8 November 2008
A while ago I signed up for the free credit monitoring service provided by freecreditreport.com. Apparently there is a 7-day free trail of a monitoring service that they sign you up to automatically, the details hidden somewhere in the small print. I haven’t been using one of my credit cards much recently, so the $14.95 charge from "CIC * TripleAdvantage" stood out. I googled for it and found a bunch of people with the same problem.
This site has some good information on how to go about cancelling. I didn’t have too many problems, but they did try pretty hard to keep me on, and when that didn’t work they offered me a free a month in the hope I’d forget to cancel again.
If you ever used this site, I’d recommend checking you’re not still paying for it unbeknownst to you.
15 September 2008
When I started at Google I joined the team working on Gmail Chat. The whole team — eng, pm, design, marketing — squatted in a conference room. It was a fun environment that often led to vibrant and animated discussions, thrashing out crazy ideas for things we should implement. Some things (like the cowbell +/’) made it in, many others didn’t. One idea that we decided was pretty bad just got granted a patent: musical emoticons.
So, its cool that I got my first patent, even if it is a moderately embarrassing one :)
15 May 2008
Mark Pilgrim’s project to document the web launched today as DocType. This is a really great resource, with topics ranging from security to cross browser DOM wrangling, and it’s only going to get better as it is completely open.
A lot of the example JS code is based on the project Erik and I started, and some is available for download from the SVN depot.
1 February 2008
I’ve finally decided to start using a photo hosting service, instead of using my own site. I do prefer the idea of keeping all my photos here, but in recent months I haven’t been able to find the time to build the features I want, such as tagging, comments, geo-coding, and uploading software.
I looked at both Google’s own PicasaWeb and Flickr. While I prefer Picasa for browsing photos I really like the over all aesthetics of Flickr, and the organizational tools. So I went with the latter and have started with my photos from Christmas in England.
