Day: July 30, 2008

I stumbled upon this blog entry about interesting things you can do with your email address over at Gmail.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html

Let’s say you have a Gmail account listed as [email protected]

Technically, Gmail, doesn’t look at the period in the beginning portion of an email so you can send different permutations of this:

Mikesmithers
M.ike.s.m.ithers
Mikesmithers.

Another cooler feature is the fact that you can append a bit of text to your email address such as:

[email protected]

Which would still go to your own email account but you could use these tags for your own use.  For example, in the above example, I could use this email address for any online banking related sites I go to so when I get an email in my inbox, I can always filter out any related to [email protected] and voila!  All my bank related emails are there for my reading.  I guess you can also sent emails directly to a folder if you wanted to.  Either way, a neat trick.

I came across the word ‘foolscap’ today and realized that all these years, I thought the long piece of paper was actually called ‘fullscap’.

Wondering where the word ‘foolscap’ came from, I took at look at our favourite Wikipedia site and found the following:

Foolscap was named after the fool’s cap and bells watermark commonly used from the fifteenth century onwards on paper measuring 17 × 13½ inches (432 × 343 mm) or a subdivision of this into halves, quarters and so on. The earliest example of such paper that is firmly dated was made in Germany in 1479.

Unsubstantiated anecdotes suggest that this watermark was introduced to England in 1580 by Sir John Spielmann, a German who established a papermill at Dartford, Kent. Apocryphally, the Rump Parliament substituted a fool’s cap for the royal arms as a watermark on the paper used for the journals of parliament.

I find myself wanting to spend more and more time with Vero so when Philipp’s flight got canceled yesterday and subsequently left me with my car parked at Vero’s after work, I decided to stick around her place for dinner.  Vero usually gets home around 4:30 so I only had a half-hour wait.

I did decide to take a nap but lo and behold, I woke up around 6PM with no Vero around!  What the heck?  She must have been working overtime again!  I decided to leave and grab some St-Hubert on the way home but a few minutes into my dinner Vero calls and tells me she got out a little late and went to the grocery store.  Ah well.

After dinner I decided to tackle the challenge of cleaning the garage.  It has been looming over my head for many a month so I didn’t know how to approach it.  I don’t know what your cleaning methods are like, but I like to start on one end, throw all the excess junk out of it and have it a giant heap at the other end of the area I’m working in.  So by the time Mike came in to help, the front of the garage seemed decent enough and the back of the garage looked like a bomb went off.

We were done cleaning by the time Vero arrived and we went to Canadian Tire so I could buy a push broom.  Lucky for me that push brooms were 50% off this week and I managed to snag one for $12!  Case in point -> If you don’t need something RIGHT AWAY (I’ve gone many a year without a push broom) then it doesn’t make sense to buy one at regular price.  Eventually it will go on sale.

Heading home, we watched a few episodes of Veronica Mars and then headed to bed.  Tonight’s challenge – Clean the bedroom as the parents are coming up on Friday and will be staying there.  Why are the parents up?  Well, we are heading out on Saturday morning to go to Gaspe for the week for the Patterson family reunion.  That should be fun times although I keep hearing of more and more cousins dropping off the trip.  What used to be me seeing some cousins I haven’t seen in awhile has turned out to be me and the old folk.  I jest, there will be a few young folk there and really, I have become one of the old folk as well.