zefrank's Red Alert

It's been ages since I visited that insanely creative website www.zefrank.com. Stopped by today and noticed there's a new short film, "Red Alert". I had no idea what it was at first but found it pretty funny. Sort of Robert Smigel meets Denounce Newswire:

Wingdings and U.S. Presidents

I was working on something in Photoshop today and by accident I selected the wrong font for some text. The font? Wingdings, a font containing symbols and icons instead of alphabetic chars.

It suddenly occurred to me that it would be interesting to see what the initials of all presidents since FDR looked like in Wingdings. And what, if John F. Kerry were to win, his would look like too (same as Kennedy's, alas). And without further comment, I give you the Wingdings interpretation of the Presidents of the United States of America:

Why Would I Use GMail? I Can't Think of a Reason.

Google says this about GMail:

• Search, don't sort.
  Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.

  My Response: Eudora does this fine. Search OR sort. My choice.

• Don't throw anything away.
  1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.

  My response: I save everything that's not spam. I have tens of thousands of emails going back years and years. It's all instantly searchable. It works great.

• Keep it all in context. Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation.

  My response: I've been advocating email as conversations for years. Glad to see this meme coming to the forefront. However, this is not enough to get me to use Gmail.

• No pop-up ads. No banners.
  You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest.

  My response: I get this now with my paid Eudora. No AdWords text ads, no popups, no HTML. Email simply is useless in a web browser except when you're on the road, or at a conference using non-secure WiFi and you need to check your mail through an https connection. I just don't care.

In fact, the only reason I will use Gmail is to keep an eye on it as a technology product. I've no interest from a user standpoint. Gmail will be the new Hotmail. Big whoop.