Kurtopia

A Target run last night yielded this little treasure:

The best part is that it’s an "athletic" fit, meaning that I won’t be swimming in it like I am in most Target tees.

Who ya gonna call?

Seeing as how I last posted on January 10, I’ve decided to designate the month of March as “A Post A Day” month!  (Cue thunderous applause.)  As you may deduce from the name, I will come up with something to post every day, no matter how meaningless, boring, or just plain stupid it is.  (And believe me… posts will be stupid!)

To start off, I want to draw your attention to a t-shirt on ThinkGeek:

This must be mine.

Did you know that there is a National Toy Hall of Fame?  Well, there is!  There aren’t really any surprises on it, if you ask me.  I’m hoping that some day the original NES will be on there (the Atari 2600 was added only recently), along with Transformers, of course!

Another great Star Wars clip on Robot Chicken.

Off-and-on for a while now, I’ve been trying to find a good place to host my email.  See, I’m pretty darn happy with my web host as far as web hosting is concerned, but their email offerings leave much to be desired.  Their IMAP implementation doesn’t seem to jive with Windows Mobile Outlook (messages I delete on my phone pop up again the next time it synchronizes), their webmail client is pretty archaic-looking, and the only way to access the junk mail folder is through said webmail client.

Fortunately, a number of sites are offering email hosting, and sometimes other services, if you BYOD (that’s Bring Your Own Domain, silly!).

The first one I tried was Google Apps, which is by far the most user-friendly and pleasing on the eyes.  In addition to email, it offers Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.  You can have all the users at your domain share the same address book, which is pretty cool.  However, I don’t like/get the Gmail interface (so much for user-friendliness!), and they only offer POP access.  POP?  Hello?  What year is this?  Even AOL offers IMAP access!  Get on the ball, Google!

Next I took Windows Live Custom Domains for a spin.  This showed a lot of promise, but ultimately annoyed me.  You can only access your email through Windows Live Mail Beta, not through POP or IMAP.  I would have been okay with this if there was a cool little Windows Mobile app I could download for my phone to read my email there, but no such luck, at least not that I found.  The best I could do from my phone was read it using the web browser.  Yuck!  You had to pay if you wanted POP/IMAP access, and you had to pay PER ACCOUNT!  Double yuck!

Most recently, I tried out AOL My eAddress.  I know, I know… I shriek every time I see "AOL" too.  But their IMAP access is pretty zippy, so I thought it was worth a shot.  Everything seemed to be going well, until I couldn’t get my actual name to show up in the display name of messages I sent.  Instead, it would just show my email address.  It might seem minor, but it’s darn annoying.  It wouldn’t show my name whether I sent email through webmail (even after entering my name in the Display Name field) or through Outlook.  WTF, AOL?

*sigh*

So, I suppose my quest continues.  Unlike Google, Microsoft, and AOL, Yahoo! doesn’t offer a free service, but what they do offer is pretty cheap.  I think I can afford $9.95/year to try it out.  But if Yahoo! doesn’t give me what I want, then I think I’ve exhausted all the big players.  I hate being so picky and particular!

UPDATE:  It looks as though Yahoo! doesn’t offer just email hosting.  Instead, you have to have them host your entire domain.  Yuck.

Simpsons Star Wars

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[ Via Daily Cup of Tech ]

Yesterday, I read this post on Lifehacker in which they requested photos of people’s “go bags.” (Yeah, I’ve never heard that term, either.) Thinking that they wanted pictures of the gadgets you take on the go, I thought to myself, how fortuitous! I’m about to pack my bag o’ gadgets for a trip to Miami. I’m going to participate! Then, I revisited the post and read it a little more closely. They define a “go bag” as “the on-the-go bag that you throw over your shoulder whenever you head out the door that contains pretty much everything you need to get things done away from your desk.” Then I glanced at their sample photo, and barely saw one gadget. So I’ve determined that I’m stupid, and I still don’t entirely get what a “go bag” is. However, I do have a photo of my travel geek bag and its contents! And rather than let it go to waste, I’m going to share it with my adoring public (of one). I present to you my travel geek bag:

So let’s see what we have here, shall we?

• The bag itself is a Jack Spade laptop case.
• In the center, sporting an Autobot symbol, is my Thinkpad T43, which will soon be replaced by a Dell XPS M1330… if Dell ever gets its act together, that is.
• By the top-left of my laptop is my new Samsung Blackjack in all its sexiness.
• Below the Blackjack is my Nintendo DS Lite, along with a few Gameboy Advance & DS games.
• Below the laptop is my Garmin nüvi 360. (Ooo! An umlaut!)
• Around the corner is my Logitech V270 Optical Mouse for Bluetooth.
• And last but not least, my Canon PowerShot SD800 IS.
• The other various and sundry items strewn about are just cases, chargers, and whatnot.

So there you have it! I think that should be enough to keep me occupied on the plane and during any downtime in Miami.

While walking my dog this afternoon, I discovered that Brave New Worlds is opening ONE BLOCK from where I live! ONE BLOCK, I SAY! I love my neighborhood. Story by Kurt.