I wanted to capture something live on a near static homepage. Twitter best complements my presence, my activity and adds a curious twist to an otherwise dull static page—making people (who care enough) aware that I’m alive and kicking somewhere.

The best part, of course, is the simplicity of Twittering—one liners, no formatting needed and no need to reach for a computer to update something. I can be in another country, on the road, and one SMS, updates my homepage. I think that’s a fantastic idea.

Update [12.Aug.2007]: Reverted back to normal view, for Sneha, my wife, who hated clicking multiple links to get to new posts.

I remember why in particular I bought my copy of Windows XP back in 2002. It came with an obscure display feature called Cleartype¹. Having blown-away by my previous experience using an Irix powered SGI Indy, I knew what sub-pixel rendering would do to my display. I wanted it.

Ever since then, viewing screens anti-aliased has been an enjoyable experience—until I changed my job recently. Windows 2000 is what we’re prescribed with at work². It is when I am writing reports that I miss Cleartype the most.

1. For best results, I’d highly recommend downloading and running the Cleartype powertoy. It captures your visual preference via a wizard.
2. Cleartype is not supported in prior versions of Windows including 2000.

Going ga-ga over standards is valid and makes sense to designers and data-miners, but what about the end-users, who just want to print hotel reservation tickets, trip itineraries that run longer than a page? May be that’s not important for team Firefox, I guess.

And since when did they add the Shift key to the combination for an accessibility shortcut in Firefox? Earlier, it was just hold Alt and press the assigned accessibility key (like 1 for home on this site). Now, it is Shift, Alt and press 1!

Firefox team, please note this is an accessibility key—for humanities sake—not meant for a keyboard trapeze. Please.

And if you’re solely on Linux, you’ve got to live through this idiocy, because you’re stuck with Firefox (or Iceweasel).

For the record, I am a Firefox user since it wasn’t even called that (we go way back to 1999). Mozilla, do you need another ten years to fix the print or understand accessibility?

Our transport comes equipped with an on-board computer and has a detailed fuel economy feedback system built-in. It tells us how we’re doing on the road in three different ways:

1. Fuel consumption indicator — This tells us how much fuel we’re consuming as we drive, more or less spontaneously.
2. Fuel economy indicator — It notes our rate of acceleration, speed and its consistency, as we drive. When we see more green LEDs lit, it means we’re doing better on economy. (This is the one that’s really pruning our habits towards driving green.)
3. The overall average fuel consumption to-date.

I find this information extraordinarily useful. I think every vehicle should have some feedback system as a standard, because it is so much part of an on-board console. And it only give us a little more sense of responsibility — to do better.

As of today, we’ve driven over 1300km and, the average to-date indicator says we are using-up 7.5 litre per 100km.

Update: On the topic, Tree Hugger has an an excellent post.

Email is such an integral part of a company, corporation, that I cannot stress enough. (I was looking for some real moving words to have an effect here, but they fail me. Oh, never mind. But you know the feeling, right?) So what is this about, then? Well, it is about the big announcement from Google.

A few weeks before this happened, someone in my organization called for views about deploying third-party email solutions to contractors based in our offices. This obviously came out of the problems of having to set up relatively temporary mailboxes on the company domain and get things working for specific non-staff groups.

The discussion evoloved, and some of us who have been using Gmail and Apps put our force behind this thing, enough to raise a genuine interest in not only thinking about options to deploy for non-staff contractors, but also a possibility of deploying them for over 100,000 staff worldwide. It’s a definite possibility, there are people really looking this up and other aspects around it at this very moment.

Now, why would we, as employees, do such a thing? Well, there’s this thing about have your say in making your life easier (as if there was a better and brief way of saying it). Let’s look at the wind-down version of why we would support Google Apps.

Let me start with Email.

My company lets me work from home or from a remote place, when I need to or when I cannot be in office, for some reason. In such situations, more often than not, the only thing I need to access is my corporate email. Presently, the only way we can do it is via the VPN. Somehow, email via the VPN, except on one occasion, never worked for me from home. And I was forced to haul myself back to office, so I could be connected.

Our present solution is Outlook + Exchange. The first time I saw it, I cringed. (I even bought a used Outlook 2000 in a nutshell, just so I could be productive without wasting time learning some basic things. But as it happens, the 600 odd page book lies neatly on my desk, unopened.)

From what I see around, a lot of people have attachment issues, mailbox limitation problems archiving, not to mention searching, indexing and a whole lot of other stuff. People complain about it all the time, but there’s nothing much they could do. But now, the prospects look better, because there’s a better solution available.

For some of us, the only email we have ever had is the corporate address. For that at least, I think we deserve a lot more than a crappy system.

Gmail’s amazing feature set is a boon for corporate users in any environment. Comfy offices to extreme weather conditions of up to -30ºc in near arctic zones.

Calendar is another. We have a lot of events happening. Some, I end up skipping because I didn’t keep Outlook open. Google Calendar sends SMS alerts to your phone, and that’s a great way of getting a notification while on the move about your appointments, events, et al.

We have a lot of specifications that a whole team of people are working on at the moment. The progress is often at snail’s pace, and in a serial manner. If there was a way to collaborate officially, the comment and review system could be a lot quicker, thus reducing the time taken to complete such tasks.

Google Apps provides all those, just lets us get our work done, quickly, effortlessly and without experiencing pain. I just hope the company sees our POV.

As one of the bank employees said to me, with a wry smile: “In England, they have it in English. Here, it is in Dutch.” This, when I asked him why the options in the ATM menu were all in Dutch and that I couldn’t make a head or tail of it². It goes without saying, I tried each button, so I now know what each one does.

1. Withdraw cash.
2. Account balance / information.
3. Deposit cash.

It is a similar story in a shopping mall. I fail to distinguish between a service counter and a cash counter. The person on the other side tells me: “Do you want to buy this? Yes? Then please go to that counter.”

This phenomenon, I noticed, is not restricted to the real world alone. Most Dutch websites do not have an English version³. To them, English is just any other European language. They do not seem to acknowledge that it might be considered as a universal language in communication⁴, thanks to the internet.

Not to be left alone at that, the “intelligent” web sites think I am Dutch, simply because I am accessing the site from within the Netherlands. And they serve all content in Dutch. I eventually end-up using either commands like these, or a translator plugin.

After the web sites, it is now the turn of the hardware. Take those debit-card⁵ swipe machines located near the Check-out counters and they’re in Dutch⁶. I just note the word PIN, followed by a confirmation to the amount billed with a “Ja” (spell J as Y), and I am done.

My work machine keyboard acts funny, even though I have English language turned on as default. For a double quote to appear, I have to first press the key followed by a space bar, or else it won’t appear. There’s also something in my work machine that is softwired to Dutch, and I often notice things that are non-English. And so it goes on.

Some bare necessities (For everything else, there’s a dictionary and a plugin):

• Zoek — Search
• Voor Huur — For Hire (For Rent)
• Te Koop — Buy
• Kip — Chicken
• Kinderen — Children
• Makelaar — Broker (Real estate agent)
• Contant geld — Cash

1. We use fingers. Thanks goodness, for the numbers do not exceed them, or else we would be carrying a notepad!
2. I have pressed a button meant for depositing cash, when I really wanted to withdraw, a few times more than I should have :).
3. Not all sites are so gloriously designed to suffix a command to the web address and get it in the language you want.
4. Probably because their native language suits them well, even if they exhibit excellent English language skills.
5. I am told that they hardly use cheque books here in Holland. Everything is paid either online or using credit / debit cards.
6. Hell, no, I am not complaining, I am more like, if it isn’t in English, I might as well learn some Dutch.

While I did this, I realized my own current theme lacked a print stylesheet for such a thing. So, I spared some time to crack up a simple sheet for printing exclusively².

The best I like about this print sheet is that links in the posts are now expanded, within brackets, for offline users, thereby making them more accessible.

Update: Plenty of juice for those who want to try this on their sites, all from the very awesome night school for wannabe designers, ALA.

• Going to Print
• Improving Link Display for Print
• ALA’s New Print Styles
• Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!
• High-Resolution Image Printing
• Print to Preview

1. You must be wondering whatever happened to my copy of FeedDemon. Well, it has far too many unread posts, for one. And FeedDemon fails to load the post when the feed has pictures, which in turn can only be viewed online. But instead of the picture being made unavailable, FeedDemon makes the entire feed unreadable/invisible for offline reading.
2. Take a look at print preview of this page or any post, or print to pdf if you like.