if the traffic hit 200 for today. The day is only half over and it's already at 195. Sweet!