Coffee Klatch

Okay, I wasn’t going to do another one so soon, but there are some interesting birthdays and events that occurred on 28 October.

Birthdays: St. Francis Borgia (1510), Eliphalet Remington (1793), Howard Hanson (1896), Elsa Lanchester (1902), Evelyn Waugh (1903), Jonas Salk (developed vaccine for polio) (1914), Charlie Daniels (1937), Jane Alexander (1939), Dennis Franz (1944), Bruce Jenner (1949), Bill Gates (1955), Eros Ramazzotti (1963), Lauren Holly (1963), Julia Roberts (1967), Terrell Davis (1972), Joaquin Phoenix (1974).

Events:
1492 – Christopher Columbus lands in Cuba
1704 – John Locke dies
1868 – Thomas Edison applies for his first patent (the electric vote recorder)
1886 – President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty
1919 – Prohibition begins (Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto)
1922 – Mussolini marches on Rome and takes over Italian government
1950 – The Jack Benny Show premieres
1958 – Pope John XXIII elected
1962 – Cuban Missle Crisis ends
1965 – The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is completed
1970 – Land speed record set by Gary Gabelich
1996 – Morey Amsterdam dies

Today is also National Chocolate Day, Bring Your Jack-O-Lantern To Work Day, Wild Foods Day, and National Make A Difference Day. So if you didn’t get a chance to bring your Jack-O-Lantern to work with you today, be sure to eat some wild foods!

Current music: Halloween, by Mannheim Steamroller

This morning I read that Christina Goodenow, who won $1 million in the Oregon Lottery, bought the winning ticket with a “stolen credit card.” Apparently the credit card belonged to a deceased relative, her mother-in-law, who died over a year ago. Now she faces charges of theft, forgery, and possession of methamphetamine, which was found in her home when police searched it for the stolen money. If she’s convicted on any of the charges (well, maybe not the drug possession), she won’t be able to keep any of the money. Including the first $33,500 installment she already picked up, but which police have failed to locate.

Current music: Fresh Aire 8, by Mannheim Steamroller

For those of you who haven’t tried Google’s “Gmail” yet, here’s a brief overview, summarized in quaint little bullet points for your convenience.

• First, it’s “Invite Only.” You can’t just go and sign up. You have to get an invitation from someone who already has a Gmail account. If you want one, contact me and I’ll email you an invite.
• Second, there is a TON of space, so you never have to delete anything unless you really want to. As of right now, it’s 2658MB (that’s 2.6 GIGABYTES of space for your emails and attachments!), and it’s growing all the time. Literally.
• You can also SEND attachments of up to 10 MB! That’s really nice for emailing mp3s or other files that exceed the usual 2MB limit.
• You can use the Google search engine to search your mail or the Web from the one box.
• Instead of organizing your emails into folders, you can apply labels to them. A message can have more than one label and you can create filters to automatically apply labels to emails from particular sources or containing certain words. This means you don’t have to deal with folders and subfolders. You just click the name of a label to display all the emails that have that label.
• The emails in your InBox are organized in Threads or Discussions, so if several people reply to you or each other, everything’s kept together and is viewable with one click.
• Gmail also allows you to archive emails, so they’re out of the way. And you only have to click “All Mail” to see them.
• Gmail has VERY GOOD spam detection. If it thinks the message is spam, it automatically sticks it in the Spam folder, where you can check it out or just ignore it. They’re deleted after 30 days automatically, so you don’t have to worry about them if you don’t want. PLUS, Gmail can detect phishing pretty well. Example: I got one of those fake PayPal emails, wanting me to log in and update my security options of all things. It went right into my spam folder and when I viewed it, the following message was at the top in Bright Red: “Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information. Learn more.” Isn’t that awesome?
• You can now format your emails as rich text, so instead of just plain text options, you can change colors, fonts, sizes, alignments, indentations, bullets, blockquotes, etc.
• Gmail Notifier can be downloaded so you’ll be notified when you get new email even if you don’t have your Gmail webpage open. It automatically checks every two minutes and pops up snippets from the subjects for a couple of seconds.
• And of course you can also change the Reply-To address (which is awfully convenient), forward your gmail somewhere else, use signatures at the ends of your emails, keep a list of contacts (addresses and info), and save drafts to be completed later. In fact, Gmail now automatically saves drafts of the email you’re working on every couple of minutes, so you won’t lose all your work if your Internet connection is lost.

Current music: The Future Sound of Gaeldom, by various celtic artists (thanks, Topher, for referring me to this CD!)