Jeremy Zawodny asks “Is your email inbox a stack or a queue?”

Both kinda suck. Looking at how my Thunderbird is currently set up, I leave inboxes set new-top (stack), and list and historical folders new-bottom (queue), to better reflect the order of arrival of messages. Reading a stack feels somehow awkward to me; FIFO just seems more natural. As others have noted, a stack often results in not-quite-new messages getting pushed below the fold and lost for days. On the other hand, if you sort new-bottom, you feel buried by the weight of all those old messages, and it’s hard to find the starting point in boxes with a lot of traffic. That’s probably why I use stack for inboxes. Maybe I’ll switch my inboxes to new-bottom for a while, and see how it feels.

Why hasn’t someone done a horizontal ‘timeline’ summary folder view, as in Photoshop Album and many other visualizations? A horizontal bar with one vertical tick per day. The height of the tick would represent number of messages per day. The tick could be bolded or colored to indicate unread messages that day. Mouseover zoom and scroll, as in WordCount. Thoughts?

For some reason I couldn’t find a good WordPress post bookmarklet, so here’s mine. was already set up to accept post_title and content; I added support for feeding the referring url into the trackback url field. This requires a small change in bookmarklet.php and edit-form.php.

I bought a Buffalo LinkStation 250 the other day. It seemed like a good way to add a bunch of storage to the home network. The device works as advertised, but there are a couple of glitches that need to be sorted out:

• The device writes file time/date stamps incorrectly. On mine, everything is stamped with some date in Jan 2002. I spoke with Buffalo about this, it’s a known problem, and they are working on a software fix. This is a real bummer, and I’m surprised that this wasn’t noted in the CNet review. I wouldn’t recommend the product until this is fixed.
• I have an Epson CX5200 connected via the LinkStation, and printer sharing works, but printing is VERY slow compared to when the printer is connected directly to my PC. There is a delay of ~30 seconds before the printer kicks in — a real pain if you a printing multiple docs. Maybe they can fix this with a driver update…
• The printer sharing doesn’t support multifunction devices, so when I want to scan something, I have to plug the printer back into the PC directly. Bummer.

Even though WP Comment Auth seems to work, I still end up having to “moderate” WordPress comment spam. The Three Strikes plugin works like SpamAssassin to automatically reject comments that score above a certain threshold. I applied couple of hacks noted by others to send notification when a comment is blocked, and also to display the comment before it’s rejected, in case it is in fact legit. Here’s my version of the plugin.

It’s about time someone invented a two-pronged push-pin, but the packaging leaves a lot to be desired. Six per package, and for $4.95?! Looks like a big waste of plastic. Why not just go all the way and wrap them individually? I had a brief conversation with the designer, he thinks that “These pins don’t lend themselves well to 100 in a pack for $0.99 to be sold to middle America.” Hmm. Design doesn’t belong on a pedestal. I suggested that he put them in a box. Go figure.

More packaging overkill: I ordered a teensy 4-cell Thinkpad battery, which weighs about 6 ounces and measures about 1.5″ by 7″. It came in a nicely padded IBM box, which was itself in a larger box from CDW :379->img:. The laptop itself was also double-boxed :381->img:. Feh.

X got back from another trip to Berlin, and we had a nice weekend here in San Francisco. I caught another session of the real estate course that I’ve been “auditing” (i.e. sitting in on for free) over at UC Berkeley — great stuff! Caught the redeye to NYC and a cab to Vasco and Kitty’s place in Brooklyn. It turns out that they were moving that morning, so I had a cup of coffee and then lugged a few boxes down stairs in a gentle fall rain. The new place is on 6th St between First and A, East Village. Funny thing is that Loren had been to the same apartment many times in the past, since it was Ari’s place. I fixed the gas by, well, turning it back on. Apparently Ari had been using a hotplate for the past seven years.

I spent the afternoon at the IAB Ad Operations “Summit”, and the rest of the week taking meetings with AdMonsters sponsors. Vasco and I walked down Bowery Wednesday afternoon and had fun checking out all the restaurant supply places. I had to resist buying a 40-quart stockpot – not good carryon material! Got my pizza in at Lombardi’s — the best! A bunch of us had dinner Thursday night at some local place on First Ave, and I caught a flight back to SF early Friday morning.

Flying back West, I was wondering why I had bothered to get such an early flight out of New York. Landing at SFO, I saw clear skies, no wind – a perfect fall day. I called Marc from the cab and said I’d pick him up in an hour to head for Linda Mar. We had a two-hour surf during which I caught maybe a wave and a half, which is to say it was a perfect session. Just what I needed right off the plane: a headful of sun and cold salt water.

Saturday brought us an awesome surprise TOGA party for Marc and Jessica’s birthdays (only a day apart – go figure). J is such a super planner, she booked a groovy sixties band and laid out a spread on the pool table at the Make Out Room. I ran down to the discount fabric store on Mission St. and got the toga goods. The whole shindig came off really well. Here are a couple of thumbs, check the gallery for all the photos.

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The following day (that would be Sunday), a bunch of us piled in the White Van and headed up to Tomales Bay Oyster Co. It was a sparkling fall day, and the parking lot was full of Explorers with B.C.S. (Baja California Sur) plates, Norteño music playing through the open doors. I staggered home after a hundred BBQ’d oysters and few Hot Sluts (Mexican hot chocolate with Frangelico).

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X’s GMAT finally came around on Monday… and so what else could we do but throw a pumpkin-carving BBQ to celebrate! The apartment is really coming along, and it was nice to have some people over. I made tri-tip with Maker’s Mark and Habañero marinade, and Kevin showed up with some lobsters. We managed to get the carving and grilling done just in time before last night’s rain rolled in.

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I’m taking the night off so that I can get some work done… and get ready for ReWired tomorrow night!

A while back I thought about adding image thumbnails to the WordPress edit screen to make it easier to browse image asset posts… It turns out that this is just one line of code at the end of the post loop in edit.php: \n"; }