Thursday, September 30, 2004

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Tire Rotation: Cross-sides or not? All my owner's manuals recommend cross-rotation, but it seems like every time I ask about it when having the tires rotated, I get a spiel about "never switch the direction a tire rotates". I dunno, maybe uni-directional tires used to be common, and it is an outdated, holdover belief? 12:03:18 PM    comment []

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Microsoft Access default query design pane. It gives me only the first 5 rows of the table. 90% of the time, I immediately execute the following tedious, mouse-intensive process: 1) Drag down to expand the height of the overall window; 2) Drag down to expand the portion of the overall window heigh occupied by the view of the table; 3) Drag down to expose the rest of the fields in the table. Why can't the default do this? If there is a rationale behind this, it must have something to do with catering to a minimum common denominator that assumes people have Access displayed less-than-full-screen on a 12" monitor. This has bothered me since Access 1.0, and 6 (or so) versions later (Access 2002), it is no better. 12:00:58 PM    comment []

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Idea for Excel feature: units. Not sure exactly how it should work, but I would like Excel to be units-aware. Perhaps it could display them on mouseover. So, if I divide one number with units of foot-lbs, by another number with units of feet, it should display the result as having units of lbs. 11:52:50 AM    comment []

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The way gmail auto-completes email recipients (by parsing on the discrete elements--First Name, Last Name, address--rather than the beginning of the address string) is outstanding. It is a rare example where a thin, web-based UI outshines rich-client functionality (e.g., Outlook). 11:50:28 AM    comment []

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I wonder how MetaPass handles it if you have more than one log-on for a website? 11:46:58 AM    comment []

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Redeeming Miles More Flexible on Phone Than Web It's no secret that the airlines would prefer that frequent fliers use their web sites to do self-service booking when redeeming miles. That's my preference, too. The problem is that the NorthWest site doesn't give you as many options. What I mean is, they show a more limited number of flight pairs. For instance, one flight pair might be A-B. Another might be C-D. But what I really want is A-D. No way to pick it. However, when I call NWA, no problem, they book me for A-D. 7:24:35 AM    comment []