Yeah. More changes. I am trying to clean up the site, make it more functional, make the browsing experience more pleasurable, and learn Wordpress all at the same time. Mostly I’m leaning on Jason for help with plugins and scripts and stuff like that. I think he likes it, well he’s not as burned out on this crap as I am. I dealt with MT for a few years and this is my first blog endeavor outside the MT world since I mucked with LiveJournal and some other server-side scripts. I’m impressed with Wordpress, but the documentation is pathetic for a lot of the plugins. I don’t think that the developers take as much pride in their work as the developers did in the MT community when I was still actively using it. There was more of an effort for documentation and communication. My biggest wish for the Wordpress community is that they install a real threaded bulletin board system for their users. Finding answers to my questions and posting things in the right place would be a lot easier if a real forum was installed.

I also think the Wordpress community could stand to start a plugin/hack site like the MT Plugins site, where things are posted when they’re updated and users can help each other with problems. Most of what I miss about MT relates to the community, but WP is young yet so things will hopefully change for the better.

It seems like every blog author is talking about their experiences with Gmail. Right now I’m using gExodus 0.2 to archive a couple of years worth of mail and it is a most efficient program which I highly recommend. A lot of people are paranoid about their mail being scanned for targeted advertisements, others are freaking out because they think that their mail can never be deleted. Personally, I’m not all that paranoid. If you don’t think that your broadband provider has trails of everything you do and could dig up an e-mail you sent through their server in a heartbeat, you need to think about that too. Aside from one gigabyte of storage, Gmail is fast, the search features are excellent, and it’s bound to get even better once it’s released. Personally, I am happy to have somewhere to put my mail where I don’t have to worry about backing it up and burning it onto CD all the time. I wish this was around when I was an undergrad. It beats the hell out of Penn State’s Webmail.

Canada has a sense of humor. The new quarter is going to have a cartoon Moose on it which was designed by an 11-year-old boy who won a design contest. I wish the U.S. was more lighthearted about things like this. I guess the state quarters were a little less serious than the rest of our coins but they are no way near as cool as this.

Canada’s new quarter
[Boing Boing]

Thanks to Chris Holland I have a Gmail account. He was nice enough to extend an invite to me and I thank him for that.

My first impression of Gmail is that the interface is so clean. The only image is the Gmail logo. It’s spartan, but that allows it to run fast. A webmail interface built mostly on CSS without the clutter of images and ads that’s UNHEARD OF! Yeah Gmail is currently running at lightning speeds. Let’s hope its infrastructure will be able to handle the influx of the rest of the world when it goes public. The other cool thing is the keyboard shortcuts. Ironically, I just started playing Legend of the Green Dragon (web based MUD) and that also uses keyboard shortcuts which I have become very fond of. At any rate, Gmail is definitely worth checking out. Yahoo and Hotmail will not be able to compete with 1GB of space. If they try to, their already slow interfaces full of ads will only get bogged to hell. Let’s hope Gmail takes out its competition swiftly.

So there’s all this madness about getting Gmail accounts right now because they are invite only. My boyfriend went begging for an invite last night and and got one. I woke up this morning to email from him - my first email from anyone on Gmail ironically. I’m jealous of course because by the time I get one, my email alias will be like 40 characters long (mostly numbers) reminiscent of my most recent Yahoo! endeavor. I’m sure I’ll eventually get a Gmail account and it will be wonderful, like I’ve died and gone to webmail heaven, but I can wait. There’s no point in prostrating myself in front of a bunch of geeks that will most likely berate me before they send me an invite. I’ll just be patient and wait.

Yet again, Vonage makes me proud to be a customer:

Vonage SoftPhone for OS X coming

[MacMinute]

Lauren Graham who plays Lorelai on the Gilmore Girls just rocked house on Bravo’s Celebrity Poker. Not only did she win but she played really aggressively and it was good to see a woman who knows how to play poker take out an experienced player like Matthew Perry.

Hot on the tail of Firefox, Thunderbird 0.7 was released today with significant improvements. It’s faster, a little bit sleeker and very much in alignment with Firefox development. When Watch out cause it might eat your profile, but if you’re an IMAP kinda girl like me, you’ll be all good. All of you people out there stuck with POP mailboxes should be shopping around for IMAP mail anyway.

When these two apps hit 1.0, they’re going to be major players. I know on the Mac with Safari being slower than a hot afternoon at Shady Pines, Firefox is poised to make a big impression. We’ll see what happens.

Anyway, tell me what Mail clients you use! I am interested in seeing how many of you guys are going to hold onto Mail.app with the grip of death even as other e-mail readers continue to leave it in the dust.

Wow, PSU did something right. For once.

Fluent PowerBooks

In Penn State’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, graduate students prepare for careers in academic research and information services by learning Linux, UNIX, BSD, Solaris, Windows and more. They manage their entire computing course load on 15-inch PowerBooks running Mac OS X.

[Apple Hot News - June 17]

I just installed it and I’m excited about the speed. It’s running a lot faster than 0.8 but that could also be because I dumped my old profile and all the old settings and started over. I’ts a lot cleaner and Tabbedbrowser Extensions and Adblock both seem to work quite well. I’m in desperate need of new OS X themes though I’m getting a little sick of Apollo. We’ll see. Suggest a theme and I’ll try it out!