canspice.org

Paparazzi! is one of those applications that does one thing and does it well. In Paparazzi!’s case, that one thing is take screenshots of websites. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it works wonders. Here, take a look at a screenshot of a redesign that’s in the works. Five seconds is all that took, and I didn’t need to fire up a browser or worry about what stupid three-key combination I need to press to get a screenshot (for the record, it’s command-shift-3). Just enter the URL, hit ‘Capture!’, and bam, there’s your screenshot.

Paparazzi! is free, which is a nice thing to see in little OS X applications like this (too many authors charge $10 for something that should be free).

Paparazzi! gets four and a half command-shift-3’s out of five. Why not five out of five? Because of the silly Yahoo!-esque name.

I’m a recent sign-up to del.icio.us, the social bookmark website. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s essentially public bookmarking. If you see a website that you might want to visit later, you bookmark it on del.icio.us for later viewing. You can also tag a bookmark with one or more keywords that describe the website, which will help you find it later on. For example, I recently bookmarked a story about Fernando Alonso and his strange posing after winning the Bahrain Grand Prix. I tagged it with the “f1″ and “fernando-alonso” keywords.

I can also see who else has bookmarked any sites that I have and which tags they’ve given them. For the Alonso story, doctorvee also bookmarked it, and he tagged it with the “fernando-alonso”, “bahrain-grand-prix”, “spain”, and “bullfighting” tags.

Tagging allows you to discover websites based on specific subjects. Again using my example, if I want to find all the bookmarks people have tagged with the “f1″ tag, I can.

You may have already noticed a limitation to tagging: spaces aren’t allowed, at least not on del.icio.us. While they are on other websites that use tagging (like last.fm), tags on del.icio.us cannot have spaces in them. This leads to three different strategies for multi-word tags:

1. underscore - put an underscore where the space would be. Using my example, I should have used “fernando_alonso” as my tag.
2. mashup - remove the spaces altogether. Using my example, I should have used “fernandoalonso”.
3. hyphen - put a hyphen where the space would be. This is the one I used for “fernando-alonso”.

Each strategy has its pros and its cons. The underscore moves the intervening character to the bottom of the tag, so your eye should gloss over it. The hyphen is marginally easier to type than the underscore and is the same width as the space. You don’t even have to type anything for the mashup. However, the underscore is wider than a space, and the mashup just mashes all the words together so you can’t read things as easily (and it’s likely to cause confusion, as in the “penismightier” comedy option).

I propose that hyphens be used to separate words in del.icio.us multi-word tags. In the interest of being able to harmonize tags on del.icio.us, I urge other del.icio.us users to do the same.

Get ready for the 2006 Grand Prix!

We have received your order and we’re glad to have you as a Grand Prix of
Canada customer.

Item: programme
Description: PROGRAMME OFFICIEL 2006
1 @ $10.00 = $10.00

Item: 12
Description: 3 DAYS
2 @ $360.00 = $720.00

SUBTOTAL = $730
Per ticket service charge: 2 @ $5.50 = $11.00
Shipping and handling: $5.00
TOTAL = $746

Race tickets have been bought, hotel room has been reserved. All that’s left is the plane tickets and we’re three for three for the 2006 Canadian Grand Prix!

BC Ferries’ “Queen of the North” sinks off coast of British Columbia. No deaths, only a couple of minor injuries.

The big vacation has begun. True, we haven’t left Hawaii yet, but I made the first steps today: transferred some money out of our ING Direct vacation savings account today to buy things like plane tickets and reserve hotel rooms.

So where are we going? Montreal, Quebec, Canada. We’re going specifically for the 2006 Canadian Grand Prix, which happens on the 25th of June. Coincidentally, that’s also Alice’s 25th birthday. A happy little coincidence. And I happen to have enough Aeroplan points to get to Montreal for free from Hawaii. It’s nice when things fall into place like that.

Of course, I’ve discovered that Montreal’s pretty much booked solid for hotel rooms on race weekend (Tim can start his “I told you so” again now). I’ve got a couple of leads, but one of the hotels doesn’t get terribly good reviews. Still, we’re not going to spend much time in a hotel room…