I am not sure if you are keeping up with American Idol or not but some of the people they are getting this year are the worst I have ever seen on the show.  Last night the final person from NYC knew they could not sing at all and knew that they were tone deaf.  She decided to go to the show because people would make fun of her when she would sing.

At the end she was pretty much begging for the judges to take her on and “teach” her everything she needed to know so that she could be the next American Idol….  WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?  Did she seriously think they would say sure we can do that…

There was one girl however who could sing but the judges would not give her a chance.  She was previously on the show and went to Hollywood and was cut.  She has taken all of the judges criticism to heart and tried to improve on everything they have told her in the past.  I am not sure why they would not give her another chance, she was good.  I am not saying she would go all the way because there is not a doubt in my mind that she would be cut before the final show.  She was trying so hard during the audition and begging for them to give her another shot, although she failed at getting another shot I think she will go far with her career.

Now the judges would not give the girl who was cut another chance, but the guy who willingly quit last year came in and got another chance.  Yes he does have a great voice, but why would they give him another chance when he gave up and not give the girl who was really trying another chance?

About 6 months ago I made the switch to the Mac platform.  The one thing that really bothered me was how the Mac handled the Home and End keys.  They did not seem to work as expected coming from a Windows platform.  I had tried searching for a solution and even asked some OS X guru’s on IRC.  However I was unable to come up with anything.

Today on the NY PHP Mailing List there was a thread about the Mac and how they should setup the development environment.  This seemed to quickly go way off topic and start talking about the must have apps for the Mac.  Rob Marscher from Affinitive LLC piped in and started telling us how he works with Linux machines at work and then has Mac’s at home.  He had always hated the way the Home and End keys have functioned as well.   Rob posted this link that shows how to re-map your Home and End keys to work as they do on a Windows machine.

On the page I started to read the comments and I found the application called DoubleCommand.  This is a very easy to install preference pane that allows you to customize quite a bit more than just the Home and End keys.  You can also save the settings for the System or only the current user.

DoubleCommand is another MUST HAVE utility for anyone coming to the Mac platform from the Windows environment.

Today i was browsing the web and I came accross GeekSuit.  On their website they have a php script that will connect to a pop email box and import the emails into an MySQL database.  The script comes with a rather nice GUI.  I could see someone using this script to setup a free web based email service.  People would register for the site and this script would run on a cron job to monitor a catch all email box.

When the script runs it would check the to email address and see if it matches any of the current members, if it does it would do the import.  If free email services were not popping up all over the net this would be a great addition to the world wide web.  However they are just about everywhere and some such as GMail even offer close to 3GB of storage space.

One web based email application that seems to get great reviews is HiveMail.  You can theme it just like you would vBulleting (popular forum application) and you can even integrate the 2 applications.  While HiveMail is not free there are several open source solutions for web based email as well.  SquirrelMail, Horde, many more.