Good: OS X has built-in spellchecking in applications that choose to support it.

Bad: Thousands of common words are missing from the dictionary, especially place-names.

Worse: It completely ignores all words that are three characters or less, so forget about OS X helping you when you mistype 'teh' or 'iz' or say "ack! t his is soo wrong!"

Sometimes an ounce of cure generates a false sense of security that can end up doing more harm than good. When you don't see any more red squiggles and you assume everything's spelled right, it might just be that the OS isn't looking close enough.

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Addition: Are there spelling bees in Spanish-speaking countries? Spanish words are pronounced strictly by their spelling (or more likely, vice-versa). Is the spelling bee a happy by-product of a disjointed, inconstant language? It'd be a shame if other countries never got to experience the joys of spelling bee championships.

Pet peeve of the day: When my (or any) computer says something along the lines of, "The user 'kfox' does not exist."

This bugs me because the computer grants existence to the object by by making it the subject of the sentence, then denying that there is any such thing. More accurate would be to say, "The user 'kfox' cannot be found" or "'kfox' is not a valid user on this system."

Of course, these don't address the larger problem, which is that I am the user 'kfox' and whether I have an account is the issue, not whether or not I exist. I don't think my computer is qualified to tell me that, even if I did name it Descartes.

Okay, so I'm 28 years old, and yet I had a first this week. Monday was the first time I'd ever bought porn.

Well, okay, kind-of. I bought a copy of this month's Playboy, but I can assure you, it was just for the articles, or, to be specific, one article. It turns out that my friend Eve's site, In Passing, was mentioned in the 'living online' section (page 28, at the bottom), and naturally, I had to see for myself.

When I went to the newsstand to get my copy and the cashier put it in a black plastic bag I thought that was strange, then remembered that you don't usually see people walking down the street, flipping through Playboy.

I now find myself with the mildly unusual task of having to find a place for my 'porn stash.'

Here's an exercise: Take up painting. Get good at it. then start working on a huge canvas, planning, painting, for months. Now, you're 80% done and you have to paint the last 20% in 5% of the time.

To go fast is to create an inconsistant work, since the speed will show. To proceed at the same pace will leave part of your masterwork unfinished.

Letting go is harder for me to do than to do a sloppy job, even if nobody knows but me.

So, true to the customs of HR departments all over the world, and as I anticipated, my manager wrote to me on Friday, asking for an official letter of resignation.

After a moment's contemplation and composition, I am at peace with my reply.

So A friend of mine at Yahoo has a friend at Danger, Inc. and she's arranged for me to go there this afternoon and play with a Danger Hiptop!

The Hiptop (Hip-top) is the next potential 'ideal merging of phone and PDA.' Built from the ground up around wireless data transfer and phone capabilities, it doesn't have to work around an established handheld form factor, or hardware that has wireless connectivity grafted on a grandfathered OS.

I'm really excited to see what this can do in person, since a few minutes with a Handspring Treo was enough to burst that bubble.

Originally slated for a January launch, Danger and T-Mobile (rebranded and expanded Voicestream) are (last I heard) doing final beta testing and are planning on a launch in late June or in July.

I'll probably know a lot more in a few hours, but I have no idea how closed-lipped they are, so I don't know how much I'll be able to share. Hopefully it won't matter and they'll release the product in the next few weeks.

I helped my friend Pamila move on Saturday, shuttling stuff from her storage space to her new bedroom in an apartment she shares with two other women. While doing so I was thinking about my own impending purge, store, and move.

A couple weeks I met my fellow incoming CMU grad student Kerry (at her going away party!) and we talked about the journey from SF to PA. She's moving out of her Oakland one-bedroom into a two bedroom place in Shadyside. Since she'll be there for two years, and isn't sure where she'll be going next, she's packing up and moving everything. Professional movers, $1800.

On one hand, I've been telling myeslf that $1800 can pay for a fair amount of IKEA furniture on Pittsburgh, money better spent there than shipping my stuff across the country, when I'll be coming back in a year. Also, 'my stuff' is one of the things I'd like to test-divest, and get a better perspective on what should go and what needs to stay.

On the other hand, storing stuff coses money too, and no small amount. Researching a few months ago, I found that a 10'x10' storage space (Public Storage) in Berkeley costs $250/month. Multiply that by 13 and it's $2750 for the year-plus. Why pay Berkeley storage premiums when I'm not even in Berkeley? Storing my stuff in Vallejo (20 miles north) would drop the price to $140/mo, or $1820.

Plus truck rental fees.
Plus the labor of moving my stuff.

The last time I moved (well, not the time I moved across the hall six years ago, but really moved) I promised myself that it would be the last time I'd move myself. And I had a lot less stuff back then... The stuff I'm running away from. Such a quandry...

The short of it is that I have a two-bedroom-apartment-full of stuff, and I need to decdide where to put it. I know what storage is like, but I know nothing about the apartment I'll be getting in Pittsburgh, 1 bedroom or 2, furnished or bare. I need to find that out before I can make any other decisions. The right answer might be to split it, putting some in a smaller, less expensive storage space, and shipping some via less expensive means. I'm unsure about my ability to pack my car up with everything I'll want and need for a year.

It bears more thinking about, but not until i have all the information I'll need, so I'll just concentrate on the 'purge' portion of my preparations until I know where I'll be living.

I don't mean to upset my republican constituancy, but January 2005 seems so far away, especialy with the Bush administration's shifting stance on the environment and international policy.

Hey everyone! I'm looking for a copy of The Guide to Living in Pittsburgh (8th edition). Barnes and Noble Online is out of stock, and they seem to be sold only in regional bookstores.

This book, written by grad students at CMU's CS department, is the authority for new students, and I'd love to get a copy before my trip out there in a few weeks.

I know there are a few Pittsburghians reading Fury. Is there any chance one of you could find and send me a copy of this book? Lavish thanks, and naturally Paypal'ed payment, would be forthcoming, and I'd have my first Pittsburgh friend!

Anyone?

Speaking of focus groups (and for the reader with a shorter-than-three-week attention span, we were), I think they're a lot of fun to participate in. As should be obvious by my mere existence as a weblogger, I like telling people what I think, and it's even better when they want to listen. When they're willing to pay me to do it, well, I'm sold.

Being in a market researcher's focus group pool is a lot like being a movie extra with an agent in the '80s: You fill out a long questionnaire to define your demographic to a tee, then when you least expect it, you get a call from the company, calling to you action. Okay, so it's more like being a sleeper fo the KGB but, you know, same difference.

I'd participated in a few focus groups over the years for this company called Larry Weiss & Co. From the first time when I filled out all the paperwork, they've got my name wrong, and no matter how many times I corrected them, that my name was Kevin Fox, and my company name was Fury Solutions (or later, Fury Media Services, or now, simply Fury.com), at the end of the day I'd still get an honorarium check made out to Kevin Fury. My bank has yet to bat an eye. Maybe they're aware of my rockstar status.

Larry Weiss clearly must have been aware of my rockstar status in July of '98 when they offered me $200 to participate in a two-hour focus group on a new hardware product.

I loved working in downtown San Francisco, feeling like I was part of something when I walk outside and saw all the other businesspeople walking around. Staying a little late in the office, then walking over to the market researchers five blocks away, I was a little smug. I'm effectively getting paid double for the day, and I get to tell people what I think! (This was pre-blogging, when I wasn't used to having people wanting to hear what I think. ;-) )

Even working late, I still arrived a bit early for my group. I sat in the waiting area, pecking at the veggies and dip that an earlier me would not have recognized as the remaindered leavings from the 'inner sanctum' of groups earlier in the day.

Sitting in the lounge, trying to pull meaning from three month old copies of Men's Fitness, People, and Psychology Today, I'd eye the other participants as they trickled in. Geek... Geek... Exec... Geek... ...Mara??

...

I couldn't be sure. To be fair, it had been nearly four months since the Levi's group. Was this the same person? Or was she just another instantiation of this prototype in my head, linked to the Mara I saw four months ago by a shared similarity to the prototype, and a similarity in circumstance? Was it that this was the first time I'd been to a focus group since then? Was one part of my mind already thinking about her while the other part was leafing through the body bulker ads in the fitness mag?

...

She walked in, ate a carrot stick, and took a seat on the other side of the room. I looked back at my magazine. It only took a second to remember that, my own experiences notwithstanding, to her I was 'Just Another Stranger' (JAS). That is, if this person was Mara at all...