Congratulations on homeownership, Garrett. Your wallet will never be the same.

And it’s great to see that Kaycee is doing better — it doesn’t look like she’s on the keyboard in person yet, but that can’t be far away.

Things I Learned Today

I’ve been a moderately happy IE user since moving to Win98; today, Joel‘s
review of Netscape 6 taught me two very useful IE features — features which are especially useful to reduce my mousing and keying:

• Hit Alt-D to jump to the
  “Address” line with the whole address pre-selected (makes it easy to type a new URI).

• Hit Ctrl-Enter to enclose whatever you’ve typed on the “Address” line between
  "http&58;//www&46;"; and
  “.com” (so
  “cnn” becomes
  “http://www.cnn.com“), avoiding any conflict with locally-defined names.

Thanks, Joel!

And I also learned that Manila is very eager to turn things which look like URIs into links — I tried many tricks to avoid having it make “http://www.” into a link and finally gave up. Sorry for any confusion. And thanks to Al and Andrea for hacking at the problem — I never would have considered putting a backslash inside the “http://www.” string, which was the trick — I guess that breaks it up enough to get Manila to stop special-casing it.

I can stop watching CNN….

I subscribed my pager to their President-Elect alert, which will send out a one-time e-mail when the next president has been determined. So I guess I can expect my pager to go off at noon EST on 20 January.

Need I say more?

Actually, it wasn’t that bad, but even though I was busy all day, I don’t feel that I accomplished as much as I wanted to. And real soon now, I have to get down to some administrivial tasks, such as working on my “Personal Business Committments” (in other words, what I plan to do in 2000) and also writing up my yearly results. It really is considered bad form not to have the plans approved before the end of the year, though it does make it easier to hit one’s targets that way.

I also got rid of the Microsoft Trackball Explorer we bought a couple of weeks ago. It seemed like a good idea, but having both the left and right mouse buttons (and the scroll wheel) all being operated by the thumb was too much — and trying to remap the buttons screwed up the mapping on the trackpad that Diane prefers to use, so I returned it to Fry’s. For a change, I was taken care of immediately (usually, there’s a 15- or 20-minute wait; I brought a book), and the whole experience wasn’t half-bad — and the thought that we might not like the trackball is the reason we went to Fry’s in the first place. Much as I dislike some of the nonsense there, their return policy makes them my first choice when I’m experimenting with gadgets.