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my email has a Mute button?

Official Gmail Blog: “M” is for…mute:

Just like you, I get a lot of email. Much of it requires my reply, some is simply FYI, and some is the result of overactive mailing lists, like the one for Google’s San Francisco commuters. I take the shuttle to work, so I need to stay on top of announcements about route and schedule changes. But when there’s an alert about a route on the other side of the city, or a co-worker’s comment spurs a long thread about bus etiquette, I use the “m” shortcut key to mute the conversation and spare my inbox. As new messages are added to the same conversation, they bypass my inbox. If someone puts my email address directly on the To: or cc: line, the conversation immediately re-appears; otherwise, irrelevant messages sent to the mailing list are archived. That way I can refer back to them when I really need to find out about changes to the route when there’s a Monday night game at the 49ers stadium, or want to revisit the debate about dogs on the bus. To use the “m” shortcut key, first click “Settings” in the top right corner of Gmail and select the option “Keyboard shortcuts on.” Then, when you’re reading a conversation you want to mute, just press “m.”

I had no idea. And is that ever useful.

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puny humans may get some perspective from this

The last Ice Age went out with a roar, not a whimper. The result is one of the most dramatic examples in the world of what climate change can mean, and Congress has plans for a “trail” to commemorate the little-known story.
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Signs, interpretive centers and maps following the floods would be coordinated under federal legislation proposed by a Democrat, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Seattle, and a Republican, U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings of the Tri-Cities. If the bipartisan measure, co-sponsored by much of the rest of the Northwest delegation, passes as expected by the end of this Congress in 2008, the long-sought “Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail” — similar to the auto route following the path of Lewis and Clark — would be planned by 2010 and in place by 2016, Keith Dunbar of the National Park Service estimates.

“Instead of opening new visitor centers, we’d enhance what’s already been built,” he says.

Federal funding would be a modest $500,000 or so a year to coordinate state and local efforts, plus about $12 million in expected capital spending. “The idea is from the top down but also from the grassroots up,” says Rene Senos, a senior associate at Seattle’s Jones & Jones landscape firm, which has worked on the plan.

Some municipalities aren’t waiting for Congress. The Wenatchee Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau, for example, already has a map of its own 164-mile flood loop, which includes Dry Falls.

Following the entire trail could be a daunting project for the amateur geologist. Its primary roads are estimated to total nearly 1,000 miles long, says Gary Kleinknecht, president of Richland’s Ice Age Flood Institute. Secondary loops could double that.

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“You just can’t fit the entire story into a national park,” noted retired Eastern Washington University geologist Eugene Kiver. The only photographs that take in the entire scale of the flood are from space.

And here in the modern age, expect people to hit the trail with GPS coordinates, Google Earth kml files. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find WiFi-enabled kiosks for devices we haven’t yet seen.

links for 2007-09-30

what he said

Radiohead ditches iTunes to keep album complete – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):

The album isn’t some sort of artistic medium that must be upheld. It’s a marketing/production vehicle, created by the record industry. Nothing but a collection of songs.

Also, the headline is wrong, as Radiohead never have used iTunes, due to their aversion over having their work broken up. Controlling the listener experience seems like a waste of time, but it’s their time to waste. And as someone else on that thread pointed out, Thom Yorke’s The Eraser is available as tracks.

well, no wonder

Scaife demands documents from Post-Gazette:

Court documents list Mr. Scaife’s monthly income from nine trusts at $3.9 million.

I guess it was easy to fund the witch-hunt into Bill Clinton’s private life, with that kind of change rolling in. As pointed out here, Scaife’s actions are no better than Clinton’s, especially when one considers his marriage count (3) vs Clinton’s (1), and the <ahem> overlap when he seems to have been paying court to his next wife before he had discharged his current one — twice.

Hypocrisy seems too mild a word, don’t you think?

finally time to leave .Mac?

Picture 2-2After 5 years (I think) the .Mac service may have run its course with me. The additional disk space isn’t worth anything to me, coming as late as it did.
I have already moved all my email to GMail. I don’t use the Sync service. I don’t use the Backup software (and it will work even if I bail). Time Machine will do all that, when Leopard ships, anyway, as well as replace my homebrew backups.

So what are my reasons to stay? I have two weeks to decide, and Apple has two weeks to convince me that they deserve another US$99.

phrase of the day

Had a big event at school today, a jog-a-thon with kids, from K-5th grade, running laps to raise money for school activities (little things like an art teacher, instrumental music, and gym equipment, stuff that was paid for by taxes dollars when I was a lad). And as could be expected, some of the younger kids got over-hydrated and had the kind of accidents that 5 year-old bladders can have. But rather than run around trying to find them clean clothes and talking openly about a kid wetting their pants, I came up with the phrase “Code Yellow” which they don’t understand but changed the adults’ mood from serious/exasperated to laughter.

Feel free to use it in your own conversation. It’s almost as useful as referring to a Rule One Violation (when you see a kid crying on the baseball diamond: as everyone knows, there’s no crying in baseball).