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Based on The Tyranny of Email I've decided to make some changes to my work habits. First, I've changed my email to check every ten minutes instead of five. Second, I've turned off the "New Mail" sound (sacrilege for the guy running Sound Set Central perhaps). Third, uhhh… Well let's just see how those first two things go.

I often turn email off when I'm in a zone, though AIM is nearly always on because I've found that I can farily easily carry on two tasks at once. The third - email - can take a back seat for awhile.

Update: Adam makes some good points here, and it boils down to one thing: personal use. I haven't turned email off: I've just turned off the sound and changed how often it checks mail. Entourage will still badge itself with an icon. I still run NNW non-stop all day, and it checks for new blog entries every 30 minutes. Do what suits you; Adam is right that there is no "one method that works for everyone."

I've long wondered why people dumped so much time into their PCs, modding the cases with glow lights and cable wraps and LEDs and so on. I've always been interested in spending my time using my computer.

Well, turns out I guess I'm a bit of a fan of external, no-work-required case mods. I've picked up an IceMate for my PowerMate.

In answer to the question "what do you get when you cross a PowerMate and an IceMate?" $50 towards a better looking desktop, I guess.

McDonald's used to have signs that said "20 Billion Served" or something. Matt and I were chatting today about typos, and I said that if I typed 10% slower, I'd probably make 75% less typos. Many of my typos are the left-hand/right-hand variety, like "agian" - 'aga' is left hand, 'in' is right hand, and the right hand jumps in a little too early. It happens with spaces often as well, as I'll type something like "lookin gforward to it."

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Camino is bugging the shit out of me. As many know, Chimera's app bundle was called "Navigator" which, for different reasons, annoyed the shit out of me as well. Now I find myself typing "<cmd-space> n a v i <return>" to open Camino, and instead some classical song begins playing in iTunes. Why? Camino is, appropriately enough, called "Camino," but my LaunchBar-loving fingers haven't retrained themselves yet. On the bright side, I have heard Quartet for Piano, Violin, Viola, & Violincello E minor Op. 16: Grave-Allegro ma non troppo quite a bit lately.

I've tried to explain to my mom why "users" are necessary on Mac OS X, but eventually I sent her to read this article which uses a house/apartment analogy. She "gets it" now.

The article mentions "su" and "su -" as being different, and they are. My business partner and friend Andy uses "sudo -s" and hasn't enabled root on his machine. I have, and when I need to "sudo" more than two commands in a row, I just su to root and get my work done (carefully).

I'm not sure what the advantage to doing sudo -s are, but maybe I'll use that for awhile instead. Maybe I'll alias "su" to "sudo -s" to force myself to use it… After all, I already have "et" aliased to "exit." It's one-handed and half as long 🙂

I'm reading Mark Pilgrim's 30 Days to a More Accessible Weblog and so far tonight I've implemented Day 10's tip, which consists of putting your main content first. I've done this via CSS now (could have sworn it was this way before, but it wasn't). I switched a float:left to a float:right and all was well.

Some other changes may pop up as I go through the rest of the days ("does doing 30 days worth of work in a single evening make me an over-achiever" he asks sarcastically…).

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I just peeked at my site's "search terms" section to see what people were using to get to my site in February, the first month I enabled statistics (around February 16th). Every month I plan to post these stats because, frankly, they're kind of amusing. Here's February's…

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I've spent less than a week with it, but I already adore my new mouse. This review sums up my thoughts nicely, so I'll simply allow you to read that. It also reviews the MX-500, my mouse's corded sibling, which is a bit lighter (no batteries) and, of course, corded. I'm glad i didn't pick one up when I was thinking about it last Christmas.

Two issues have popped up. I'm actually on my second MX-700, having exchanged the first one after I noticed that the left button (regular click) wasn't always staying held. It'd mouse up and immediately mouse down (a faulty switch) when selecting text, dragging icons around, etc. Unfortunately, the replacement mouse wobbled a bit. We're talking 1/16" of an inch, maybe? Regardless, a noticeable amount, and when you use a computer as much as I do, a very noticeable amount. I unstuck and readjusted the glide pads on the bottom and all seems well now.

This article got me thinking about the time I got a knock on my door and opened it to find two federal marshals: both large men, both carrying pistols (I live in Florida - their jackets weren't too thick).

The men informed me that they were federal marshals. According to them, the former lessee of my apartment was also named Erik with a "k" and he was wanted for possibly housing a fugitive. They said they ran this address again while trying to track down this other Erik fellow and were surprised to see another Erik living there. They decided to check it (me) out.

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I was going to write a longer entry about how the Windows Longhorn UI continues to suck (slide shows in the task bar, "buy photos online" in the file browser, that sort of thing), but Matthew Thomas so easily picks apart the "do you want to replace the file?" dialog that I no longer feel compelled to.

I was glad too to see that he pointed to an old MacKiDo article that resonated with me when I first read it a number of years ago.

Apparently some people have never heard of a $2 (US) bill. After reading that story, I made up my mind to try to find a bunch of $2 bills with which to buy things so that I can keep track of the odd reactions I'm bound to get from people. My favorite piece:

Guard: "So, the fifty's fake?"
Manager: "No, the $2 is."
Guard: "Why would he fake a $2 bill?"

It is at this point that it becomes clear that the guard knows there is such a thing as a $2 bill, and the manager clearly does not. Funny shit. 😀

P.S. Anyone looking to buy me a birthday present (y'know, March 23) is encouraged to visit http://www.bep.treas.gov/store/section.cfm/69/84. Yessum!

According to the USPS, the proper way to pack a hippo is as follows…

You'll need:

• 1,000-gallon tank per hippo
• 1,000 gallons of water
• Crane
• 1-pound sedative
• Soothing hippo music
• 2 Aspirin (for you)

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I promised Tom Coates and Christian Claiborn a response to their comments left on my Ethical Blogging entry yesterday.

Before I do so, I'd like to point out three other articles that I've read (via TrackBack). The first is Matt's fairly long piece, mostly in response to Rebecca Blood's article. The second more closely covers product placement in blogs. Finally, Justin Jones offers a concise summary and a few new points as well.

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You know that nifty feature in MovableType that allows you to choose "Yes" to "Remember Personal Info?" It's braindead.

It only remembers your information for that article. Safari had over 500 cookies in its cookie cache… for 12 blogs.

I've posted a query in the MT support forum. Let's see what happens.

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I will not be adding MTThreadedComments to this blog because:

• It looks like a whole lot of work that I'd have to do with every new version of MT.
• It's quite new (version 0.1.1?).
• I don't think threading provides much gain. If you can't figure out how to quote someone using text between a pair of " then you should leave my site immediately.
• Some parts of this.