Jefflog

Baby Maggie laughed for the first time last night, and we caught it on camera. See for yourself.

If corn oil is made from corn, and olive oil is made from olives, what is baby oil made of?

American Airlines Removes Pillows From MD-80 Flights

The Fort Worth-based airline this week removed pillows from its 334 MD-80s in a move expected to save time and money by enabling workers to clean the cabins faster, said spokesman Tim Wagner.
[...]
Wagner estimated the airline would be saving “in the mid-six figures” because of the move.

I’ve been a Tivo owner for about four years now, and it’s revolutionized my television watching habits. When we sit down to watch TV, we always have something good to watch that Tivo has recorded for us. Because we can fast-forward through the commercials, we can get about an hour-and-a-half of regular television watching done in about an hour.

Alas, the modem in the unit got busted a long time ago due to an electrical storm. It was going to cost $100 to get it fixed, and the dial-in service was costing $9.99/month at the time (these days, it’s $12.99), so we just cancelled the service. No problem, because my generation 1 Tivo still works pretty well without it. Sure, I get a warning every time I access it that it hasn’t dialed out successfully in three years, and I can only record by time instead of by show title, and every recording has the title “Manual Recording” leaving me to guess what show it actually is, and the internal clock is now off by about 23 minutes making it really difficult to figure out what time a show should start recording….OK, so there are a lot of issues with it, but overall it still works very good.

Today, I hear that Tivo is going to add banner ads to shows you are watching. Presumably, they’ll just upload it onto users Tivos during one of their standard upgrades. (Except for us, since we haven’t received an upgrade in three years!) This is just one of several steps the company has taken backwards lately, cowing to the requests of advertisers at the expense of consumers. I shouldn’t need to tell you what happens to companies when they stop listening to their customers.

OK, so I can understand that someone needs to pay the bills at the television station, and that a move like this is probably inevitable…Fox already inserts annoying animated ads at the bottom of the screen for their other TV shows anyway. Nevertheless, I’m happy that I’ve got my old unit. I was thinking about getting a new Tivo, but now I think I’ll keep the old one for as long as it keeps working.

(For the record, I have tried to hack into my Tivo unit several times to fix the time issue, going so far as removing the hard drive and mounting it in my PC, but never had any success.)

Eric Meyer, the great CSS guru, has come out with an equally great standards-based HTML presentation software. Consisting of some snippets of Javascript for page navigation and CSS for presentation, it turns a simple page of markup into an elegant slideshow.

Demo of the system is here. Go ahead, load up the demo, then select “View Source” from the browser to see how clean the markup is.

This system has a few advantages over PowerPoint:

• It’s HTML, so you don’t have to buy the PowerPoint software to create or view the slides. This makes it easier to share your presentation with other users.
• If you’re already familiar with HTML, it makes it even easier to create presentations.
• It can display any information you can embed in a browser. Embed hyperlinks to escape out to other webpages instead of clumsily toggling between applications halfway through your presentation.
• It doesn’t (yet) support animated transitions from slide to slide. (That’s a feature because I find animations always distract from the presentation.)

It just occurred to me that this post would make a great S5 presentation.

If you’re using tabbed browsing in the Firefox browser, most people seem to know that you can cycle between the tabs using Ctrl+Tab. What people generally don’t know about is the ability to jump to tabs 1-9 by using Alt+<#>…Alt+1 takes you to tab 1, Alt+2 to tab 2, etc. For Windows, it’s Ctrl+<#>, Mac it’s Cmd+<#>.

Complete list of Firefox keyboard shortcuts.

The Mozilla project just released version 1.0 of their Firefox web browser for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. If you’re using any other browser, including Netscape’s own browser or Safari and especially IE, you should download this program now. It is hands down the best browser you’ll find.

While the Kerry campaign hasn’t yet conceded Ohio, let’s face it: he’s losing by a margin of 150,000 votes right now, and the 250,000 absentee and provisional ballots remaining are going to cover a margin that large. Bush won, and far more clearly than he did in 2000.

Secretly, I’m disappointed, even though I know Kerry wouldn’t have been any better in a lot of ways. I’m fearful that with a President who has yet to veto a single bill in office with a Republican majority in the House and Senate for four more years. He promised on the campaign trail to reduce the deficit in half, but I don’t believe it, and even if he did, it wouldn’t be enough in my eyes. Our economy is going to be in a world of hurt someday, and for what? A free Iraq?

There’s also no hope of curtailing the Patriot Act now, excepting for Constitutional challenges presented to the Supreme Court.

All 11 state measures to ban same-sex marriage passed. I’m still undecided on the whole same-sex marriage issue — I think homosexuals should be allowed the same legal benefits heterosexuals can have, but am uncomfortable with using the word “marriage” to describe their union — but to have these measures pass feels wrong to me. We look back in history and see slavery as a distasteful practice that was well-supported in its day, and I can’t help but think we’ll see the issue of same-sex marriage in the same light 50 or 100 years from now.

I’m sitting at home watching the results stream in from CNN’s website. So many statistics! What a party.