Jeffrey McManus

When you use the "Add Engines" command to add new search engines to the Firefox search bar, you’re taken to a page that gives you the option to add a number of lovely search engines, including one for Wikipedia.

But then when you click to install it, it really installs something called "Wikipedia&Google" which isn’t the same as Wikipedia search at all. To demonstrate, if you type in a common phrase like "Berlin Wall" into real wikipedia search, you’re taken straight to the Wikipedia topic for the Berlin Wall. If you type the same phrase into this "Wikipedia&Google" abomination, you’re taken to a page of Google search results, which you then have to sort through.

Maybe this isn’t "evil" (who do I ask for a refund from first, Wikipedia or Firefox?) but certainly unexpected and unwelcome. This is particularly bad since it’s not easy to uninstall search engines you add to the Firefox search bar.

The floppy dried-up skin peeled off on Thursday, leaving a shiny pink scar that looks fairly horrific (although not as scary as when the finger had 12 Frankensteinesque stitches in it). The finger is still quite swollen and it’s still difficult to make a fist, although I’m trying to follow the hand surgeon’s advice by forcing my hand shut eight or ten times each day to make it more flexible. This isn’t easy; I sometimes have to use my left hand to make my right hand close all the way.

The skin at the base of the finger is really tight. When I stretch it or twist it, it feels tight and there’s some sharp pain, like the wound wants to open up again. This makes it hard to reach inside my pocket or pick certain things up with the hand (although I’m nearly back to 100% of my normal typing speed, and I did do some simple graphics work in Fireworks today, doing a new Konfabulator widget which I’m hoping to get done over the weekend).

Sorry for the ick factor, but over-sharing is one of the ways that I deal. (I ran all this down for Dave today and for a second I thought I was going to see him keel over with disgust.) After having a screwed-up hand for three weeks now, I’m looking forward to this being done with. Maybe there’ll be some improvement by the time I see the doctor again a week from Monday.

  pug vader by adampsyche.

this is WRONG.

I loves me my New York Times but two things that they consistently screw up are news of the West and technology reporting. They blow it on timeliness, they blow it on accuracy, and (particularly for news about the West) they often use a condescending style which is maddening.

David Pogue is not the best technology reporter/reviewer in the world. His review of the IPod nano in today’s edition is embarassingly cloying and extremely poorly edited. In it, he says:

Some music players contain a tiny hard drive, offering huge
capacity. Others store music on memory chips, which permit a much more
compact design. (This type is known as a flash-memory player, or flash
for short.)

What’s so clever about the iPod Nano ($249) is that it merges these two approaches.

Well, no it doesn’t, it’s just a flash player. What Mr. Pogue may have meant to say was that the nano offers the best of both worlds, but this quote implies that the device is somehow both a flash player and a hard drive device, which makes absolutely no sense. I realize he’s trying to hit a non-technical audience, but there are accurate ways to describe the product that don’t bombard the reader with technical details.

He also credits Apple with the "gutsy" move of discontinuing the IPod mini. This is gutsy like falling off a bicycle is gutsy; the mini was their mid-range player and now it’s being replaced with another mid-range player. Yes, it’s gutsy of them to disrupt their own market by coming out with a new product that displaces one of their old products, but that’s how you stay on top (it’s the same thing that Sony did when they released the audiocassette Walkman in the 1980s; everybody said it would cannibalize sales of their high-end audio equipment, but it actually led to two decades of dominance in consumer audio). But the gutsy part didn’t involve taking the old product off the market. So, memo to Mr. Pogue: if you’re going to pontificate like this, read the Innovator’s Dilemma and check back when you’ve found a new copy editor.

OK, so they’re up to five blades now. That’s pretty messed up.

People of a certain age can remember when the three-blade razor was an extra-humorous Saturday Night Live fake commercial. Three blades? That’s ridiculous. Don’t you know people in third world countries would kill for a single blade? Now 3+ blades are de rigeur, apparently.

When I was a teen, I had to figure out shaving by myself because my peach fuzz came in right around the time my parents got divorced; I suffered from a lack of parental guidance in the shaving department. As a result, I never really questioned my technique or my equipment. I embarked on a search for a new razor this year after my sister mocked me for using the same cheapo disposable razor that our dad used to use. After much searching, I settled on the Gillette twin-blade, which tears through my scraggly beard like a Sherman tank. It also has this lubricant strip, which I figured was a cheesy gimmick (to get you to buy more razors) but actually seems to make a difference. It’s noticably better than the cheapo model that Dad and I used to use.

I actually did try one of the three-blade jobbies and they didn’t make a huge difference. But gentlemen, if you haven’t revisited your shaving choices in a few years, I’d urge you to spend some quality time at your local Walgreen’s and explore your options.

I’m growing my Van Dyck back, by the way. I let it go over the labor day weekend on a lark and the wife noticed it coming back and liked it, so I guess I’m keeping it.

Update: Chad scientifically predicts when to expect the six-blade shaver.

Some psycho ran his car over ten ducks and ducklings that live at a car wash in Campbell, then got out and used his bare hands to mangle the ones he couldn’t drive over.

This bummed me out since I had a personal relationship with those ducks. I used to love seeing those little guys (they live across the street from the joint where I used to work). A car wash with its duck pond is not the kind of thing you see every day but fortunately this loon didn’t bag all of them.

The car wash is collecting cash for a reward fund to help them catch the guy, they’re up to $14,000 so far. Fortunately their security camera caught it so maybe they can nail this idiot.

Ben Stein (former Nixon speechwriter and, more recently, Comedy Central game show host) has an interesting piece in the NY Times on the unbelievable disparity between the paychecks of investment bankers (etc.) and the soldiers that serve to protect society.

This seems like kind of a "no duh" premise for most people (of course the guys who sign up to leave their families and risk their lives deserve more than $1,900 a month) yet military pay has been embarassingly low for generations. It’s no surprise that the military procurement system turns into a hotbed of corruption as officers walk through the revolving door into the defense industry and get huge paychecks for pushing through weapons systems that don’t work for their buddies back in the Pentagon.

I was having some similar thoughts the other day with respect to teachers — another "no duh" situation that somehow seems to go perennially unaddressed in our society. How would things change (for better or worse) if people started becoming schoolteachers for the money?

There’s a post on BoingBoing today about "spam blogs" that look like blogs but are really collections of zombie content set up to ultimately drive you to some affiliate marketing site. This offends me as a user but it also offends me as an English major (I imagine that for every fake content site, some forlorn English major out there is going hungry).

Seeing this reminded me to post about my experience switching to all-Y! Search, all the time. I think there’s a Coke-vs.-Pepsi perception of Y! search versus Brand X search (especially since Y! search used to be Brand X search). But after switching over full-time, I started noticing a few subtle yet useful tricks that you can’t get anywhere else. F’rinstance, the ability to put a domain that serves up garbage information in the penalty box, permanently:

"Block" is my friend. Who knows whether it will divert traffic from fake content sites on a macro level, but at least it gives me the satisfaction of dealing the death penalty to sites I never want to see again in my search results.

I live in San Francisco and work in San Jose. That means I get to drive down Interstate 280 (aka the Silicon Valley Highway of Death). It’s about 55 minutes each way. It’s not too bad, actually. When I started doing this commute I bought a kickass car stereo that plays MP3 and WMA files, so I just load up a CD with about 200 songs and keep the one CD in the car. Each month I burn a new CD with different songs. Sitting in a little room all by myself listening to music and thinking about random stuff is pretty much my idea of heaven, so it all works out. As long as the other idiots on the road stay out of my way, of course.

I have long held the opinion that Bay Area drivers are among the worst in America. (Worse than Boston drivers, even, and Boston is a notoriously toxic driving environment.) I’m seeing more traffic and wrecks on 280 since I started doing the commute in May, and in the past few days the drive has started taking an hour or more. Is this a sign that the Silicon Valley tech economy is coming back, or a sign that Bay Area drivers are getting dumber, or both?