I never got a ballot in the mail for this year’s elections, so I decided to try and find one online. The Somerset County Board of Elections page has a bit of useful info, but I couldn’t find a ballot. I’ll do some more looking tonight before giving up, but I think I’ll probably have to wing it when I get into the booth tomorrow. One amusing thing I found on the site: a really cheesy, and almost entirely useless, video. Click on the “upcoming elections” link to watch it. The background music is hilarious.
Category: internet
Ray Noorda
I just found out that Ray Noorda died today. The linked article calls him the “father of network computing,” and I guess that’s accurate. I used NetWare for years, starting with version 2.15c, I think, in the early nineties. I earned my CNE certification when NetWare 3 was big. I switched allegiance from NetWare to Windows NT grudgingly, in the late nineties, and by that time, Noorda was gone from Novell.
The obituary on the Canopy site says “In lieu of flowers, the family requests that each one of us put in a little extra effort today to enable someone to reach their fullest potential in their work — that’s what Ray would have done.” I’ll try.
A9 no more
A9 has dropped their toolbar, the instant reward program, and a few other features. I was never 100% satisfied with their search results, but they were pretty good, and the 1.57% off on everything at Amazon was too good to pass up, so I just kept using them. Without the toolbar or the instant rewards, I’ll be heading back to Google for most of my searching. And switching back to the Google toolbar, of course.
CDs
I spent some time today looking at CDs. Bankrate.com is a pretty useful site for comparing rates.
I looked at ING Direct and E*Trade, among other places. E*Trade currently has better rates than ING, but according to stuff I read at Epinions and FatWallet, E*Trade has a pretty questionable customer service record.
Wikipedia
I was browsing around Wikipedia a bit today, and discovered entries for Roselle Park, where I grew up, and Somerville, where I live now. Of course, San Diego has an entry too, as does Comic-Con and Horton Plaza.
living in the past
Every once in a while, I check and see if my old CompuServe home page still exists. Alas, it does. I abandoned it in 1996 or thereabouts, but, since I no longer have a CompuServe account, I have no way of making it go away.
[EDIT from 01/25/2021: The page is now gone, thankfully, but still exists in the Internet Archive.]
Spurl and del.icio.us
I exported all my Spurl bookmarks to del.icio.us today, and set it up so new Spurls will go to del.icio.us automatically. The bookmarks are at del.icio.us/andyhuey if anyone’s curious. I went through and added tags to all the bookmarks in del.icio.us. I’m wondering now if there’s any way to pull them back into Spurl.
Google weirdness
GMail’s new “Web Clip” feature is nice, but it’s got one weird fluke — when I’m in my spam folder, it keeps showing me spam-related recipes. It showed me a Spam hashbrown bake and Spam fajitas today. Yuck.
Google Base
Google Base is pretty interesting. Check out what they’ve got under comic books, for instance.
bookmark managers
After my last post on bookmark managers, I set up a Spurl account. I uploaded my bookmarks from my Mac and my PC, but they never appeared in the account. Apparently, they were having some problems with the upload process that day. I uploaded the Mac bookmarks again last night, and they did show up today. I spent some time playing around, and I do like the interface. One of the nice things is that you can organize your bookmarks into folders and tag them. (I think most of the other managers just use tags, no folders.)
This guy’s blog has some stuff about bookmark managers, too, including a link to one service I hadn’t seem before, BlinkList.