"We are just destined to be really, really good friends who only hang out when I don't have a boyfriend, but still need male attention to boost my fragile and all-consuming ego."
- Ana
from Bookmarklet
"Don't worry. You're so funny and smart and amazing, any girl but me would be lucky to date you. You'll find someone, I know it. And when you do, I'll be right by your side to suddenly become all flirty and affectionate with you in front of her, until she grows jealous and won't believe it when you say we're just friends. But when she dumps you, that's just what we'll be."
- Dan Hsiao
The conclusion of this article finds the Onion in top form.
- Andrew C
translation: I am not into you like that. You don't do it for me in that way. Never did. never will. Sorry, but only sort of...
- Morgan Haley
The "my mom says hi" part is a nice way to twist the knife a bit.
- Brian Chang
Exchange is SO STUPID. Just because I decline a meeting doesn't mean that I never want to see it again, be aware that it's still happening, or want to waive the ability to change my mind. If I have a meeting conflict and have to decline a meeting, then a few days later the other meeting changes or is canceled, I have *no idea* that the first meeting (that I can now happily attend) exists!
- Kevin Fox
I think you've just explained why it's so hard sometimes to get people to RSVP meeting invitations: they want to make sure they absolutely can or can't attend before sending the RSVP to Exchange/Outlook's black hole.
- Mark Trapp
The lack of centralization for an organization is what really kills me. Newer users move their copy of the meeting without realizing there's no notification to the owner, and no warning that you shouldn't do that. Or for all users, the owner changes the meeting but neglects to send out the update (or the update fails to arrive for all users) and then half the attendees don't know why the other half isn't in attendance.
- Stephen Mack
Also, there are three options: Accept, Decline and (depending on the context you're looking at the event) 'Maybe' or 'Tentative', which mean very different things ('uncertain' vs 'yes, without confidence').
- Kevin Fox
We use Exchange here at EMI too, and it's just unbelievably bad. I'm scared to know how much collective productivity is lost due to these sorts of issues.
- Eric Case
I don't decline meetings anymore because of this. The only state I use is Accept or nothing at all. It's even worse as a remote employee not being able to see what is going on
- Benjamin Golub
The same here Benjamin. I have another gripe - for the programs I run I often took quick notes in the meeting calendar. If a meeting is rescheduled, it not only removes future instances of the meeting, but everything in the past as well. The logic behind this functionality defies reason.
- jcunwired
isn't there an option to display 'declined' meetings like iCal?
- kartik vaithyanathan
What's the difference between 'accept tentatively' and just taking no action?
- Kevin Fox
Kartik, all my searching says 'no'. It's been suggested to me that I write a script that regularly looks in my 'trash' folder and forwards any events in there to a new 'declined events' calendar, but that just makes me ill.
- Kevin Fox
Kevin, I don't think this is even possible if you're on a server connection.
- jcunwired
That's freaking hilarious. I have to admit to enjoying it when someone who definitely knows what they're talking about it rips into an uninformed blogger, no matter who said blogger may be. Baseless claims and innuendo are some tiresome.
- Joel Webber
McClure could really use some more colours, font sizes, and swear words if he really wants to be persuasive.
- Andrew C
"What does product liberation look like? Said simply, a liberated product is one which has built-in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you'd like to take it elsewhere."
- Matt Cutts
from Bookmarklet
The answer for GMail is pretty weak. Allowing POP/IMAP for realtime access is totally different then allowing backups. Anyone who's tried to setup GMail backup via POP knows what I'm talking about. It ain't easy, especially given the way they limit POP access.
- Steve "Daddy do it!" Lacy
Steve, I actually thought the backup was quite nice: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog... . That said, I would love if there was a way to click a button and download your email in a tarball or zip easily. Or maybe pay $5 and get a DVD with your email snail-mailed to you. :)
- Matt Cutts
wonder what the Open Data folks think about this new venture from teh Goog
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
more choices 2 choose from & more 2 think about wow
- polou/indigo_bow
"While the Earth-bound internet uses a protocol called TCP/IP to allow distant machines to communicate over cables, the ISS payload uses delay-tolerant networking (DTN) ... commanding each node in the network to store information until it can find another node that can receive it. Data is relayed in a chain and should only need to be transmitted once."
- Tom Stocky
One more thing: All of our iframe embeds (including search) support a css=URL parameter to enable custom style. We haven't documented it yet, but see http://friendfeed.com/buildin... for an example and howto, and http://www.building43.com/ to see it live.
I was wondering how they did that! Thanks
- Frankie Warren
But how do I customize the title so it's not the long search string?
- Jesse Stay
We're going to fix that very soon Jesse.
- Paul Buchheit
Could that (improper instancing of by louisgray.com) be the cause of http://ff.im/4J6lp ?
- ianf ⌘
Thanks Paul - that will make me feel much better about keeping it there. :-) I've got some huge community improvements coming soon that I'm hoping to integrate FriendFeed with.
- Jesse Stay
I may be missing the howto, but developed my own way awhile back using object tag, and placed in a drupal block.
- LPH™ and his dog P™
from BuddyFeed
Paul, first tried to embed in the post, but did not work out. Then I embedded the search in a sidebar widget, that worked: http://www.amsterdam20.nl - any tips how to make the embedding working in a regular WP 2.8 post? Or is this not possible b/c it is an iframe? TIA!
- Jeroen De Miranda
Is there any chance of losing the scroll bar? I know you can manually increase the height but would really like this frame to automatically grow on my site. Or is this technically impossible atm? Either way, a very cool feature. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Paul.. thanks for the "undocumented update".. it's nice to have such open access to what's happening at FriendFeed. I'm used to the "Wall of Silence" from Google and THAT gets old and extremely frustrating fast.
- Chris Myles
Cool. I just discovered the embed flag yesterday. I like loading the feeds in the firefox sidebar.
- Peter Warnock
Kol, I think you are a little out of luck.. since an Iframe is just a "window" to another URL, the main page needs to define the size. Without it the browser would need to load every iframe page just to determine how to render the main one. However It would be nice to have an embedded option that allows the "N more comments" concept (more details here http://ff.im/4fGzH), it takes up...
more...
- Chris Myles
Chris, so the iframe is not the way forward? What alternatives could achieve this? I don't mind putting in some code to embed my FF posts properly (with a frame).
- Kol Tregaskes
Kol, I'm not sure where you got the impression I don't think Iframes are the way forward, I was addressing your issue of "losing the scrollbar". An Iframe is the only way to get "real time" updates.. you could always roll your own javascript, ff API , DOM based utility but it would only get you the content at the time of the API call. If the FF team thought http://ff.im/4fGzH was a good...
more...
- Chris Myles
So there is no other way to get real-time updates without an iframe? Once we can get rid of the scrollbar then I can use it on my site.
- Kol Tregaskes
FF can only update pages they own! BTW in its current form I think the benefits of an embedded FF post (or group etc) far outweigh any minor side effects of a scrollbar. I'd love to use friendfeed as my entire blog commenting system, I'm just waiting for a couple of things (http://ff.im/3TfED) to automate the process.
- Chris Myles
We would love to embed a private room on internal Deki Wiki. The last time I tried it still had the sidebar. I will try again to see if you have made it possible to do this.
- Christian Burns
from iPhone
The minute I decided to embed FF into my blog!
- Burcu Dogan
Does this also include individual post embeds (via share)?.. I can't seem to get those to work!
- Chris Myles
the building43 stuff is great. they did a good job explaining and such. used it for my lifestream on my blog.
- (jeff)isageek
Paul baucheit and the rest of the friendfeed team. You are implementing a lot of cool features lately.
- alfred westerveld
Using this technique on http://waded.org now, instead of Evan Sims' FriendFeed WordPress widget. I like some things about the css=URL approach better, and some things not so much. (Anyone, is there a technique to control # of entries displayed?)
- Wade Dorrell
"We realize that after five years, this leaves some of you wrestling with some tough questions. How will you ever get used to using Gmail without that familiar grey "BETA" text greeting you when you log in everyday? What example will you cite the next time you make an internet joke about perpetual betas? Don't despair... Just go to Settings, click on Labs, turn on "Back to Beta," and it'll be like Gmail never left beta at all."
- Keith Coleman
from Bookmarklet
"Twitter, Facebook and cell phones didn't create this desire or problem. I've known people all my life who turned the television on as soon as they woke up in the morning and left it on until they went to bed at night, just to insure there was never complete silence in the house. All that the new connectivity, on-line virtual game options, and instant messaging do is make it easier to avoid the awful specter of silent, alone time. And yet ... just try to imagine Henry David Thoreau writing his masterpiece about Walden Pond while twittering, texting, and watching CNN. ... And yet ... there's a unique kind of strength that comes from simply sitting in companionship with yourself and listening for what your heart or the world might tell you. Or allowing thoughts or events to percolate slowly against counter-thoughts, opinions, or trends. My best ideas don't occur to me when I'm feverishly involved in churning out words. They come when I give my mind permission to listen instead of talk. To just be for a while. Undistracted. Undisturbed. And sometimes not even consciously focused on the problem at hand. "
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Sometimes a person can be so lonely and sad, and silence only magnifies the thing that's so hard to face - you are alone. Turning on the TV is a temporary respite from this burden and safer than alcohol or sleeping pills.
- Daisy
In my experience, the best ideas come when I'm in the shower. (And never a pen and paper around.)
- Peter
I push one high-frequency poster from my home feed into the void, and up bubbles this wonderful little piece which for 11 hours lived somewhere in limbo beyond the margin of the page. Wonders! That said, remember where you've read it first: "in the future the most luxurious commodity will be the silence." Silence as in "silent as a dead brick," not "silent in general." You've read it »HERE«.
- ianf ⌘
I swam the length of Walden Pond yesterday in silence, and, yes, it was a much more satisfying experience than participating in social media, and one more conducive to creative thinking.
- Sean McBride
Hm, I do have Walden here at my computer as audiobook. Maybe I should change FF some time for the 'silence' of Thoreau...
- Ton Zijp
I ran off to the wilderness with a satchel of books. It worked for two months and then I longed for the spontaneous collaboration that FF is trying to optimize. Will a mobile device/cloud network revolution now allow me to leave Silicon Valley and head back to the woods? Not permanently, life is about balance.
- Lane Rapp
Being alone is overrated. I like to watch TV with the sound off to give my eyes something to look at while I'm thinking.
- Gabe
It was the oddest thing ever! I went over and picked it up and it was labeled with flower names. Took it to the shop owner and she said "Oh, that's a needlepoint pattern disk, one of my kids was playing with it". RANDOM.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
wow. my dad still has a huge collection of those with data on them. He has at least switched to using CD-Rs now, but the archives are still there. I have about 20 blank ones I kept in case of an emergency but got rid of the rest.
- xero
Could be anything. Need a higher-res (or closer-up) photo. You don't have to store images on floppies anymore, remember? (Or, maybe it's a iPhone Nano dressed up to look like a floppy.)
- Wade Dorrell
I had windows xp instruct me to insert the disk utility floppy disk the other day when I was trying to save a computer at work. Yea, no floppy drive.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
Wade =P I know it was a floppy because I went and picked it up. And this is as good as my G1 pics get when it comes to floppies that are 10 feet away =D
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
That's basically the conversation Dave and I had once we'd returned the disk: how long has it been since we've had a computer with a floppy drive? I think my Frankenstein'd server has one, but other than that the last desktop floppy we've had was on a box from around 2000.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Since when women have been interested in floppies? ;)
- Jemm
We are now down to one computer with floppy drives (both 5.25" and 3.5"). We have a lot of data on floppies and zip discs, but rarely need to access it. It's just in case.
- Admiral Anika
Reminds me of the "cool printer" my kids saw in a store a couple of years ago. It had keys with each letter of the alphabet on it and as soon as you pressed one of the keys, the letter printed on a piece of paper. They thought it was one of the coolest things they'd seen.
- Kenton
They hear me roll'n sector by sector, they hate'n
- Micah Wittman
from twhirl
An old '01 Dell of mine which I used until '04 had a floppy drive. I doubt the drive was used more than a half dozen times though. Last time I can remember actively using them for anything but coasters is to store clip art and play DOS games like The Oregon Trail and Commander Keen in the early 90's.
- Tom Harrison
I can honestly say I have used one in the last two months. Someone had a piece of software that they needed installed. I found a pc in the office and put the contents of the old floppy on a usb stick. It all felt too strange. That place has more than one 8 year old server running mission critical apps, too.
- Tim Wright
I can't even recall the last floppy drive that existed in my house. I did find a floppy in the bottom of a box in my closet not too long ago and I thought about having it bronzed and mounted for displaying on my knick knack shelf. :)
- tinypants - Hagitha of FF
are you sure that your flux capacitor didn't send you to 1989? maybe it needs some adjustment?
- Neil Bernhart
I keep one as a backup for sentimental reasons.
- JSNFLMNG
I've got a stack of floppies somewhere. They have my old saved Space Quest, Kings Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry saved games on them.
- Pete Delucchi
from fftogo
@Pete I had all those games. they were awesome. I was a big Sierra fan back in the day.
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
Sierra and Dynamix both, Jason. Oh, the days of installing Outpost 2 with its dozen plus floppies...joy!
- Pete Delucchi
Dude, if Oregon Trail had been written on the front of this disk I wouldn't have even turned it in. That bad boy would've been slipped in my pocket with a quickness!
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
but then you would have likely died of dysentery. man I always died of dysentery in that damn game .
- mikepk
or snakebite. half the people in my wagons always died of snakebite.
- Jessie
2019: CD-ROM? What's that? Just a little something that made everyone despise AOL. AOL? AOL was like Myspace before there was the internets. Myspace? Myspace was like a decomposing Facebook that's been left it in a landfill for 10 years. Oh, that's that smell? No, that smell is Facebook. 10 years of crap will do that.
- ·[▪_▪]·
we use it! in my office when they want to send information to bank, they use Floppy disk and they always have at least 1 packages with 10!
- خیزران Never Changed
An old lady came into work the other day and pulled a floppy out of her purse. (I work in a Walgreens photo dept.) I didn't say a word other than "ooh, no" with a nose wrinkle and a shake of the head.
- ::Kristen::
@kristen did you have to put on gloves and get out the tongs??? :)
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
Which reminds me, i have a sister in law that works at khols. They now accept any returns as long as it's something they sell. A guy came into the store she works at to return three week old used underwear. she didn't even pull them out of the bag.
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
You might be surprised to know what important things still require 3.5 inch diskettes. You know them big tubes you hurdle through the sky on, many still use them. Updating a working system doesn't make cost sense.
- Steve C
Tina: OH! Yeah, that girl. She's freakin everywhere.
- Matthew DeVries
our library sells floppies for 50 cents a piece. and people still buy them. and use them. go figure. o.O
- Miriella
they make for good boot discs in some cases
- Logan Lindquist
I think we need a room called RandomRoom, any takers?? :)
- Jason
@Jason I think another name for FriendFeed is RandomRoom
- Steve C
i actually have a usb-powered floppy drive...
- edythe
Grumbling over semi-random nature of URL canonicalization and the generally poor state of search engine friendly URLs. But otherwise chugging right along.
- DeWitt Clinton
All of you, specifically. (Or is that "each of you, specifically"?)
- DeWitt Clinton
English is my 4th language DeWitt, so that can't be about "me" :) Come on! give us more hints!
- directeur
@directeur - if you please, I need a name that isn't taken already. Two words, separated with a hyphen. Something that means something like "search me." ASCII only -- accented characters not permitted, unfortunately.
- DeWitt Clinton
I've got one for you. Do you want me to post it here or email it?
- Michael R. Bernstein
Here is perfect. No secrets between me and my closest friends.
- DeWitt Clinton
ego-look? ego-search? ego-ego? :) And I will ego-kill you if you're working on the idea I got in mind :p
- directeur
*twiddles thumbs and toes waiting for the results*
- imabonehead
Whoops, fell asleep while going off on a tangent trying to better grok grid layouts. I'll hit publish on this when I get into the office this morning.
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt, ever heard of the japanese king killed by his servants? :)
- directeur
I'll ponder that on my drive. But now that you mention it, I think I'll take a different and unexpected route this morning.
- DeWitt Clinton
First time I heard that voice in the hallways, I was so confused. I couldn't tell what was going on. Was it an alert? Was someone's dog making a weird noise? Oh man, there are some aspects of Google that I will always miss and this is right up there.
- Christopher Sacca
i wish i could fav this more than once. :) this is the greatest thing that has ever been.
- Jenna Bilotta
This is so clearly a ploy to flush out all the Googlers on FriendFeed. :)
- Matt Cutts
I wonder if other teams at Google had as much fun as the Blogger team in imitating Craig's distinctive yet, Muppet-like alert. It got to the point where just the single word imitation would have us in stitches. Good times.
- Jason Shellen
I remember the first time I heard Craig's bread-call my first thought was "who's Brad?"
- Laurence Gonsalves