Saw it last night - wow. If you have even the slightest interest in the environment, economics, politics, cars, and/or corruption, you’ve got to watch Who Killed the Electric Car? - it is mind-blowing. Though I actually saw the images of General Motors destroying scores of perfectly good cars that people offered to buy, I still can’t believe it. Chalk up another victory for oil companies and car manufacturers. 
It turns out I probably don’t have strep throat since I have developed laryngitis, and the two do not normally go together. Laryngitis is a funny thing - my voice was scratchy on Friday, completely gone yesterday, and is very hoarse today - which I guess means it’s getting better, but I still feel awful. Here are some interesting things I’ve discovered about laryngitis:
Time to drink my 4,391st cup of tea.
John Cusack is my favorite actor of all time. In high school, I watched The Sure Thing, Better Off Dead, and Hot Pursuit at least 50 times each, and with some effort I’ve managed to watch nearly every other movie he has ever been in, even in the tiniest roles (Sixteen Candles, anyone?) I’ve been sick for the last two days, and am so glad that I purchased the first two when they came out on DVD, because they are the mental equivalent of comfort food - I may have to invest in a few more for the next time I get sick.
The annual Leonid meteor shower is happening tonight - if you’re in western Europe, western Africa, or eastern North America, you might want to check it out. Beginning Saturday night at around 11:45pm EST / Sunday morning 4:45am GMT and lasting for around 2 hours, you may see an average of more than 2 shooting stars a minute. That’s a lot of wishes! 
CNN: Leonid meteor shower nears peak
Ségolène Royal won the Socialist party nomination yesterday, making her an official candidate for the French presidential elections, the first round of which will be held in April. If elected, Ms. Royal would be the first female French president.
La Guinguette: Ségolène Royal - Présidente ?
The Age: Populist “Sego” gets Royal assent from France’s left
Every once in a while, I glance at the Google blog, just to see what they’re on about. I found their It’s the little things in Gmail post rather annoying. I mean sure, I like some of the features they mention, but there are even littler things I’d like (and have requested), such as the ability to sort my inbox by date or by title, and a way to remove the chat folder (even though I have my interface set to “standard without chat,” there’s a stupid chat folder sitting there). These are little things, but they annoy me big time.
I do love Gmail, though, and have invitations if anyone wants to give it a try.
This is a test of the power of the internet:
About 10 years ago, I read a book with a couple of really funny lines, and I’d really like to know what the book was. As I recall, it was sort of Carl Hiassenish. One line was something like “he wore an old blue blazer kind of smile, practiced and worn in.” Another line went something like “the wind cut through his clothes like a saw through ribs.” I’ve Googled approximately three million variations of these phrases, but no luck so far. Any idea what book this could have been?
So I bit the bullet and downloaded IE7. Despite its many flaws, I liked Internet Explorer 6, but I was very worried about IE7. I gave Firefox and Opera another try, but I just don’t like them, particularly the fact that my wonderful discovery on making tooltips invisible didn’t work in Firefox. So this weekend I backed up my whole computer and downloaded IE7. The installation went fine, though I had to reinstall a couple of other programs, including Microsoft Money.
There are some things that are better: the tabbed interface, though I’m still not used to having to look at the top of the screen to see the open windows, rather than the bottom; when I go to Gmail, I no longer get a blank screen and have to refresh; and when I hover over a link, I always see the URL in my status bar (for some reason, certain links didn’t show in IE6), rather than having to right-click > view properties. On the other hand, IE7 is far less customizable than Microsoft claims. I hate the security alerts, but managed to disabled most of them. I also figured out how to do some of the customizing I needed - I’ll share more about all of that later.
A while back I blogged about how much I like Netflix. Since then, I’ve discovered what most people already know: they engage in a practice called “throttling” (by subscribers) or “smoothing” (by Netflix), whereby Netflix prevents you from getting more movies per month than they think is reasonable. Though the subscription is for unlimited rentals per month, if you turn movies around very quickly, they will withhold your next DVD or send it from a distant center so that you never get quite as many movies as you thought you would.
I was pretty annoyed when I figured/found this out, so I thought I’d switch to Blockbuster, but it turns out they aren’t much better. (And I know they now let you return movies in person and get a free one, but that defeats the purpose of DVDs-by-mail.) So what I’ve done is kept both subscriptions, with Netflix reduced to 2-at-a-time and Blockbuster 3-at-a-time. I’ll have up to 5 movies out at a time, but each company individually will be unlikely to throttle me because I won’t usually be returning movies the day after I receive them. I just started this new arrangement, but I think it will work.
For years now, I have been annoyed and exasperated by tooltips in Windows XP. They pop up unexpectedly, obscuring what I’m trying to read (in Internet Explorer, on my desktop, in the Control Panel) or type (in FrontPage - why must it tell me to use ctrl+click every time I hover over a link? After 7 years of web design, I know, believe me). Most of the time, tooltips are worthless. For years I have been trying to find a way to disable them, with little success. Tweak UI (a Windows configuration utility that I highly recommend) helps some, and there are various registry hacks that get rid of a few of more, but nothing that disables all of them. Today, I discovered a brilliant piece of software called AlphaXP. While it doesn’t disable tooltips, it does the next best thing: it makes them invisible.
AlphaXP actually has a whole bunch of features related to transparency, but the only one I care about is the one that lets you set the transparency of tooltips. Putting it at 100% makes them invisible. It’s not free, but the $15 price tag is well worth the disappearance of my number 1 Windows pet peeve. Note that the “lite” (free) version of the software doesn’t offer this feature, though I’m sure it’s a fine program for other transparency needs.
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