MovieMask rocks. I was just able to watch the best movie ever made with my eight year old son, even though the movie is Rated R. The MovieMask technology allows anyone to create "masks" for any movie which then allow any user to view any such movie with whatever "rating" you would like. The technology is very precise and even lets you cut out a single frame. Cool. ¶9:48 PM; digg

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court approves gay marriage. I've been up much of the night listening to talk radio stations and reading the Internet about this ruling. It is devastating to hear how backward so many people are in trying to prevent this. How can "religious" people be so damned intolerant? I am absolutely certain that in years to come, Americans will look back at this period with shame, just as we now look back towards our past legal discriminations against African Americans and women. ¶5:37 AM; digg

Two heads are better than one. This week I upgraded my primary Dell XP PC to run with two monitors, prompted by my friend Pito. Wow. I will never use only one monitor again.

I can't believe I never realized how painful it is to only have one monitor. Always having windows pop-up in the way (Outlook alerts, AOL instant messages, warning windows, etc) to distract me, and then hiding my other important windows underneath.

And doing rediculous window gymnastics in order to copy information from one window to another one which obscures the source text.

The dual monitor revelation is similar to when I first started to use a cordless mouse, not realizing until that moment how much time I used to spend fighting with the damn mouse cord.

For years people who need access to lots of information have always used multiple monitors: stock traders, airline pilots and traffic control engineers, and even anesthesiologists.

I'm never going back.

For more info, see also Google.
¶3:17 PM; digg

Social networks have often been implemented to allow people to keep their contacts up to date and to find interesting connections with friends of their friends. I've tried solutions from Plaxo, LinkedIn, GoodContacts, Friendster, Six Degrees, Classmates, Peoplestream, tribe.net, and Ryze. These all have different goals, but share the same approach of contact sharing. I've been suspicious of these services as becoming spam machines (intentional or not), but just sent invites to a few friends to try LinkedIn, only to find that their website stopped working last night. :) For more info on these networks, see my contacts page. ¶8:48 AM; digg

Screwed again by a biller, in this case Verizon Wireless, again. They assessed me a $25 penalty for an expired credit card and reported me to the credit agencies, even though I called them a month ago to ask them to send me forms to change the account name/billing to my wife's name. They had never sent me the forms. But since I log my biller calls and letters in QuickBase, I was able to tell them info about the prior call, including the date and time and rep name. Given this info, they did just agree to rebate the $25 penalty but said they would not contact the credit agencies to make the correction there. This pisses me off. If I had more time to spend on the issue, I'm sure I could get this fixed. But who has time? I'm not working a regular job right now, and I continue to be amazed by how much time is taken up with biller mistakes like this. How do people who work 40-60 hours a week find the time to handle all their biller mistake correspondence? I don't think VerizonWireless or other carriers are inherently evil. I realize they serve a customer base who often does not pay their bills etc, and as a result, they have had to put pretty aggressive policies like this in place. But when they make mistakes, as they just agreed happened with me, they don't have policies to correct them. Sigh... ¶5:14 PM; digg

Check out the End of the World ¶5:55 PM; digg

I recently got XM Radio for my car, to have more commercial-free options. It is cool. I found out that due to pressure from the Christian Right (which is neither), XM added a few Christian stations, and also gave parents the ability to block any "offensive" stations such as the Comedy Network (whose comedians sometime use dirty words). So I called up XM and told them I was offended by some of their stations, and had them block the Christian ones... ¶6:58 PM; digg