Kudos to local teen scientist

So, I fire up Slashdot, and the latest post points to a Kitchener-Waterloo Record article about a teenager from Waterloo Collegiate Institute whose winning science fair project was developing microbes that eat plastic shopping bags. Kudos to Daniel Burd!

And as far as I know, this is the first time that therecord.com ever got slashdotted.

Another bogus late fee from Bell Expressvu

Am I the only one getting gouged by Bell Expressvu every month? Or does your Bell Expressvu bill have a "Late Payment Fee Unregulated" entry too?

My bill dated May 12, 2008 has a $0.31 charge for "Late Payment Fee Unregulated". Last month, I was charged $1.03. These charges are completely bogus, since I always pay my bill as soon as it arrives.

If they're getting an extra $0.31 to $1.03 out of everyone each month, then that's a lot of cake.

chokechain.com

What should I do with the domain chokechain.com?

Look at it the way it appears today: http://chokechain.com

And at the archived version from 4 years ago: http://web.archive.org/web/20040403173742/www.chokechain.com/

I used to do a radio show called Choke Chain, and always planned to do something related to music with chokechain.com, but never got around to it.

Meh.

Google == Internet

My account with my ISP, site5.com is going to expire in a few months, and I'm going to let it. I just spent the morning setting up Google Apps to host my email. And now I've moved my blog to Blogger.

It started with Gmail. Not only was it a handy web application, it was actually superior to a lot of traditional email clients due to the way it showed a series of emails as a conversation. Instead of scrolling to the bottom of an email message, and reading backwards, ignoring all those > signs, you could start at the top and read normally.

But the clincher is Apple's fault. I pre-ordered an iPod Touch last fall, and soon after I got it I was hooked. Partly because it was so slick, and partly because I configured it to connect to my Gmail account via IMAP, then configured my Gmail account to collect several other email accounts.

That means that checking all my email accounts is as easy as firing up the mail client on my iPod Touch. And due to IMAP, if I file or delete an email on my iPod, the next time I look at email on my MacBook, it's already filed or deleted, without me having to tediously handle it again.

In my next post, I'm going to have even more to say about Apple, Google, iPods/iPhones and the internet.