John Lamansky

I recently found a message from my ISP in my Junk Mail folder, with the subject “Spam - How It’s Growing and What We’re Doing About It.”

Oh, the irony.

If you have a FeedBurner feed, you’ve got to check this out: FeedBurner has released a feed-to-email subscription service.

For bloggers and podcasters, a feed-to-email subscription service means you can expand your “push-delivery audience” to readers and listeners who aren’t familiar with RSS feeds.

For readers and listeners, an email subscription service such as FeedBurner Email means that you can sign up to receive emails every day that let you know about new blog posts or podcast episodes. (Of course, if there’s nothing new for a given day, you won’t get an email.) For many people, email subscription services remove the need to remember to visit a blog or podcast site for updates.

My take on FeedBurner Email? In short: it’s awesome.

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Okay, I thought this would be something really dumb when I first saw “Microsoft” and “dance-dance email” in the same headline, but it’s actually kind of cool. Users of this email program developed by Microsoft Research can “dance-dance” to quickly sort their email. Sounds like it could even make sorting through a full inbox fun for once.

From an Arstechnia.com article:

The Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) pad on the floor [...] turned out to be the centerpiece of the event. Dr. AJ Brush, PhD, jumped on the pad and showed us how the team had used the off-the-shelf gaming interface to demonstrate a new method of human-computer interaction.

Firing up a custom-built e-mail application, she used her feet on the up and down arrows to scroll through messages, and hit another pad to open and close them for viewing. E-mails could be flagged using the left and right arrows. Deleting was the most fun, as it involved jumping and hitting a specific combo (right arrow and the diagonal between up and left) together. Dr. Brush said that test subjects had gotten quite excited about deleting e-mails and became a bit too carried away in cleaning out their Inbox.

Dr. Stephen Drucker then demonstrated a second possible application for the pad, a smooth-scrolling photo management application in the vein of iPhoto or “Microsoft Codename Max.” The user could quickly run through photos and sort them into different folders using the DDR pad, although Dr. Brush did admit that in testing it was found that one’s right leg could get tired while constantly scrolling to the next photo.

The floor was then opened up to questions. First off the bat was the obvious one: it looks like fun, but when the fun wears off, how practical is such a system? Schofield admitted that there have to be specific, measurable increases in productivity for a new system like this to take off, but that there were some cases where people might welcome a change of pace in the way they interact with their computer. The opportunity to stand up, stretch, and get a small bit of exercise while simultaneously sorting through your Inbox might appeal to busy workers who are hunched over their keyboards all day long. Besides, he concluded, “there is no law that says work can’t be fun.”

I’ve decided to change the email subscription system to use a WordPress plugin instead of FeedBlitz. Since FeedBlitz requires account registration, it’s a real pain to subscribe via email if you don’t already have a FeedBlitz account.

With the new system, all you have to do is enter your email address in the box on the sidebar, click the OK button, and then click the link in the confirmation email that will be sent to your address. Then tada! You’ll be notified of any new posts on this blog. Enjoy!

Here’s a really cool concept: write a message and have it emailed to you in 20 years. That’s the idea behind the Forbes email time capsule. You have until November 30 before the capsule is “buried.” Read this article at Forbes.com for more info on the technical details.

Naturally, the biggest roadblock is that peoples’ email addresses change. (The article gives some advice on what type of email address you should use.) The second-biggest problem in my mind is the security of this database. After all, it will be stored in three places for the purposes of data redundancy. Although it does sound appealing, I probably won’t want to use this as a system of backup for my top-secret ideas for that A.I. program I’ve been working on…

Ah, time capsules… this brings back some fond memories. I’ve always been fascinated by time capsules, time travel, and etcetera. My brother, I, and two friends of ours buried a time capsule in our garden about four or five years ago. I can easily remember the time period because it was at the time when state quarters were the latest thing. So we buried some state quarters along with a sentance-long piece of paper that said in summary, “congratulations for finding this.”

Unfortunately, the map telling exactly where in the garden the time capsule is, as well as how deep it was buried, was misplaced. I do remember the general area of the garden in which the capsule is located, as well as the fact that it was about two or three feet down. I suppose that general information will suffice. Now I just need to decide when to dig it up.

And say hello to “Windows Mail,” to be included in Windows Vista.

Finally! Microsoft will be renaming the basic email program included with Windows and Internet Explorer. The name “Outlook Express” has caused much confusion because of its similarity to “Microsoft Outlook,” Microsoft’s personal information manager, which also includes email capabilities.

The truth is that “Outlook” and “Outlook Express” are two completely different programs, even though they both email. Outlook Express even has a cool feature not found in the hundred-dollar Outlook 2003 or the open-source Mozilla Thunderbird program - OE can edit the HTML source of an email message.

Windows Mail will also be using the standard “eml” format instead of the proprietary “dbx” format.

I’m sure you’re already aware of this, but you can never be told enough: when you’re blogging, emailing, or using other Internet forms of communication, you need to be careful about how you present things, because you no longer have inflections, body language, etc., at your disposal. One way to “replace” these is to use emotions (but then of course there are those people who say that a well-structured sentence shouldn’t need emotions, yada yada yada…). But once upon a time I was new to email, and I learned this “be careful what you say” lesson the hard way.

I once had a “email penpal” named Nicky who lived in Australia; he was my very first penpal. After we had been writing for some time, I decided that I wanted to tell him about the funny things that had happened to us recently.

Like the time our fireplace blew up and sent glass shards flying across the living room, leaving burn marks on the carpet? (On the more serious side, it was definitely a miracle that about 15 seconds before the explosion I felt a sudden impulse to get myself and my baby brother out of the living room.)

And remember that one early morning many years ago when the house filled up with smoke because the pop-up-timer mechanism on the toaster had broken? I proudly remembered my fire drill techniques and crawled across the kitchen floor, then quickly jumped up into standing position and yanked the toaster’s power plug out. (And then my parents wake up and say something like, “Why does the house smell like smoke?”) That piece of toast was in a sorry state… (to be more specific, the slice of bread looked like greasy charcoal and had probably shrunk about 25% due to extreme moisture loss).

I never heard from Nicky again. Perhaps I gave a slight impression of pyromania…

I recently received a forwarded email from a relative that read:

The Red Planet is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter’s gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.

The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.

By the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30a.m. That’s pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month.

I was getting all excited until I read this article and realized the email was a hoax.

The circulating emails are simply exaggerations. Yes, Mars will be rather close to Earth, but it’s going to happen in October, not August; it’s not going to be as big as the full moon; and it will not be 60,000 years before it happens again.

Sigh… I’ll need to be more careful about what emails I believe. I’m not used to this kind of email hoax; I’m only used to hoax emails that announce, “THIS [important system] FILE IS A VIRUS! REMOVE IT NOW OR YOUR COMPUTER WILL FACE UTTER DESTRUCTION!”