What a sci-fi world we’re living in, and most of us don’t even notice:

For years, scientists have tinkered with creating wires only nanometers — billionths of a meter — wide. A nanometer is to an inch what a small grape is to the whole planet.

Instead of building such wires by pouring metal down long tubes, some investigators instead are experimenting with biological materials that can arrange themselves into strings spontaneously — DNA and bacteria-killing viruses, for examples. These strands would then serve as the backbone for metal to attach onto, making wires.

Yeast protein wires supercomputers

How cool is this? I love simple ideas that make life more manageable, even in simple areas like that tangle of cables under your desk: The Cable Turtle.

It all started innocently enough. I was placing an online order. When I went to check out, I noted, dimly, that the shopping cart was powered by PayPal.

Filled out a page of info, hit submit and was told that I already had a PayPal account, and to log in. Now, I think about 2 years ago when PayPal was new, I did create an account, and never used it.

So I can’t log in. And my email address from back then is long gone. They do have a way to deal with this: give them the old email address and complete the credit card number that you signed up with.

I no longer have that credit card. So now what?

I go to the help page and fill out a form explaining the situation. What do I get in reply? An email saying I should log into my account in order to update my credit card info.

Irritated, I go through the whole order again, this time using a different telephone number. They STILL flag me as having an account. They must be using my address. Now, my name is Peter Smith. If you go to any moderately large high rise apartment building in America, you’ll probably find that over the past few years 4 different “Peter Smiths” have lived there.

OK, back to square two. The email they sent me telling my to log in and change my credit card number has the URL of a help page. I click on that, and I’m told I must be logged in to get help. In the event I can’t log in, it gives me an email address to write to.

I explain my experience in an email and send it to the specified email address. And what happens? I get an auto-response saying that they don’t accept email at that address and that all correspondence should go to through the web site, and they include 2 links, one to the page I can’t go to because I’m not logged in, and one to the page that I started out on.

No where can I find a phone number or a person to talk to. All the choices on the help form are going to get me autoresponses. I’m totally fucked. My only resort is to contact the vendor and ask them if I can phone in an order….

PayPal… you totally SUCK.

Oh, and while we’re talking tech, I should do my part to pass the word that Mozilla 1.0 is finally out.

Here’s a little hack that’ll enable Quartz’ font smoothing technology for all Carbon apps under Mac OS X. You’ll need 10.1.5 to run it.

Here’s a neat page for web page builders who use Mozilla or Netscape 6. Add CSS2 and HTML4.01 references to your Sidebar. Handy stuff!

Well, I got rid of Blogger and switched over to B2. So far, I’m liking it a lot better. Setup was pretty easy… I started at about 7 tonight and installed it on my TiBook, tested it, broke to commute home and eat dinner, and installed it here, and its only 11:30.

Please forgive some general sloppiness as I do have to tweak the templates and so forth, but at least now there’s a place for comments and I don’t have to deal with Blogger’s primetime slowdowns.

Coupla links about blogs, since I’m still in deep research mode:
=>technical: The Weblog Tool Roundup from Joshua Allen at Webmonkey
=>cultural: Weblogs: A History and Perspective by Rebecca Blood (referenced in the Webmonkey piece). If you read this, stick it out to the second half, where Ms. Blood makes some nifty observations on the benefits of blogging.

Spent the evening doing some research on various blogging packages. Having trouble hitting the sweet spot between feature-starved and feature-bloated (for a personal site). I got Geeklog running without too much trouble, but its totally overkill for a one-man show like this. Found some very simple little tools, but many don’t include comments, which I’d like to have.
Worth noting is b2 which looks pretty sweet. It still may be too much for me though. I still might install it, just for grins.
As of now, plan is to build a link tool for TOH (the Other Half) to use on her Blogger site. After that I’ll see what I feel like doing.

In other news… well, there is no other news. Been doing this stuff all day. Hope to get back to Dungeon Siege editing and playing Morrowind tomorrow.

Today is my first experience with using Blogger during prime time, and I have to say its pretty horrific (very slow to load). Also, the posting tool sometimes doesn’t work in Mozilla, at least under Mac OSX. So I’m back to considering using some other service, or some local tool. I don’t mean this as a knock against Blogger… I think its a very cool service. Just possibly not for me.
I’ve heard good things about Geeklog so I’m going to install it on my TiBook and see how things go. If anyone reading this has had any experience with Geeklog, please drop me a line. psmith at this domain works as an email addy.

Even if I stay with Blogger, I need some more functionality. Quick project list:

• Comments
• Link Maintainence Tool
• Project List & Tools to maintain that

On the one hand, building this stuff could be kindof fun and I’d get some semi-serious experience with PHP and MySQL (I work in a StoryServer/Oracle environment by day… pity me). On the other hand, there’re a lot of other projects swimming around in my head. Lack of time is such a burden… I feel it crushing me everytime I stop to think.