I have a ton of things to blog, but I have to go to class, my office hours, then do my linguistics homework and more class. I'll probably post a few entries around 2, but until then, Ammy has some interesting notes, including a detailed report of her sneak preview to California Adventure, the new Disney park next to Disneyland. Worth checking out!

Karen clued me in yesterday to an amazing service Adobe is trying out that lets you create PDF files without having to buy the Distiller ($250). I know there is some (what do we call it now? 'freeware'? is 'shareware' archaic, taken over by 'open-source'? But what if it's not open-sourced? 'public domain' isn't right, because almost nobody actually puts things into the public domain, disavowing all rights to them. aww heck, this is another entry in and of itself) cheap software that replaces your printer driver and makes PDFs, but Adobe's option is probably better for most of 'the rest of us.'

The service, going by the oh-so-compelling name of 'cpdf1', is relatively buried on Adobe's web site, allows you to upload any document created by or in Microsoft Office, WordPerfect Office, Postscript, HTML, or any Adobe product, and a few minutes later they'll spit back the document in PDF format, either directly from the web page, or in an email attachment.

The service is free for the first 3 documents you make, and you can get unlimited use for $10 a month or $100 a year. I personally like it because distiller is pretty pricy, and I only make about 10 PDFs a year (and I have far more than 3 email addresses, which they use as the unique identifier for the trial subscriptions).

I haven't figured out how to make multi-page PDFs from Photoshop files yet, but this might be just the thing if you want to archive some documents in a format more stable than Microsoft Word 2001 build#2872.

One thing that's not clear is what happens if my document uses a special typeface. Presumably Adobe has access to all of their own type library, but I'm not so sure about other foundries, like Emigre, Chank, or Disturbed.

At any rate, it's a valuable service which you'll probably remember and go "Oh wow! Now I know why this got Kevin excited" the next time you're sending out your resume, or any other document you want to look just so even when it's being read on some skanky 386 with no fonts. Enjoy!

So as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, my Christmas present to myself was an Archos jukebox MP3 player. With a 6 gig hard drive, it can store about 150 CDs of music, and is about the size of a portable cassette player.

They had a show special of $299 ($50 off) and I bought one. They said it would ship as soon as they got back to their Aneheim office on Monday, and I'd receive it a few days later.

Well, after several emails and a few voicemails (nobody picked up the main line) I started having a sneaking suspicion. Going to their website last week, I found that their DNS servers didn't even recognize Archos.com. Today their site is back up. well, kinda.

Damn. The player was much more solid and had such a superior design than Creative's Nomad Jukebox, and it looked like they were going to do things the 'right' way (hardware support for stereo 48Khz input with firmware to follow, a track record of MP3 codec firmware improvements, etc). Now I'm loath to get one of the remaining Archos machines in the channel, because it may never be supported, but I don't want to get a Nomad either. It's too big, uses a proprietary drive, and while it has sound in for recording, it only records 22Khz mono, which is worthless to me.

I know it's only another 6 or 8 months until MP3 jukeboxen start coming to market all over the place and prices come down. I guess I'll just have to wait... I hate waiting.

Another Thursday, another five conversations! Finally, something good every Thursday now that Friends is winding down...

Forget the commercials. This Sunday I'll be watching the Superbowl for the special effects. Actually, more than likely I'll just TiVo it, so I can fast forward to the good parts later, and stop the action whenever I like. Besides, Superbowl is the perfect time to go to Costco...

Every piece of email sent to anything at fury.com comes into my mailbox. Any time someone signs up for a pron site and says their email addy is 'sound@fury.com' or 'raging@fury.com' I get another copy of pornmail and pyramid schemes for all eternity. Over the years I've tried several methods for cutting down the spam (they have my 'real' addresses as well, so simply filtering by that won't work). Procmail, greps, rulesets, third-party neural-net anti-spam services, zippo.

Basically my goals for a spam filter are to not allow any spam into my Inbox, and not miss any legitimate email. At long last, and after demoting Pine to a secondary mailreader, focusing on (groan with me) Outlook Express for the Mac, I've created a ruleset that's worked flawlessly for the last two weeks, and may be the holy grail I've been seeking.

well, a picture is worth a thousand words, even a 17K gif flowchart, so that's what I've got. I apologize for the gif quality. It's what Visio could do...

It's actually not that hard to set up. If you want something like this for yourself, but don't understand something in the flowchart, drop me a line.

My to-do list is growing faster than it's shrinking, but it's 90% good. I took a nice picture and overheard a good quote to match it 30 seconds later. It's not inpassing quality, but it's good enough for me:

"The umbrella industry: pushing the idea we have to protect ourselves from water."
-overheard on Sproul Plaza seconds after I took this pic.

Oral histories are predominantly combative. Norse, Native American, and most other cultures with oral as opposted to written histories tend to fill those histories with violence.

Graphic depictions of wars, personal battles, and fights for power within the group make up the meat of these histories which gave members of these cultures their identity.

And they say there's too much violence on TV as if that's something new...

For those who have asked, and those who haven't, I just wanted to let you know that I'm working on porting versions of Fury.com to AvantGo and Tellme, so you can get your Fury fix wherever you are!

(I thought about WAP but the screen's just too darn small and WAP is designed for accomplishing tasks, not reading pages of content...) Anything else? Does anyone have a compelling justification for an XML version?

Yay! It's 2001! Bluetooth chips should be plentiful and in everything! Wait... They're not... It's times like now that I wish they were though. I can't find my Palm V anywhere, but if it had a bluetooth chip, then I could look for it with my cellphone...