Out of Cheese

Google Maps tries really hard to return search results no matter what you type. I performed a bit of an experiment tonight where I only typed in a single letter, trying A through Z, to see what I got. I deleted my history and cookies before each search in an attempt to ensure I didn’t get any results based on previous searches. Of the 26 results, five went straight to cities in Germany and two to Holland. Those results:

• C - Chemnitz, Germany
• D - Düsseldorf, Germany
• E - Essen, Germany
• G - Gera, Germany
• K - Cologne, Germany
• L - Limburg, Netherlands
• U - Utrecht, Netherlands

Lest you say these may just be the largest cities whose names start with these letters, I’ll point you to London, which is probably a bit larger than Limburg; New York, which is a bit larger than N, Denham Springs, Louisiana; and Paris, which is somewhat larger than the three options Google returns for ‘P’.

I wish I had more time to describe how incredibly excited I am about Daniel Jalkut’s announcement of Black Ink today. Maybe later.

Let’s just say that it’s the first application I’ve ever bought before using it even once, reading a review, or even reading a feature list. A replacement for Across Lite? From Daniel Jalkut? Wow.

The U.S. Postal Service officially approved a forever stamp today. Forever stamps will go on sale May 14th.

I’ve been waiting for this for a while. I typically need about five stamps a year, but at the pace first class mail rates increase I rarely go through an entire book of stamps before rates go up, forcing me to double up stamps to finish up the book. Now I’ll be able to buy a book of forever stamps and not worry about rate changes.

More interesting, though, is that this creates a new market in stamp futures. Think about it this way: If you invest $1000 in forever stamps on May 14th, postal rates increase by 10% over the next three years, and inflation only increases by 5%, you could sell your forever stamps for a 5% net gain over keeping your money in cash. This means that folks can start financial speculation about the future relative change in first class mail rates versus inflation. In other words, stamp futures.

What if there’s an oil crisis, the cost of running the Postal Service truck fleet skyrockets, and first class rates go up to $1? You’d make a fortune! On the other hand, if someone comes up with technology which allows everything currently sent as first class mail to be sent as email instead and demand for first class mail drops to nothing, you’d lose your whole investment.

I’m currently downloading a large file from work (through VPN, then through Wi-Fi) at close to 700KB/sec. That’s 700 kilobytes, not kilobits. I don’t really like paying Comcast $100 a month for the small amount of TV I watch plus Internet access, but at times like this I’m very happy I have a cable modem and not DSL.

Thanks to a weird IMAP problem, I couldn’t receive email at work from about 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. today. I left work at 5 to go to the Sharks game (thanks much to Venkat for offering an extra ticket) and got home around 10 p.m. That’s when I started to read and reply to my email for the day. It’s 2:20 a.m. right now and I just finished.

This wasn’t a particularly bad day on the email front either — if anything, it was lighter than normal.

Maybe I get too much mail….

The folks over at Ars Technica launched a redesign of their site today. I like the new look, but they dropped one thing on their home page that always brought a smile to my face. On their old site, up at the top right under the logo they had a line saying

Serving the PC enthusiast for over 6×10^-2 centuries

It was a great description of the geekiness of their readership (myself included) while poking a bit of fun at the rather short history of the Web to date. And now it’s gone. Oh, well. I suppose not enough people like negative exponents.

Update: Greg Hines points out in the comments that this is still there — it’s just far down on the bottom right of the page instead of in the top left. Also, I see that “PC enthusiasts” have turned into “technologists”. And the site has aged by two years.

There are days when I really wish caffeine woke me up. This is one of those days.

Unfortunately, it’s never really seemed to do much of anything for me. I can drink a cup of coffee and go right to sleep. Rather frustrating, really, especially when I’m really tired and have a lot of work to do.