Jamazoo

The Google mail team has announced another neat trick of the Gmail system:

Append a plus (”+”) sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.

For me, the real value in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy to filter on those variants. For example you could use hikingfan+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to hikingfan+bank. You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. For example, I added “+donation” when I gave money to a political organization once, and now when I see emails from other groups to that address, I know how they got it. Solution: filtered to auto-delete.

I really like this trick. I get too many emails per day, much of it is friendly spam sent with good intention but really a waste of my time. So with this “+” feature, I can tell my Mom to send me email to myemail+mom@gmail.com and she can send all the fake virus warnings and urban legends to there. Auto filter and done. I also hate how some companies are a little aggressive with their email reports, and have a complicated time waster of a mess to unsubscribe from them. I mean, do I really need two emails a week from Southwest Airlines reminding me that I don’t have time to go on vacation, and that Hawaii can be mine for only $99? No! Why depress me? But I kinda want to get those emails because I keep dreaming that one day I will jet off to parts unknown. Now I just make it myemail+vacation@gmail.com and auto filter it away. Save the dream for later.

PS - These tricks work with Google Apps mail users as well.

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Diaper Chicken is a little game you play between spouses, using a baby as the prop. The game is played by holding the baby until a smell is noticed. The key strategy is to ignore the smell until it is possible to hand the baby to the other player, while simultaneously making a seemingly legitimate excuse for why you must leave the room immediately – or preferably the house. The game is won if you can successfully pass the baby off with a dirty diaper and force the opposing player to change the diaper. Extra points can be earned if the opposing player figures out that you have done this smelly handoff intentionally. No points are earned if a visiting relative is convinced to change the diaper in lieu of the handed off spouse.

Today my wife managed to come into my home office with our baby, pass him off without breaking stride and scamper off to have a shower. She won – it took about 5 seconds for me to realize that the child was foul, and as I followed her path down the hall to give the child back, I realized that she had already made it into the shower. She must have run down the hallway. Evil, evil woman.

I cornered her when she got out of the shower, and the big grin on her face was proof enough to me that the baby’s accident was no accident. For any of you expecting your first child, be aware of this game. It WILL happen to you. If you are already a parent, then you know that it HAS happened to you.

To avoid playing this game, invest in one of these or use these When discussing your loss at playing the game, use these so that the children do not come to understand the incredibly fun game you are playing.

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This is a neat (but poorly laid out) site that has all sorts of cool engineering mechanisms that are CAD modelled, animated or actual videos of models. Very cool stuff from Cornell.

“KMODDL is a collection of mechanical models and related resources for teaching the principles of kinematics–the geometry of pure motion. The core of KMODDL is the Reuleaux Collection of Mechanisms and Machines, an important collection of 19th-century machine elements held by Cornell’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.”

Kinematic Models

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Webmaster World is a damn good site. I have been lurking, reading, posting and pondering there for 5 years now. Seems like it is not that long, but I guess i am getting old. At first I was highly annoyed at the insistence on anonymity. For example, when discussing a site problem, you must use a generic name like widget.com to describe the site.

It seemed stupid at first, but then I started poking around at other webmaster sites and found them cluttered with way too much spam and self promoting url-drops. Very annoying and then I understood the point of “widget .com” . So go there and learn - and read the charter so that you don’t get smacked too often

Webmaster World

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