A Blog.

In the last 2 weeks, I’ve noticed on several occasions I’ve thought I’d sent mail only to find it sitting as a “Draft” in Gmail. I began to think there was a horrible bug in Gmail and was having flashbacks to the days of figuring out why Outlook would leave mail stuck in your outbox.

Today I figured it out. It’s the scrollbars.

When you start replying to the message, assuming you scroll down a little into the body (which I seem to do often on my laptop’s screen, but less often on a desktop screen) the “send” button scrolls off. But, it’s not obvious that you’ve lost the send button, because there is still a top row of buttons. I wind up, subconsciously, clicking the “back arrow” button as the closest thing to “send” or “reply.”

If the scrollbars were the traditional browser-standard ones, it would be obvious to me that I’m in a frame that had scrolled down. For example, it’s obvious inside the message pane itself. As it stands now, I don’t even notice that a row of buttons has scrolled off of the page, since only part of the page is scrolling, and it’s doing so very subtly.

I went and saw Bob Saget’s standup last night at The Moore, and it was one of the least laugh-inducing 45 minutes I’ve ever sat through. His opening act however was fantastic – I’d definitely recommend checking out Ryan Stout, who should have a Comedy Central special coming out soon.

For those who don’t know, Bob Saget’s standup is known for being dirty and edgy – in stark contrast to his persona on America’s Funniest Home Videos and his character Danny Tanner on Full House. The problem is, although his material is marginally dirty it’s not actually edgy or interesting. He spent more time warning us about the offensive things he was about to say, and very little time saying them. He was coasting on his reputation as a screen star for the whole time, without providing the audience with any clever or original material. His act included:

1. A series of jokes about the movie Titanic. Yes, it’s 2009 and evidently that passes for topical, relevant humor. He even made a joke about how predictable the ending was. That joke was tired even before the movie was released… 13 years ago.
2. He must have thought that edgy Titanic material was quite funny, because he made callbacks to it throughout the rest of the set. It was brutal. Just as I hoped we were going to move past it, he kept bringing it up again.
3. A number of jokes he told which “his father told him as a kid” which were funny, but they weren’t his. They’re just old jokes. He repurposed them by wrapping them in a story about how young he was when his father told them to him. So, picturing a young kid hearing them was, I suppose, the originality he added.
4. A few anecdotes about “Uncle Jesse” and Dave Coulier which might have been amusing if they were bigger stars, but it’s tough to be captivated about a story about how some B-List stars got offended by Bob Saget’s zany antics.
5. His whole act was a little Robin Williams-ish, in that he was talking a mile-a-minute, and wouldn’t stay on topic. He’d start telling a joke, then it would remind him of something else, and something else, and you almost forgot what he was trying to talk about by the time he got back to it. Perhaps that was for the best, because there was no punchline to be found in any of it.
6. He made a lot of mistakes. He would mispronounce a word, and then make a joke about how that’s not a word, and laugh at himself, and we were all supposed to laugh along with him. I wouldn’t normally think this was a big deal, but I found it oddly smug. When Robert Plant sings a lyric incorrectly, that is funny. He’s a legend, and when he slips up it’s amusing because he’s so great that you know you’ve witnessed a one-off mistake from an amazing musician. However, when a guy gets up there and tells a series of boring jokes, and then screws them up, there isn’t a joke there. Laughing is like an acknowledgment that he’s earned the right to screw up, based on his prior comedic success.

Anyhow, if Bob Saget comes to town I’d recommend skipping him. But, keep your eyes peeled for Ryan Stout. His jokes are brutal and hilarious. A few drunk fans even heckled him, and his responses were scathing and well-delivered.

It has begun again! This is my friend John (Schwartz)’s entry. Check it out, and share it. He can win prizes for having the movie re-posted and watched more times than the competitors’!

It appears they’ve accepted our offer, and in the next few weeks I’ll be living here:

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http://getexceptional.codeplex.com/

This release adds the ability to use the plugin as an HTTP Module, so it will automatically report all unhandled exceptions without requiring any additional code – just one line of configuration in web.config.

I released my first CodePlex project today. It’s a plugin for .NET apps to communicate with the Rails-based Exceptional exception trapping service. The site provides a nice UI to your exceptions, allows you to see the ones that hit the most, get e-mails on them, mark them “resolved”, etc.

Rails has spun out a lot of great online tools like this, which I miss after moving to .NET. Thankfully they have a simple web-based API so it’s not too difficult to build plugins like this.

The library is currently in Alpha status, but I’ll move it to release status as soon as we begin using it live on Wishpot.

My dad is in Israel photographing the Dead Sea Scrolls. I just saw the video on CNN here. He shows up around the 2:20 mark. He’s also keeping a blog here.

And so it begins.

In the spot where Teatro Zinzanni used to be, there is a map depicting a huge, two-tower 41 story building called the Insignia Towers.

After doing a little reading on the Seattle Condos and Lofts Blog it appears development has been put on hold. This is, evidently, becoming a fairly common occurrence in the Seattle market. Similar things are happening with The Heron Pagoda (“…due to a faltering economy, poor local condo sales and lack of financing for parts of the complex…”), the Ava Condo and Hotel, and there’s evidently a standstill with the Stewart & Minor hotel and loft project.

I don’t know enough about the Seattle real estate market to know if this is common, but I found it interesting. Some of these places look like they might be quite nice. The Stadium Lofts design is particularly unique.

I recently found out about the coolest web 2.0 app to date, RRollr:

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