Daily Randoms. Car getting ready for Burning Man, book Harald, book Makers, and sites that dont use
I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Kirkland, while my car gets its 60K service, plus Burning Man prep, plus getting a trailer hitch installed (also for Burning Man). It's going to take all day. Fortunately, this Starbucks isn't too noisy, has good wi-fi, and the seats are comfy.
David Friedman's novel Harald just came out as a free ebook. I love how the Baen Free Library has "send to my kindle" as a pushbutton option.
Also, I've been reading Cory Doctorow's Makers, serialized over on Tor Books blog here. I've never really gotten drawn in into any of Cory's previous novels (stalled out on both Down and Out and Little Brother), but this one is working for me.
I'm annoyed that neither Last.fm or Pandora do Portable Contacts / Google Contacts / Facebook Connect / etc for "find your friends". It's only a very very mild annoyance, since I don't actually use Last.fm much, but it sent me an email today, which reminded me that I had an account there. But if you care to link up to me there, I'm at http://www.last.fm/user/PegasusFallen and on Pandora at http://www.pandora.com/people/me22893
A related annoyance is that MySpace's "find my friends" still uses the "3rd party password" anti-pattern when pulling from Google Contacts, instead of using PoCo. IMO, Google and Yahoo should start blacklisting the IPs of the sites that still do that, just to kick them over to using PoCo, and stop teaching people that it's okay to give every site that asks for it their webmail password.
Speaking of which, I showed a friend of mine today that webmail is not as apparently anonymous as some people think. All the big webmail services insert a Received header that contains the IP address of the browser the email was sent from.