language

Language is interesting. I don't know why I thought about it last week, but I wonder why "text speech" didn't come up back in the 1800's during the early days of wire transfers and morse code. I had forgotten this topic until yesterday when I went to look up the spelling for cancelled, or is it canceled? If you must know, it's both. Apparently, the British way is with the double ell. I figure the Americans shortened it to save on ink and space in newspapers and print media. (Cancelled isn't the only word like that. Plus you have humour vs. humor, etc.)

In any case, back to wire transfers in the 1800's during the early days of Western Union and text speak. The reason text speak became popular today is because it is difficult to type on those itty-bitty buttons and have to hit a button 3 or 4 times to get the letter you want. Plus, teenagers are lazy and, at least in the US, teens were the ones doing most of the texting on their cell phones. (Text speak was born from l33t speak, but that's another topic...)

In the 1800's when someone wasnted to send a letter by wire they were charged by the letter ... Ok, I just looked it up, they were charged by the word. So text speak would not be that big of a deal. However, I'm surprised it didn't come up in morse code. Okay, question number 2 concerning telegrams: Tosavemoneywhydidn'ttheyjustuseareallylongwordandavoidtheperwordcharge? See, that last question would have saved me the cost of 17 words. So, anyway... this is my post for the day.

Windows Utilities

Oh, how I love useful utilities. Just see my list of Software Every PC Should Have to the left and down a little. Well, I found a neat little tool to handle file copying. If you've ever done a lot of file copying, particularly of large files, particularly over a network, then you know what a pain it is in Windows. If there's a slight hiccup, Windows forgets what it's doing, or sunspots, the copy fails, Windows stops the process, then deletes the destination file, giving you no way to resume it.

That's where Copy Handler comes in. It takes care speeding up the copy process, resuming on failed attempts, and a bunch of other geeky stuff that makes copying files large and small, many and a few, so easy. I've added a link to Copy Handler on that list.

Google Preferences

Okay, yet another geeky post... but I think many of you may agree with me on this.

I really wish the Google preferences would be associated with my google account. That is, I have a very fast connection, I like having more results per page. But everytime I go back, it's reset to the default 10 results per page.

But the most irritating thing I find is results from pages that require a login and pay account. (www.experts-exchange.com I'm looking at you.) I never ever want to get results from certain sites (like experts-exchange).

On the opposite side, there are sites that I would like to have a higher ranking for returns if there is anything found there. Say you want to get the recipe for an apple pie. Now you have some favorite recipe sites. So when you type in "apple pie recipe", the top results will be from your favorite sites, as opposed to maybe on the second or third page of results.

So that's my current wish list for google, give us a black list (sites we never want to see) and a white list (sites that rank highest) of sites we want results from.

Firefox 3 and my favorite extension

Okay, it's official, I like the new extension Tab Mix Plus. Not only does it take the place of two of my favorite extensions, Tab Mix Plus does it better than the previous two. Get Firefox 3 and then go find Tab Mix Plus! (If the official FF3 version is not yet released, the beta is linked to from the extension's page on Mozilla.) See the side bar for links.

How is it better? First the little tab button on the side (the one that opens a new tab) looks prettier. When you load a new page, the tab shows the loading progress of the page being loaded. Now both of these are probably FF3 enhancements, they just aren't visible without tweaking. Tab Mix Plus makes the tweaking easier to not necessary (they've done the tweak for you). Finally, (for this post only), there are a large amount of options you can tweak for Tab Mix Plus in the Options menu.

Become a power user, use FF3 and grab the extensions I've listed on the sidebar.

Weird Al

What?! Two posts in one day?! What has this world come to? ... !

Anyway, I just found out yesterday that one of my two favorite music groups is coming to town in just a mere two weeks! Weird Al Yankovic is making his first ever stop (as far as I know) in Louisville, KY. He's been to Indy, King's Island in Ohio, and I think probably St. Louis and Tenn. The times he's been to King's Island and Indy, I was ill prepared to go... but this time I'm there.

The concert is at Iroquois Park Amphitheater on July 4th. I've heard his concerts are always great!