I ended up buying two Titanium flash drives. One 4GB, for general toting of stuff, and one 2GB which is password-protected and therefore Windows only.

I did the U3 technology that lets you take your world with you in your pocket, but am sad that it doesn't extend to the Mac. I did find Portable Firefox which isn't U3, but is nifty in that it comes with an OS X executable and a Windows one that both use the same bookmarks, etc. Close to my dream.

I grabbed a few U3 apps above and beyond what came with the drive--Putty and OpenOffice and Firefox. But I haven't had a chance to explore the world of U3 or other portable apps yet.

But, dammit! Why not have cross-platform password protection? Grr.

eta: Gah! Why am I having a hard time finding mention of cross-platform Portable Firefox? Mine is! I tried it. Weird.

A little article about humans, computers and chess:

In the old days, chess programs went around killing enemy pieces at every opportunity. Their human opponents understood that in chess, like war, other factors often matter more: territorial control, mobility, initiative, reach, coordination, supply lines, impregnability, and safety from decapitation. By trading material for these advantages, the humans won. So, programmers taught the machines to recognize and consider the same factors.

Unable to win with their old tricks, human players learned new ones. They played quirky openings to throw computers off-script. They plotted attacks a dozen moves ahead, beyond the machines' range of calculation. They hunkered down in defenses that to a computer looked impregnable. They cluttered the battlefield with obstructions, making it harder for computers to see threats or payoffs. They left irrelevant pieces on the board to absorb the machines' attention. It was a whole new game layered on top of the old one. The humans named it "anti-computer chess."

Now programmers are adding a third layer: anti-anti-computer chess. They're teaching machines to break old habits, see through clutter, and force the wide-open bloodbaths at which computers excel. In 2003, Deep Junior flummoxed Kasparov with a kamikaze attack unprecedented in computer annals. Last year, when Kramnik forced Deep Fritz off its opening script, the program invented a new variation and went on to win the game.

[link]

The gist of the article is humans and computers, working together, will achieve unprecedented blah blah blah....

I was working on a word attachment I opened from my mac email account. I hit save several times as I was working, and was not prompted to save changes when I closed. I cannot now find the file, and this is something I need for work tomorrow. HELP!

Edit - never mind. Figured it out.

Anne,

What program was it opened in? It might be in "recent" and you can save it somewhere else.

Or

Go to the same email, and pretend you are going to "save as."

Have you any idea what the extension was? If so, you might use search on the hard drive to find any files of that extension modified within the last day.

Daniel, I can't remember exactly how I tracked it down, but when I went into an "open attachments" menu (I think) there was a search box. I typed in the file name, and was able to pull it out of the ether.

I've since saved it to my desktop and have opened it several times to make sure it's really, truly there.

Does anybody use Vonage? I am so pissed at Verizzzon right now I want to dump our land-line service.

I use Vonage and love it. I occasionally get a bit of echo, and I can't call if I'm ahemming at high bandwidth. But other than that, it's been flawless, and it's really nice for my folks in Indianapolis to be able to make a local call to me. It's not so nice for my friends here in Arizona, but as soon as they get local numbers for me here, it'll be fine.

However, they are currently dealing with a load of issues trying to work out their workaround with Verizon's broad VOIP patents, so I might hold off and see what happens with that first.

I loathe Vonage (terrible quality calls, and their customer service, if possible, is worse than Verizon's -- the whole story is in this thread or the previous one somewhere), but have been very happy with my cable company's digital phone service.

Because it's dedicated bandwidth (Vonage has to piggyback on what you're already using for internet), the call quality is outstanding and we've never had the issues with dropped calls that we did with Vonage. And only having to deal with one company for phone/cable/internet is nice and convenient when something does go wrong.

I use Vonage and after a bit of a rough start it has been excellent for a long time.

OK-- I really like the interface on this online comic. (The content is OK. I think the narrator is intended to be creepy, but also sympathetic. I'm right there with the former, but not with the latter.)

It is basically a zoom interface. Each panel contains a really tiny thumbnail of the next page you press when are ready to go on. It zoom in on that thumbnail to the next page. (You can also use a page list at the bottom or arrow keys if your browser allows it.) Regardless of how you indicate you are ready for the next page (or the previous) it navigates by zooming.

[link]

When you hear about it, it does not seem a big deal. But to me, subjectively, it is the easiest multiple page on-line navigation system I've ever used.

Part of it is the light weight. I think it does just the right amount of caching. So it actually moves faster than almost any page at time navigation system I've ever used. I think the zoom method works better than scrolling cause your eye does not get "lost" for a second about where you left off. I think the zooming works better than normal page navigation system, again because it keeps your eye focused on the right spot for the next page. In short, I think it reduces eyestrain in terms of reading large amounts of material on-line. I'd be curious if other people using it find the same.