I installed Google Desktop since it’s been updated to index (in particular) Thunderbird email… used it for a couple of days, and now it’s gone, gone, gone until they fix the performance issues. I was getting all sorts of delays opening and saving files, and just navigating around the OS. I have a gig of RAM and a fast PC, it’s not that – it was Google Desktop. I removed it and thank god, things are back to normal. Great functionality, but not ready for prime time. I think the big G blew it on this one and released too early. Even if it’s labeled “Beta”, people will form a negative impression. I’ll try it again when the next version is ready.

Some comment spammer just started crawling my whole site, so I finally had to track down and install the SecureImage plugin for WordPress. It seems to have done the trick… Thanks Thom and Dave.

I needed a little Donnas fix this morning, and got thru ATRnRM when I landed on something I must have downloaded and never listened to: The Donnas playing _Keep On Loving You_ by REO Speedwagon, from the Drive Me Crazy soundtrack. Awesome!

Update: I found a video of The Donnas playing Shot Down In Flames on the Atlantic Records message boards – there’s some other good stuff there too.

One of the very few things that bug me about my Thinkpad X40 are the seemingly helpful dedicated “Page Back” and “Page Foward” keys that sit along with the normal 4-way arrow keys. The problem is that it’s way too easy to hit “Back” when I’m in the middle of writing something in a web-based input form, sending me into a panic, fearing that I’ve lost an hour’s worth of writing. (The fact that this is possible at all is a seperate issue, but that’s not IBM’s fault). It just happened again, and so I went looking for a way to disable those keys. Sure enough, after a little poking around, I found the Thinkpad Keyboard Customizer Utility, which not only permits you to turn those keys off, but also provides a way to create a virtual “Windows” key, which is missing from the X40 keyboard. This is nice because I have a few _AutoHotKey_ macros that use the Win key to launch programs (Win-C for calculator, etc).

Just one of those little tiny things that make a difference to some of us.

Another cool cover: The Smashing Pumpkins playing the Cars’ You’re All I’ve Got Tonight — a classic in its own right — on Bullet with Butterfly Wings.

One of my favorite bands is X. One of my favorite songs of theirs is The Have Nots, where they reel off a whole string of names of bars, real and parhaps imaginary. The one that’s always stuck out to me is the Zircon Lounge, not sure why, but I like the name. One day a few years ago I called 411 and asked for the listing here in San Francisco, and strangely enough there was a listing. I’d certainly never heard of a place here in town by that name. I rang the number and they answered “Place Pigalle”, which is a bar down on Hayes. That night I went down there and asked the ‘tender about the Zircon Lounge, and she said that the owner had almost used that name, but decided at the last minute to go with Place Pigalle instead. The only other evidence of this I can find is their email address, which I found posted here. Funny little story. The question is: is Place Pigalle somehow the Zircon Lounge that Exene was talking about?

_Sheena Is A Punk Rocker_ (Ramones) is one of my all-time favorite songs. I just found a cover by Hüsker Dü, on Live At the Ritz – very nice, although in this case I prefer the original. Any other covers of this song out there?

I wrote a while back about PIM UI woes, and how I wished for a little software gadget to automate parsing the details from an email sig and creating structured data. This happens to be one of those cases where the solution actually exists, and it does exactly what it should do. Anagram rocks, and it’s well worth the $19.95 registration fee. Now I just select the signature, hit Ctrl-C Ctrl-C and Anagram creates an Outlook entry on the fly. I use some AutoHotKey macros to do lookups and other things – more on that later.