Blogger Mobile

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Blogger Mobile: Blogger introduces mobile-phone-to-weblog posting. Send an MMS/email message from your cellphone to the specified email address, and Go.Blogger auto-generates a new random blogspot URL hooked to your contact information. (The URL can be changed or merged with your existing weblogs when you “claim” your number on login.) More from Blogger Buzz (with jingle), Blogger Help, Bizstone, Youngpup, and GoogleBlog. What do you think of this compared to “moblogging” via Flickr? (Crossposted to Metafilter.)

At this time, I’m still using Flickr to post from phone to weblog, but since I got my new phone, I’ve been running into minor layout issues with Flickr: issues I will detail later. Blogger Mobile could potentially help to fix these with some MT/Blogger template mashing. The question is, am I willing to spread myself that thin, posting photos between two competing services just so they display properly on one website?

For now, moBrownpau on Blogspot is my dump for mobile experimentation, holding stuff posted via the long-defunct AIM Bloggerbot, Flickr, and now Blogger Mobile.

Cassini Coolness

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I haven’t been paying much attention to NASA’s current Saturn mission, but I should be. Even after the Huygens landing, there’s still a lot of amazing science — and photography — coming out of Cassini as it swoops through Saturn’s rings and moons. Right now Cassini is starting an extensive survey of the rings, and has confirmed that the rocky moon Phoebe is closely related to Kuiper Belt Objects.

More cool photos from Cassini:

And speaking of Mars Rovers, Opportunity is set to try getting unstuck from the deep sand it’s currently bogged down in. Best of luck to the JPL rover team on that.

Dear Fedex.com:

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I just wanted to let you know that I recently found it easier to walk to the nearest staffed Fedex office, visually confirm its street address, and ask for the phone number, than it took to to use your website to find said office. The following problems were encountered in attempting to use your search form:

  1. The Find Locations page is hidden away in a slideout menu which does not work in Opera 8.
  2. In Firefox, the search form does not work. The button refuses to submit until the page is reloaded. When it finally submits on reload, the form returns a “please fill out the fields commented in red” error, while showing no comments in red. This is because the form requires at least one of the “Type of Location” checkboxes to be selected; they are prechecked in Internet Explorer, but said checkboxes are empty in Firefox, a real web browser. One wonders why you could not have just used more semantically correct radio buttons rather than checkboxes, using HTML’s “checked” attribute rather than whatever Javascript is doing that work. (I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that thing about the radio buttons, but checkboxes are perfectly semantic for this.)
  3. By the way, that search form also breaks the Enter key, forcing advanced users to suffer the tribulation of moving a hand off the keyboard to click a mouse button just to submit the form. Unacceptable!
  4. And finally, the Fedex locations search results page does not show phone numbers.

Please, Fedex, hire someone like 37 Signals or Happy Cog or something to get your site properly fixed, because right now, store-searching is a mini-disaster.

Starting Them Early

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So you’ve got your Bratz, you’ve got your Li’l Bratz, and you’ve got your Bratz Babyz. Well, if we’ve reached the “babies” stage in indoctrinating our children into this fabulous culture of vain, vapid, materialistic, sexually unsubtle consumption, then the next logical step in the product offense — and I do mean offense — should be prenatal. BRATZ FETUZZEZ: “keepin’ it real in the womb.”

(There was going to be an image here, and I was in the process of photoshopping Bratz lips and eyes onto an ultrasound screenshot of someone’s unborn baby, but then I figured that would be too tasteless to waste effort on, so I closed the file. Sorry.)

Via Lileks.

Wachovia in XHTML/CSS

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Check out Wachovia.com, latest big-time entry into the world of XHTML/CSS markup. The new front page is straightfoward, readable, and clearly structured, with headers and lists of links providing quick and clean access to the bank’s various products and services. The inside pages are still the old table-based tag soup, and the new front page doesn’t validate all the way just yet, but it’s a good start.

Do Not Cling to Me

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Stained Glass at First Baptist DC

One of many stained glass windows at First Baptist DC. I think this one depicts the woman with the discharge, who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was made well. My mistake, Rod tells me that this is “Mary and the Risen Christ,” right after the Resurrection. Jesus is depicted carrying a shovel, which causes Mary Magdalene (to whom Jesus was not married, by the way) to think he is the gardener.