I noticed a smart, although slightly annoying, change from Friendster this morning. They used to send emails that said, “Your friend David’s birthday is coming up on July 31!” But this morning’s email said, “Your friend David’s birthday is coming up! Click here to find out when.” That’s a smart change because it drives traffic to the site. When I used to receive the fully-informative emails, I was already done interacting with Friendster after glancing at the email. Now it’s just the start of my interaction with them instead; I have to pay a visit to their site, where the interaction continues. That little change was a smart way to bring a lot of extra traffic to Friendster.

9:29 am Comments Off on Friendster Birthday Emails


Ilse went to the vet today, and she’s already 4.7 pounds. That’s huge! She’s more than twice the size that she was two months ago. None of her clothing fits her anymore. I swear she’s like the size of a German Shepherd. So I’m going to start calling her Shep.

10:07 pm , Comments Off on Shep


This morning around 6am, Ashleigh and I were awakened by a horrendously loud noise which we (in our sleepy stupor) were sure was a huge earthquake. Of course, there aren’t earthquakes in New York, and we soon realized that the sound was the entire inside of our closet collapsing. The main shelf and rod suddenly gave way, bringing the contents of the closet downward and crushing our shoe rack into oblivion. Fortunately no one was injured, since no one lives in our closet.

Needless to say, it turned out to be a great opportunity to weed through unneeded (and apparently very heavy) clothing. The Salvation Army will be very grateful. Until their racks collapse.



The Tony Awards were a lot of fun to watch this year because of the live performances, but we weren’t at all shocked by most of the winners. They seemed to match well with Roma Torre’s predictions on NY1 and with our own predictions. The only surprise of the evening was David Hyde Pierce for best actor in a musical. We thought for sure that Raul Esparza would win for Company instead, but I suspect the Tony voters were making up for David not winning a Tony for Spamelot. Hopefully Raul will get his chance in his next show.

11:05 pm Comments Off on Enjoyable But Not Very Surprising Tonys


Rob and Abby got a dog. His name is Sir Toby Belch, and of course he’s getting a web site:

www.sirtobybelch.com

And in other news, Ilse is very dapper as she models her new track suit:

Ilse in her track suit

4:11 pm Photos , Comments Off on Puppy Updates


Tonight Ashleigh and I tried the new “Watch Now” service from Netflix. It allows us to watch a movie instantly on our computer screen instead of waiting to receive it in the mail. The service is only available for select titles, and obviously only with a fast internet connection. Anyway, it’s pretty amazing that a movie can be delivered so quickly and reliably, and at a very decent quality, over the internet. Our movie had to pause a few times for just a minute to “catch up” to itself (as a result of hiccups in our internet connection), but that gave us an opportunity to use the restroom; it wasn’t much of a nuisance. This is definitely the future of movie renting, and I highly recommend it for any Netflix users who haven’t tried it yet, provided you have a very fast connection.

8:22 pm Reviews Comments Off on Netflix Watch Now


I finally switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail last week. So far, I’m pretty happy. I’m just trying to get used to the automatic threading of “conversations” and using “labels” instead of folders. Why did I switch? Yahoo Mail Plus, combined with Yahoo Personal Address for my thenestor.com email address, made my Yahoo Mail kind of pricey. Gmail offered the same service for free, including the use of my domain name. And unlike Yahoo, Google doesn’t take over the whole domain name; just the mail part.

Now I’m on to the challenging task of moving old mail into Gmail. The first step was obvious: To get my mail from Yahoo Mail into Gmail, I just set up Gmail to retrieve from the Yahoo Mail POP server. Done and done. It just takes a while, because Gmail processes only 200 messages at a time, every half hour or so. Gmail is even smart enough to put most of the “Sent” mail into the “Sent” folder.

The harder part is getting my old mail (from before I used Yahoo) from Outlook Express. Basically I followed instructions similar to these. Most of the Gmail import solutions out there involve forwarding all your mail and therefore losing the original dates of the messages. Not interested. Instead, I put my mail on a POP server on my own computer and then had Gmail download it from there.

First, I imported my mail to Mozilla Thunderbird. Then I set up an IMAP/POP server on my own computer. I found a free, easy-to-use mail server called Mercury. I set up an account for myself, and then I went into Thunderbird and hooked it up as an IMAP account. Then I copied the emails from the archive folders into the Inbox of the IMAP account. After that, I went to Gmail and added an external account (to retrieve POP mail) using my IP address. Voila, it started downloading 200 messages at a time.

Now the tricky part is that a lot of my mail is going to the Spam folder, so I have to keep checking it once in a while during the retrieval process. The good thing is, all of the false-positive Spam has really old dates, so it’s easy to spot.

2:36 pm Comments Off on Switched to Gmail


We got a puppy. Her name is Ilse von Nestorhausen, and she has a web site:

http://www.ilsevonnestorhausen.com

Because every pet should have a web site. That’s what the web was invented for.



On the corner of Bank Street and Greenwich Avenue in the west village.

10:01 am Photos Comments Off on Like a Biker Bar, Except It’s a Vespa Starbucks


Some of the American Idol contestants are decent, I guess, but I’ll tell you who my idol is: Robin Sparkles. She’s got the best music video ever.

9:37 pm Reviews Comments Off on Canadian Idol

Read more...

Visit the archive to read all entries sorted by date, or check out the memories page for my favorite entries. And if you're sick of reading and just want to look at pretty pictures, go check out my photos on flickr.



subscribe to this blog or go start your own:

56 queries. 0.124 seconds.