PSoTD

Hardly anyone my age has a facebook account. All those old friends for high school that I might actually find entertaining to read about aren't anywhere.

I'm not sure what Facebook can do about this. Maybe they ought to tie in with reunion.com somehow. Or maybe I should just come back and check out Facebook again in a couple of years.

Or maybe I should just accept that the 1970s high school generation just ain't gonna Facebook much.

I've just begun to look at this site. Can you really get a good price on large ticket items, or do the auctions eventually drive everything up towards the "Buy It Now" price? And are those "Buy It Now" prices really reasonable?

Not sure why anyone uses it anymore, it seems like Yahoo Mail and Gmail are superior products. Here's more fun from Hotmail, the kinds of things that community email discussion lists have to deal with.

Last error: 5.0.0 550 SC-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or IP/domain reputation problems. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help.

It's not spam but discussion from a list the recipient physically signed up for, but Hotmail rejects it because they're not smart enough to figure that out. The intended recipient never sees it. Nice feature!

There's a BIG opportunity to make motorized bicycles cool in America.

Web developers have to make sure their code works for the Firefox browser. I must admit to being surprised, in the past week I've run into two sites which don't work on Firefox, and that's really not a good idea. After all...

Firefox reaches 18 percent of corporate desktops

and...

So, based on XiTi and IWS’s statistics, roughly 1 in 5 Internet users prefer Firefox, assuming Internet and web usage are correlated.

Alright, this blows me away.

I wanted to look up the place where we lived in Muncie, Indiana, in the last 1960s - the first house my parents bought. There's something on Google Maps I haven't checked out before, Street View, so I try it. And there it is, our old neighborhood. As if I were standing on the street. I turn east, walk down the street a bit, and there's our old place.

Amazingly, the giant oak tree on the east side of the yard is still there. All the little trees - they may have been dogwoods, I don't remember - that were on the west side yard are gone. The house looks about the same from the outside, nearly 40 years later. The back yard now looks tiny. For most of the time we lived there, our back yard came up next to a woods, but with the development now there, it really was tiny.

I took a virtual walk around the neighborhood. Much of it I don't remember, because it wasn't there when we lived there. I can see our friends' houses. I decided to retrace the bike ride to the old Rexall's Drug Store and Village Pantry stores that we'd go to on Saturday to buy candy and baseball cards. There's our park to the left and what used to be a soybean field to the right - still some sort of farming field, but can't tell the crop. I don't remember a sidewalk being on Eaton Avenue but it's there now. Past the stop sign where Terry and I picked up the dormant water moccasin and threw it - 11 year olds can be SO stupid - only to find out it had slithered away later when the sun had warmed up the ground that early spring day.

It's a bit longer of a bike ride than I remember, but I get to where it used to be... and there are the buildings, right there on Memorial Drive and Eaton Avenue, both of them. I can't tell what they are now. But they are businesses.

Just an amazing little trip. Thank you, Google Maps.

This is kinda cool, you can use this to find out who are buying ads for what keywords and at what cost. For example: Republicans. Really, ChristianCafe.com?

Let's see if I understand this. Sender Score Certified offers a free email whitelist service to ISPs. But emailers have to pay them if they want to be certified sender.

If this is truly how it works, then ISPs shouldn't use this service from Return Path. Entities shouldn't have to pay to be on an accepted list for email delivery unless ALL entities pay.

I've been on a regular routine of having one of Bob's Bagels "everything" bagels with cream cheese in the morning with a cup of coffee.

I have to agree with this review of the bagels:

I see others listed as the best bagels in PA, which is hard to substantiate. I can say Bob's Bagels is a small shop with the owner in the kitchen. It is easy to tell that the man cares about the product he produces and the customers who buy them. The ultimate testimony to any such establishment is the demand for the product, and if you see this little shop on any given morning, you have to know these bagels are good!

But the real point I wanted to make is that even a small bagel shop ought to have a web site, even if it's a low-priced one page thing that doesn't look much different than this, except have their own domain. You can't depend on Yahoo or anyone else to get your basic facts straight, and you never know who will be looking for you online. In fact, I'll try to point out how much traffic I get searching for "Bob's Bagels in Lemoyne" in the near future as I see results.

It sucks. It blocks way too much legitimate email, and you can argue that it either does this because of Comcast's lack of interest in delivering legitimate email to their subscribers, or their incompetency. It's pretty amazing to me that a free email service - Gmail - can do spamfiltering right without a direct subscriber profit line, and Comcast can't get their heads out of their asses about it and they charge for it.

If you're a Comcast subscriber, and you use Comcast to receive email, you should ask them how they guarantee that you are receiving legitimate email - from email lists you belong to, from forms that are supposed to process email to you, etc. Ask them. I suspect you'll find the answer less than reassuring.