My girlfriend’s run off with my car,
And gone back to her mom and pa’,
Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty,
Now I’m sitting here, sipping of my ice cool beer

Well nobody wants to burn in Hell,
But everybody’s got a soul to sell.

At least Zeldman thinks so. He suggests a land line phone, but I really wouldn’t like one of those. I’d be far more interested in a phone sans music player. Admittedly because I already own an iPod that I’m more than happy with, but also because 8 gb really doesn’t suffice for me, and I’d rather have two devices that solve their job greatly than one that doesn’t do each just as good.

Gmail gets a lot of credit from most people for its great spam protection. I have a Gmail account, but I don’t use it. I only log in every X months, because I feel I have to. Often, some spam messages get through. Now, I know spam filters can’t be 100% correct, but when I logged in yesterday, and found a spam message from an Amazon scam¹, it wondered me why they didn’t catch it. Aside from being from a lycos.co.uk address, which isn’t really a safe bet for spam, it used a basic scam trick that Thunderbird started catching some years ago: it linked to some website, but making it look like it was linking to another. So, it seemed like it linked to an Amazon login page, but in reality it linked to some fraud site. Why doesn’t Gmail catch such stuff, when it’s so obvious?

1. I knew it was a scam, since Amazon don’t know my gmail address. ↩

There’s nothing so lonesome, so dull or so drear,
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer

I just finished watching the Aardvark’d film about 4 interns at Fog Creek Software.

All in all, it was decent. I like these kinds of stories, like Revolution OS, about software and clever people saying clever things. Paul Graham is great in this one.

There are numerous things with this film, however, that really annoyed me. First of all, there’s a side story about one of the developers having a tomato plant on the balcony; this has absolutely no relevance to anything else in the film, and just seems so weirdly misplaced. Second, there are these awfully made reconstructions. The people participating aren’t great actors, which they really shouldn’t be either. But this shines through so clearly in the reconstructions, it ruined quite a lot for me. In one instance, one of the interns attempts a jump out the window, but in realising his failure, he clings on to the window ledge. The next scene is an attempt at showing it from his angle while he’s stilling hanging in the ledge. The others then come running, not looking convincing and asking what he just did. All the while, when he’s supposed to be holding on for his life, his fingers are relaxed, and no one looks really panicked.

As stated, it’s a decent film. I just wish they would have hold on to the story about the software, instead of doing these half-hearted dramatic sequences.

New York City Cops,
New York City Cops,
New York City Cops,
They ain’t too smart.

Who is forever anyway?

Palatino is probably my favourite serif font, which I tend to use in all my school work. Unfortunately, Palatino has an annoying little glitch, when pairing c and e at small sizes:

This is especially problematic when you — as I do — write in a language, where æ is actually used.

Why is it that word processors (NeoOffice in my case, but Microsoft Word does it too) automagically turn URIs into clickable links? Maybe it’s because I’m a strange user, but very close to all of my word processor use ends up being printed when it’s done. And, well, clickable links aren’t worth much on paper. I just don’t see the incentive to do it (other than it being, admittedly, a quite logical behaviour for a computer program), when you’re dealing with stuff that winds up being printed.