• Antibiotics for Sinusitis – This article from Science-Based Medicine sums up exactly my thinking about the germs floating around out there right now.  I’ve been sick twice this winter, and in both cases, I needed high-powered antibiotics to muck everything out, and even then it took two or three weeks to shake it off.  From what I’m hearing from folks all over the country, this isn’t exactly unique – the bugs are bigger, stronger, and longer-lasting.  It’s likely that over-prescribing antibiotics is one of the prime factors for this.
• SpySat stuff – Is it bad that I ignored all news about the US government shooting a missile at the spy satellite until Phil posted about it (as I knew he would)?  Sorry, I just don’t trust the information given back on this sort of thing until I see it on the Bad Astronomy blog, and I have even less use for most of the unnecessary drama that surrounded this particular event.  Why must the media blow stuff like this out of proportion?  I appreciate Phil’s level-headed presentation of the facts.
• Wireless Digital Display Tattoos – Call me strange, but I think this idea is really neat.  Of course, I’m the guy who’d love to have a neurological uplink to a computer, too, so embedding a subcutaneous, wireless tattoo interface in my skin isn’t a huge leap from there.
• Um, Yeah – Grapefruit – xkcd apparently unleashed a monster with today’s comic about fruit.  Bear in mind, it’s highly subjective, so his mapping may match yours.  (In fact, it’s safe to say that it probably won’t.) Go easy on the guy.  Just because he’s wrong doesn’t mean you need to beat up on him.

Click for larger view

I’m actually kind of amused by the listing.  It’s one of those times where you really wish Google’s search API would actually take case-sensitivity into account.  I think they got it closer to correct with the ‘More About…’ links, but still, I’m scared to click on anything since I don’t actually know where they go.

I started the process last night, leaving it to work while I went to bed.  Unfortunately, I woke up this morning to find that the installer had, in fact, stalled on the download.  It wasn’t a problem, though, since I just canceled the process and started up the Wubi installer again, allowing it to pick up where it left off.  Then there was the reboot and the selection of Ubuntu from the boot-up cycle and the completion of the Ubuntu install from there.  Of course, I ran out of time this morning and had to leave for work before the install, setup, and configuration could complete, so I’ll mess with it some more tonight when I get home. 

I’m pretty excited about this, though, because I’ve heard good things about Linux in general and about Ubuntu in particular.  It’s supposed to be both faster and more stable than Windows¹ and just plain better all around.  I’ve friends who use Ubuntu who swear by it, so it’ll be nice to give it a whirl and see what I think.  If I find a way to do all the things in Ubuntu that I do in Windows, it may even replace Windows as my primary operating system.

Wubi is still in beta, though, so I’m not necessarily expecting everything to run perfectly smoothly, and the developers warn on the website that Wubi Ubuntu may run a little slow depending on how fragmented your hard drive is.² It should be a nice little experiment.

Any Ubuntu users out there who have some favorite applications they’d like to tell me about?  I’m rather hoping that Firefox is the default browser that’s installed with Ubuntu.  From there, I’m going to have to go on a hunt for useful applications.

1. In my opinion, it doesn’t take much to accomplish this feat.
2. They do provide a means, though, of configuring a partition for Wubi Ubuntu without, I’m guessing, having to reformat the entire drive so that it doesn’t have to run for the from virtual disk file.

So, I pleasantly surprised to discover a couple of days ago that Google had added the option to color your labels.  And even better they’ve provided a limited (24) but stylish set of colors that blend well, rather than clashing with everything else on the page.  Suddenly my inbox is dressing a little flashier than before, and it’s become easy again to find specific emails of note.

Fabulous.

I’ve been toying with the idea of taking advantage of the new Facebook feature of pages, and I whipped up this little screenshot with title and URL for that purpose.

A smaller version of the above, with the URL moved, for use as either linkto button or a forum signature image.  I’m using it currently as my sig image on the TTL forums.

Yeah, I love playing with Photoshop, and I don’t even tap into half of that program’s power.

I’m curious – does anyone else use Twitter?  If so, what are your usernames?  Feel free to add me to your own list; my username is stitzelj.

The other plugin that no longer functions is Gmail Manager.  This little addon puts a little module on Firefox’s status bar that allows to check and manage multiple Gmail accounts quickly and easily.  Well, Gmail Manager no longer works, showing all emails accounts as having no email, despite there being mail in most of those inboxes.

My guess is that Google changed something in their Gmail API that has caused most, if not all, Firefox addons for the service to break.  I haven’t had a chance to do much in the way of research into the issue yet, so I don’t know how widespread this issue is and if it’s affecting everyone or if it’s just something screwed up with my particular instance of Firefox. 

If anyone knows anything about this, do please let me know.  I’ll try to keep you posted in the meantime.

Update: Turns out this is a known issue.  There is a comment from the Better Gmail developer that Google rolled out a new version of Gmail recently.  They are currently working on developing a new version of the addon to be compatible with Gmail.  No word yet on whether Gmail Manager is being updated.

So, I’m going to start doing a little research and querying to see if I can find a decent and affordable host that lets me do all these things.  Shared hosting is most desirable at this point, since paying the exorbitant monthly fees for a Virtual Private Server is well beyond my means.  Trouble is, I’m not sure it’s possible to do everything I want to do on a shared server.

For LaTeX, I need a server that has tetex-extra and dvipng installed, as well as imagemagick.  For Habari, I need a PHP5 installation that actually functions like PHP5, instead of being a limited version.  And I know something else is needed for openID that I don’t currently have, but I haven’t yet been able to pin down what.

I’m open to suggestions from the community, as well.  Anything that will make my research a little easier is most welcome.

So, kudos to Xanga.  I, for one, am very pleased that this change has been made.

This is a story of how much I love shopping with Best Buy.  Rather than wait to have a box shipped to me from Microsoft, just so I could then wait another handful of weeks for them to ship me a repaired or new one back, I just took out my 2-year service warranty and took my console back to Best Buy.  After chatting with a member of their Geek Squad for a moment and verifying that, yes, I could upgrade from a 360 to an Elite, I walked back and grabbed myself one of the black boxes.  And then, after paying the difference between the 360 and the Elite, I walked out of the store the proud owner of a brand spanking new Xbox 360 Elite!

My wife even liked the color.  Me, I’m just thrilled to have the 120GB HDD.

I took a look at the Apple Store, though, since none of the stores around here seem to have the new iPods in stock yet, in order to get a better look at the new models.  From the front, it almost looks like the iPod Classic is just a larger version of the 3rd-generation iPod Nano – rounded sides, just with a larger hard drive.  But the profile view revealed that it was still pretty boxy looking and just the face had slightly rounded edges, which made me much happier. 

It was then that I noticed something very exciting, at least for a geek like myself.  All of Apple’s iPods now have double the space for the same price as the previous generation.  So now, instead of getting an 80GB iPod Video for $350, I can get a 160GB iPod Classic for the same price!  Very exciting stuff. 

I’m also very pleased with Apple’s new iPod Nano with its video capability.  I’ve always thought the Nano would benefit from being able to play video, so it was very cool to see them chop the legs of the iPod and call it the next generation Nano.

I was fairly intrigued by the iPod Touch, with its WiFi ability and widescreen video, but the storage space isn’t quite right for me yet.  If you can’t tell, I’m all about the big hard drive, and 16GB just isn’t enough space for what I want.  Given time, though, I’m sure the size will grow as the price comes down.

I should probably stop drooling now.  My keyboard’s liable to short out any minute.

(Source: Xbox 360 Fanboy”)

In the meantime before I figured this out, I popped open Safari for Windows again this morning.  I really, really like that browser.  In a lot of ways, it makes most websites look a lot better.  Safari seems to render websites with a cleaner, sharper look overall.  Plus, the browser just fired right up and responded instantly to every command I gave it.  It seems to be pretty lightweight, much the way Firefox was in its earlier days.  The only trouble with Safari is that it doesn’t have the addon and plugin support yet that Firefox does, which still makes Safari my second choice for a browser.  If it ever gets the kind of open source addon support that Firefox has, it will certainly give Firefox a run for its money.

I did run a brief Google search this morning for websites that have plugins for Safari.  I didn’t really find much, aside from Safari’s version of Adblock and a couple of developer tools.  I’m kind of hoping that more plugins will open up, but I don’t even know if Safari’s API is open.  It’d certainly be good if it was, but Apple might be playing things close to the vest.

If anyone knows anything about good plugins and addons for Safari, do please let me know.  I think there’s a lot of potential for Safari yet, and probably most of it is still untapped as yet.  I’d like to see that change.