Looks like Google let their VI geeks loose on the Gmail product. Not only do they have the VI direction keys like “j” and “k” implemented, they’ve even implemented two-letter VI-like combinations, such as “g” “i” for “go” “inbox”.

Will this finally be the impetus for people for people to realize that the keyboard is a useful way to navigate web pages? (Today I saw a guy working on a computer who evidently didn’t know that the tab key would get him from field to field in the form he was entering.) Unfortunately, Google has implemented keyboard control with a bizarre-o Active X control, which prevents you from seeing the source of the page, scripting it, or anything else, not to mention being highly browser-specific.

From an article in the May, 2004 issue of Men’s Health:

Q. Whenever I have cash, I feel great. Then, when it’s gone, I get really down and antisocial. What’s wrong with me?

A. I’d guess you have low activity in your prefrontal cortex (PFC), the part of the brain involved with planning and judgment…

It looks like neurobiology is really invading our popular culture. What’s next?

PS. Men’s Health is actually a very reasonable magazine, worth reading.

Today on TV I heard the following:

That stuff was the guy who lived there before his.

This sounded very natural so it took me a second to figure out what was happening. The stuff belonged to the guy “who lived their before him“, and then to make that phrase possessive, it was easy enough to make the basic him to his transformation.

Gregory Raybassa is a literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese into English who I have never heard of. But I was struck by an a recent interview with him in the New York Times where he quoted Walter Benjamin, the German literary critic, as saying:

No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.

gG came to live with us on Valentine’s Day.

I’ve just obtained new Dogen translations, by Eido Shimano Roshi, of the Zen Studies Society in New York, and Charles Vacher. They’ve done Uji, Bussho, Yuibutsu Yobutsu, and Shoji.

These books are beautifully produced. Their version of “Uji” has the entire text hand-written by a 17th century monk on facing pages, and the other volumes have equally beautiful calligraphy throughout.

The translation itself, though, follows the faithful, literal approach, which has the disadvantage of resulting in English which is often unnatural and occasionally incomprehensible.

Google can do no wrong. It’s forthcoming IPO will be the most successful in history. It will completely own the search market and then mail and whatever else it tries its hand at. It’s the Microsoft of the 21st Century. Its corporate culture is an open geeknoid ideal to which we can only hope to aspire. It will create the humongous centralized personalized computing infrastructure which will set the next stage for the evolution of mankind.

I’ve never seen quite such a perfect contrarian play. Although as usual, the contrarian scenario will probably take at least several years to unfold. (Disclaimer: the writer passed up an opportunity to buy MSFT at $14 in 1988, thinking it overvalued.)

Search is going to be much more competitive than it looks. Advertisers have a limited number of dollars and are going to deploy them where they are most efficient. Meanwhile, there are already dozens and dozens of sponsored listing brokers that will be fighting tooth and nail to get their piece of the business. They’ll compete coming and going.

Mail is not as big as it looks. The privacy issue won’t go away. More basically, the Google business model for mail will fall apart when advertisers realize that people don’t want to click on ads while they’re trying to read their mail. The 1GB of storage is nothing special; Yahoo! can do that tomorrow. Searching all your mail is a very nice feature, but there are a number of other ways to do that that don’t involve keeping all you mail on one company’s servers; an interesting one is Zoe.

And the Fortune article that painted Google as basically being unmanaged chaos was probably being generous to them. Someone I know recently applied for a job there and was finally contacted five months later. Google then spent two months taking him through an opaque, unstructured interview process that eventually went nowhere. That’s no way to run a company.

Google has a lot of international revenue—but that’s just because search, when done right as they did, is pretty internationalized out of the box. The same won’t hold for any of their newer services, such as zip-code search, which will require huge effort to roll out internationally, and face much stronger local competition—and Google doesn’t even have people on the ground in some major markets.

Google will be fully-priced as of the IPO. There may be some upside as they experience good growth over the next few years, but I’d get out sometime in 2006.

Just found Magnatune, a fabulous on-line music store; or perhaps on-line publisher is a better description:

1. Nothing is DRM-encumbered.
2. Everything can be listened to.
3. Any format can be downloaded, up to and including WAV if that’s your multi-hundred-megabyte cup of tea.
4. You can choose how much to pay for an album.
5. The artist gets 50% of the purchase price.

I downloaded an album by Jeff Wahl, who plays some great acoustic new age guitar, for $8. The FLAC download was 342MB.

The New York Times reported that Alex Rodriguez’ “performance coach” is working with Alex to reduce the number of thoughts he has per day. Most people, he says, have 2-3,000 (that works out to about three per minute, in case you were wondering), whereas highly trained professional athletes get rid of negative and useless thoughts, reducing their total daily thought count down to 1,200 or so. And they hold each thought longer.

I’m sure Dogen would agree that this seems very logical so far, but I still have two questions. First, how do the athletes reduce their thought count? And second, exactly how do you define a “thought”?

A new, daring hijacking exploit was carried out on my computer—taking over my user style sheet.

The user style sheet is something used by the browser which most people haven’t ever heard of. It’s mainly an accessibility feature—you could set your own CSS styles to display everything in large type, for instance. (In IE, you set it with Tools | Internet Options… | General | Accessibility… | User style sheet.)

The devious thing about this exploit was that the user style sheet the malware stuck on my computer contained CSS property values computed using Microsoft’s proprietary expression feature for dynamically computing property values. Specifically, within an expression giving the value of some attribute for the BODY tag, it was looking up certain keywords within the META tag, and if it found them created a pop-up window which took over the entire screen!

I hear that the next release of XP has anti-malware features. It certainly seems like a no-brainer to disable the expression feature in user style sheets, to not allow pop-ups to be created from within CSS expressions anywhere, or, most basically, to not allow any changes to the user style sheet without the user’s express permission.

I guess this exploit is actually not that new. This article about it dates back to summer 2003.