Monday was a doozy of a day and the fun continued yesterday. First, the pager went off about 5 times during a meeting. Then when someone commented on it after the meeting, I jokingly pretended to give an OfficeSpace-style thrashing to it, but did it ever go lightly with my elbow. Well not that lightly apparently, because this seemed to have broke the LCD screen on the pager, which made me want to laugh, cheer, and freak out all at the same time (apparently, these pagers can dish out abuse, but they can’t take it). Luckily (or unluckily?) I was able to go down to the IS department and get another one in 10 minutes flat. Then the pager lie in waiting, mostly quiet, for a few hours (”Crouching beeper, hidden pager”) and then attacked in full-force at around 12:30pm at night, right after it sensed that I was relaxed and ready to go to sleep. When all was said and done, it was 2am and my wife was passed out on the couch, sleeping through the pages and I was an envious, tired mofo.

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Yesterday, some misconfigured servers at another ISP hammered Yahoo. We actually thought it was a DOS attack. I got 393 pages in < 30 minutes. I can still hear the sound of the pager, hammered into my head.

Bleargh.

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A friend of somebody at work released a Firefox extension that lets you “visually” see how web page elements are set on a page.. Very slick. This could come in handy for a lot of web designer folks out there.

http://www.karmatics.com/aardvark/

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Wow, this program rocks!

It adds zillions of new options to the Windows XP <Alt>+<Tab> task switcher. You can:

• Display as icons or as a vertical list (nice!)
• See very nice thumbnails of the application
• Use the arrow keys or the mouse (including the mouse wheel) to navigate between apps in the list
• Configure a number of hotkeys
• Enable a “sticky mode ” for the window if you choose
• Make the display 0-100% transparent, shadow, fade animation, etc…
• Configure a right-click of the minimize button to minimize to the tray - I used to use PowerMenu just to do this one thing!
• Control the size of the icons and the window and the fonts, etc.., etc… - very configurable
• Open source

Very impressive!

Check it out at:

http://taskswitchxp.sourceforge.net

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Rented “I Heart Huckabees” from Blockbuster tonight. Had I not been on my laptop, blogging and messing around with Flickr, I think I would’ve passed out. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t a philosophy major, but I just didn’t get this “existential comedy”. Or maybe it’s because I lost interest within 10 minutes and was too busy on the laptop to pay attention. It’s certainly an innovative and different kind of movie. Just because I found it excruciating doesn’t mean that you won’t like it.

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