I’ve been playing with Unsanity’s Window Shade X public preview. One of the nice new features of version 3 is “Minimize In Place”.

Suggestion for WSX3:

MIPed windows should [do something] when their dock icon is clicked. Right now I can’t decide what that something is; I think that perhaps a double-click should maximize all of them.

MIP iTunes, and open Safari. Now, consider your mouse movements. In order to maximize the MIPed iTunes, if the Safari window hides the iTunes MIP, you must first either cmd-tab to iTunes or click the icon, then click the MIPed window. Thus your mouse at worst travels from the center of the screen to the bottom of the screen, then almost to another edge of the screen, just to maximize a MIPed window.

At the risk of asking for them to write Unsanity’s version of Exposé, another nice feature would be to have keyboard shortcuts that MIP all windows, just the current app’s windows, or maximize all MIPed windows.

Saturday, Laura told me we had mold in the hallway. Even though I wanted to keep it for a pet ["Sparky! Play dead! Now make penicillin!"], she said we had to get rid of it. My response was “I have no idea how to get rid of mold.”

This is why I have parents, I guess. And Google.

Upon the recommendation of Mom and Uncle Google, we had to do several things to remove the mold, and to keep it from coming back. First, as the mold was on the ceiling and the upper parts of the walls in the hallway, Laura had to scrubbed the area with bleach water. Next, we’re leaving a light on in the hallway.

Apparently this fills the mold with great self doubt. “Am I in the right house? It was dark in here last time. Crap, I’m going next door.”

Finally, I had to climb up into the attic and seal off the attic fan vent. I have no idea why anyone would install an attic fan in Atlanta. All it does is suck the humid, nasty air from outside into the house. Since the return registers are also in the hallway, they were pulling hot air from the attic through the ceiling vents and into the hallway, where it caused condensation on the ceiling and walls, thus giving the mold a nice place to live.

The idea was to take a painter’s plastic tarp and seal off the vents. Once I got up to the attic, I realized that I’d forgotten about the huge giant attic fan that was sitting over the vents, just where an attic fan should be. Luckily, the plastic tarp was big enough to cover the whole fan.

Hooray for home ownership.

Anyone want to replace my air filters? I’ll give you $5, easy.

This page has a manual and a quick reference guide to Picazo phones.

Answers to Tara’s interview questions:

1. What’s your favorite potato dish (for example, mashed potato, loaded baked potato, scalloped, etc)?

1a. Mmm, mashed taters. Mashed taters is good taters. Gotta fear them unmashed taters. They might rise up and overthrow the gubmint. They’d be dictaters then.

2. Describe the weirdest experience you’ve ever had while driving.

2a. Stop signs. I just noticed them last week. Really annoying. You people have put up with those things for how long?

3. What’s funnier, cheese or corn?

3a. Corn. Just think about the word. Cooorn. Say it over and over. Besides, when was the last time you’ve found cheese in your poop? And for those of you who’ve been sodomized by an angry Pepperidge Farm employee during the holiday season: though you probably deserved it, it doesn’t count.

4. Name five songs you have in your collection that no one would expect you to have.

4a. That’s pretty unfair, since I enjoy finding the worst mp3s possible. Some of my favorites are:

The Beat Farmers - Tie My Pecker To My Leg
Coin - Jet Pack Turbo Suit
Blumchen - Du Und Ich
Rasputina - Howard Hughes
Luca Turilli - Ancient Forest of Elves

5. What’s your favorite flavor of Jelly Belly™ jelly beans?

I hate jelly beans. Most of them taste like earwax. If angry midgets are forcing me to eat them [the beans, not the midgets], I’d hope for lemon-flavored ones. Beans, not midgets. Although angry lemon-flavored midgets would be pretty interesting.

Business tip for today: when you have a world-famous, instantly-recognizeable brand name, change it.

I mean really, you can’t have people buying your products. That might actually make money, and jeez, what would you do with that?

Instead of the simple, four-letter “Palm”, the insipid twits in Palm’s management spent two years in business meetings to come up with their new company name, “PalmOne. Brilliant. And the lower-case L is the numeral 1. On purpose.

They were probably drinking “New Coke” the whole time.

PalmOne. It’s like Palm tried to sign onto IRC and someone else had their nickname, so they changed it to something ‘leet’.

This is the perfect social hack for Monday.

Tired of piles of junk mail clogging your mailbox?

“A little-known Federal law allows individuals to send a Prohibitory Order against companies that are sending unsolicited sexually provocative or erotically arousing mail. The Supreme Court went one step further, allowing individuals to decide what constitutes “erotically arousing” mail. The law makes it illegal for a company to send mail to an individual within thirty days of receiving the Order.”

So what are you waiting for?

Print out US Postal Form 1500, fill it out, attach an opened piece of junk mail, and send it in.

Read the link for detailed information.

This makes me very happy, because I find Providian credit card offers to be highly obscene.

It’s probably normal to think that “flash mobs” are a form of violence against those jerks who make Flash-only websites.