I'm Back In The Game!

After writing yesterday's post, I googled "get rid of news headlines yahoo mail" and lo, I am not the only one who hates headlines in my mail. I found instructions to get rid of headlines; it took less than five minutes. Full instructions here. You need Firefox. Check. You need to download a little Firefox extension called Stylish. Check. Restart Firefox. OK. Paste the conveniently provided script into a new style in Stylish (easier than it sounds.) It worked! My Yahoo page is as bare as a snow covered field. No advertisements. No headlines. No more undulating people selling me cheap mortgages.

From the Stylish web site:
User styles empower your browsing experience by letting you fix ugly sites, customize the look of your browser or mail client, or just have fun.

Yahoo Should Be Called Boohoo

I don't have a flippin idea what to talk about today. Must be blogger's block. My usual resources of interesting and weird news stories yielded nothing. I have no personal musings to share. I thought about mocking how ugly the Google phone is, but that would be schadenfreude (sp?). Who makes fun of gazillionaire world-as-we-know-it-changers on a Tuesday? Silly news doesn't seem silly after reading about schoolgirls getting sprayed with acid.

Normally I rely on humor to keep me from being dragged into despair, which is why I keep my posts to relatively unimportant topics like bacon and gummi bears. But this week, I can't overcome the funk. I'm thinking the culprit is Yahoo.

Suddenly, when I open my mail, Yahoo presents me with the five most depressing world headlines. Last week they bogged me down with Somalian pirates. This week it's Iraq and Afghanistan horror stories. I don't see the value of being reminded of bad things every time I check my email, which I admit is as frequent as a caffeinated woodpecker pecking at a tree. This guaranteed to bring you down Yahoo mail/headlines feature was not in effect two weeks ago, and two weeks ago I was blogging along happily. I checked all my settings to get rid of the offending headlines—nothing. I may have to switch to gmail.

Oh Google

I am none too happy about the new way Google autofills my search field not with my most recent searches, but with the world's. Or maybe it is U.S. searches. Google doesn't say. Or English speaking searches. Or all searches everywhere, translated to English. I don't know, but it bugs me. I do a lot of research and I'm somewhat compulsive hence I search the same things a lot and I want my searches. Not only am I not getting my searches, I am learning more about my fellow humans than I care to.

I was searching the title of a magazine article I'd recently published, to see if had become an internet sensation yet and I got as far as typing "is o" when these options presented themselves:


Is Obama the antichrist? For real? A half million results? My internet is slower than rush hour on the Dan Ryan because you're researching whether Obama is the antichrist? OK fine. Internet for all. Freedom of speech. Freedom of search. Whatever. My search is narcissist and delusional so who am I to judge? Lots of questions about Obama, I noticed. Then I remembered Sarah Palin's gotten more hits in the past two weeks than Britney and Paris combined so I wondered what the world was asking about her and typed "is s" thinking I'd get a bijillion questions on her. Instead I got this:


Is Sean Hayes gay? Please. Does tinsel sparkle? What's the obsession with who is gay? Nothing on Sarah P. yet. Here we go with "is sar" (yes I know we skipped "is sa" but I forgot to get the screen shot and I am too lazy to go get it):


Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay. Again, what is the obsession? Onto "is sara":


Now we're becoming more curious. We want to know if they are gay and Jewish.


Jewish, gay, married, getting a divorce? We want to know! Here is "is sarah p":



Finally! There she is. I know a lot of misinformation has been flying around the tubes, but I didn't think her pro-lifosity was in question.

Now we know the burning questions on things that begin with "S". Can I have my old autofill back?

Nothing To Dig Here

I was hopped up on researching the "Hey C'mon I Gave You An Article Now Make Me An Internet Sensation" icons that appear at the bottom of so many onlinozines (Slate, Huffington Post, Salon, etc.) but I bored of the project half way through and am not pursuing that thread after all, much to the relief of one reader who said the whole idea was boring from the get-go and demanded more gummi bear art (comments lines now closed).

And I can't say much about social bookmarking or Delicious that isn't covered in the clever video How To Explain Delicious To Your Parents. If you bookmark a lot, or want to but don't because your bookmark list already stretches down your monitor, over your keyboard, onto the floor and out the back door, check out Delicious. There should be a word for the joy that comes from having organized what was once a mess. Georderlich.

Is a post only talking about what you're not going to talk about really a post? Well, here's something. Is this not the cutest logo ever? It's not actually a logo, it's more of a mascot for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They sell shirts with the little guy + cat and I'd almost shell out the $29 for one just because it's so darn cute but they don't specify whether the shirt is 100% cotton. So I'll just visit their site every day and gaze at it for my daily dose of gosh darn balls to the wall cuteness.

Hey, Favicons!

How do you get those little icons next to your URL and why don't I have one, I asked myself. Typed "little icon next URL" into Google and learned it is called a favicon and how to make one.

First: "Save your image as a 16 x 16 pixel Windows file." Huh? What is a Windows file? Platform-specific files are passé, right? Well whatever, there are sites that generate favicons on the fly. No need to know what a Windows files is.

I uploaded a GIF of Edea (image A.) to favicon.cc and it generated image B. which did not look too promising, but Edea's my girl, so we pressed on, placing the file—which must be called favicon.ico—in the root directory of my web site.

That brings us to image C.: Edea as a little icon next to my URL!

I'd have to classify this as Not-Quite-Successful. But hey, I have a favicon. You can too.

Round Corners

Love that Web 2.0 look of rounded corners but don't want to spring for PhotoShop? Here's a web tool for creating rounded corners on the fly, for free. Go to roundpic and upload your image. You can specify the corner radius and which corners you want rounded, then preview the result. Click Round It! and voila, download your newly-rounded image.

You can even specify image size, image quality and background color. And, last time I used roundpic, there was a conveniently placed google ad for getting rid of a yeast infection in one day. Talk about one stop shopping.

TOP: That's Mike with square corners. Bor-ing! MIDDLE: Mike rounded. Spiffy. BOTTOM: Mike with square and rounded. Now that's fancy.