Site to Check Out: Great Bargains for Early Birds

Woot is unlike any other site I've ever seen. Each day, it offers great closeout deals on a single item of merchandise. The visitor doesn't know whether the operators have 20 of the gizmos, or 2,000 of them. Once available quantities are exhausted, the Sold Out sign goes up.

A new item is posted at 12:01 EST M-F.

Frankly, I've yet to visit the site when the day's item wasn't sold out.

Tech Tip: Clean Up Quoted Text in E-Mails

If you're like me, you get a lot of e-mails which cite other messages, which cite still other messages. And with the convention of
>preceding quoted text lines with greater-than symbols
>>and preceding their predecessors with double greater-than symbols
>>>things can get ugly pretty quickly.

E-Mail Stripper is a simple tool for cleaning up this kind of crap. Just download the 171 KB executable file (there's no installation routine) onto your desktop or someplace else where you'll be able to find it easily. When you've got some quoted text to clean up, simply:

1. Launch the EXE
2. Copy the messy text to the Windows Clipboard
3. Click on the application's Paste button to paste the text into the program's dialog box
4. Click on the Strip It! button to strip out all the >'s and added line breaks
5. Click on the Copy button to copy the sanitized text back to the Windows Clipbioard

Pretty cool, and totally free. I've been using it for years.

Filtering Run Amok

The librarian in me cringes at the thought of filtering information, but the practical person realizes that there's an argument for blocking some information on the Internet from minors. There's a lot of offensive content out there. Let's not even get into the topic of who should be making the judgment as to what's offensive, but a case can be made for (and against) filtering.

But let's not get carried away.

I routinely buy a couple of pizzas every Sunday evening. Not only does that cover dinner, it provides me with lunch to pack for a few days. I've been doing this for years, and the manager of my local Pizza Hut knows me (and knows my regular order). "Dick, right? A stuffed crust pepperoni and a stuffed crust onion? Twenty minutes."

She told me a couple of weeks ago that she didn't understand why the store's phone system (which is tied into a database of customers) couldn't remember my name. "Each time, I key in your name, Dick, and save it. But when you call again and I key in your phone number, the name doesn't come up."

"Try keying in Richard," I suggested.

When I returned the following week, she was grinning. "You were right. Richard worked."

Geez, don't the Pizza Hut programmers have something better to do with their time than implement strategies to keep potentially off-color content out of their customer database?

He Must Not Have Been Talking to Yogi

"If you don't think too good, then don't think too much."

--Ted Williams (according to the Car Talk guys)

Thought for the Day from the Sage of Baltimore

"Only the mediocre are always at their best."
--H. L. Mencken

Tech Tip: Make Acrobat Load Faster

While Adobe Acrobat Reader has become kind of a lingua franca for placing non-HTML and non-XML documents on the Web for access by the public, it's always bothered me how long it takes for the Acrobat Reader module to load, even on a reasonably fast machine.

I finally installed a nifty utility which signficantly speeds up the loading process. It comes from a British company named TNK-Bootblock (http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/), and it's called Adobe Reader Speedup. I've installed it on a number of machines, and it's significantly improved loading performance on all of them (though the improvement was particularly noticeable on the slower systems).

Downloads of the freeware product are available from the usual places, but I got mine from Major Geeks (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4139.html).

It's pretty nifty. The program only needs to be run once. After that, Acrobat Reader loads much faster whenever you click on a link to a PDF document.

It appears to be clean, too. No post-installation problems were reported by NAV, Ad-Aware, or Spybot Search and Destroy.

The GOP Was Right in 2000

Political consultant James Carville has reluctantly admitted that he foolishly disregarded a friend's warning before the 2000 election. "Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!"

Bush and the Middle East

When I voted for Al Gore in 2000, it wasn't because I was particularly enamored of him. He simply seemed like a better prospect than George W. Bush. (So did Ralph Nader, for that matter.)

Despite the election results, though, Bush won. (I still understand neither the concept underlying the Electoral College nor the lack of an uproar to abolish it following the incredible comedy of errors which followed the 2000 election.)

Actually, Bush hasn't done as poorly in most areas as I would have expected him to. I think he's probably a decent guy who I wouldn't feel terribly uncomfortable around. I think he's done his best to implement Compassionate Conservatism as he sees it, and I know he's nowhere near as knee-jerk conservative as a lot of the GOP would like him to be.

I also feel that he was sandbagged by the 9/11 attacks. Any president would have had his hands full under such an assault, let alone one elected by less than an overwhelming margin.

But in invading Iraq, he put the nation in harm's way for the flimsiest of reasons . . . and that's something which the electorate cannot afford to tolerate.

When I finished reading James Fallows's "Bush's Lost Year," ( http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200410/fallows) in the most recent Atlantic Monthly, my blood really boiled. (Okay, you're only going to see the first couple of hundred words of the piece unless you've got a subscription. But that's what libraries are for, folks. See--there is still a place for us!)

First Post

Okay, the last thing I need right now is something else to distract me from the stuff I need to do.

Frankly, though, the concept of blogging fascinates me. On the one hand, it's the epitome of vanity press--an individual having the temerity to presume that the rest of the world is eagerly awaiting snippets of his wisdom. On the other hand, though, it's an opportunity for that individual to get his thoughts down on paper (okay, pixels) and to kind of toss them out into cyberspace. Between Google and all the other search engines, it's even possible that those thoughts might actually be found by someone who might appreciate them (or ridicule them).

Hell, let's go for it.