Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I had the brilliant idea of compressing my 1.1 GB Thunderbird inbox today. See, it’s about 4% of my entire disk space on this Dell Inspiron 8200, and I really would like to do something else with that space. So, I just went to C:Documents and SettingsMy UserApplication DataThunderbird and compressed the whole Thunderbird folder. In Windows XP (home and pro) you can just right click the folder, go to properties, and check a “compress” box.

That done (it took half an hour, almost), I saved just over 200mb of disk space. Compressing Thunderbird using the built in filesystem feature in Windows XP makes it 18% smaller than before, for which my computer is thankful.

USAirways is quite considerate. Today in the mail I just received a $100 voucher because they lost my luggage on their Philadelphia to Ithaca route this Christmas. I got it back the next day by Taxi, but it was quite unexpected. Unfortunately, the same thing has happened again recently when I went to Stamford to conduct an interview with a company there, and I think I will have to write them again…

All the net is abuzz with Oscar talk, and someone has guessed using Google the winners. Personally, I think the Google index is both too slow to update, and far too old to effectively gauge current movie interest. Instead, I’d prefer to use something like Technorati to make my Oscar predictions.

There are a lot of ways to do this, of course–using a combination of averaged, weighted Netflix, Amazon, Google, Technorati, etc. data would be one way to go, but it’s almost as arbitrary as any one of the services, depending on how you weight them. The goal is to break each nominee into obvious clusters, for each award. So, I’ll just Technorati counts, even though perhaps I should weight them by authority.

• Best Picture goes to Ray
• Best Actor goes to Jamie Foxx for Ray
• Best Actress goes to Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby
• Best Animated Film goes to The Incredibles
• Best Foreign Film goes to The Chorus

But the Oscars are due in any minute–so lets see how I do!!

Update: Get the Oscar winners here. I was wrong on Best Picture, which went to Million Dollar Baby, and Best Foreign Film, which went to The Sea Inside. I did get the rest right, for a blogosphere prediction rate of 60%. Not bad, guys!