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Well, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 Final today. It took me about 10 minutes to install it (and all of the required dependencies).

So far, I'm pretty impressed (despite the fact it locked up when I started it for the first time). They borrowed quite a few pages from Firefox with tabbed browsing, a built-in RSS reader, and a search box by the address bar. The main enhancements in the IE line are vastly improved CSS rendering and support for alpha-transparency in PNGs (both which have been a huge thorn in our sides with IE 6). They claim to have fixed all but one of the CSS bugs listed on Position is Everything.

Now if only Microsoft would port it over for other operating systems (wait! Windows isn't the only OS?) like Mac OS X, or Linux. I'm not holding my breath.

There are a million hypotheses out on message boards and fan sites trying to guess the overarching story behind Lost. They range from theories about the castaways having gone back in time to theories about them being part of a grand science experiment. Based on information that came to light this summer during the off-season, I've developed my own theory about what's going on in the Lost universe.

The numbers (4 8 15 16 23 42) have always been a hot topic among Lost aficionados. It was revealed over the summer that these numbers are, in fact, a complex equation developed by an Italian mathematician named Valenzetti. It determines the amount of time before humanity exterminates itself, either by warfare, nuclear holocaust, or pandemic disease. My theory centers around this equation.

I think that the DHARMA initiative (or whatever is left of it) came into possession the information that the person (or persons) responsible for the destruction of the human race would be on Oceanic flight 815. They somehow (I told you this was a theory) caused the flight to pass over their island, made it crash, and they are going through the remaining passengers one by one to determine who the person is.

Things that support my theory:

• In episode 1 of season 3, the DHARMA people didn't seem surprised at all to see a plane crash into their island. It appeared like they were expecting it. Ben (Henry Gale) sent Ethan and Goodwin out to pose as survivors and to bring back lists of the remaining passengers.
• Walt, who had been in their custody for several weeks, was simply released at the end of season 2. I think they determined that he wasn't responsible, so they let him go.
• The psychic told Claire that her child would be responsible for something terrible if he was raised by anyone other than her.
• Ben (Henry Gale) told Kate in episode 1 of season 3 that the next few weeks would be very uncomfortable. (interrogation)
• Jack seems to be getting psychoanalyzed/interrogated by Juliette.

Microsoft published a list of CSS fixes in IE7. They claim to have fixed every bug listed on Position is Everything except for the 'escaping floats' bug, which is planned for the future.

If these claims really are true, this could be a giant step for IE towards standards-compliant CSS.

After reading Colin's excellent post on search engine optimization, I decided that my personal blog could use a little fine-tuning to hopefully index it a little higher in search results.

Google, at least, will rank each page it indexes based on several criteria. The mains ones being the actual URL of the page, the page title, and how the content of the page relates to both. Since I built my blog using Ruby on Rails, it was easy to customize the URL based on each blog entry. If you click on the title of a post, for example "Search engine optimization", you will be taken to a URL that looks like this:

http://www.travisonrails.com/2006/09/07/Search_engine_optimization

The title of the blog post now becomes the URL of the page. This definitely helped my search ranking, but my page title remained the boring "Travis on Rails" no matter what page you were on. So, I recently decided to change the page title to reflect the title of the post as well. Thanks to Rails, in one line of code and less than five minutes time I now had page titles that echoed my post titles. So now if you go to a post titled "Search engine optimization", you'll see the URL from earlier as well as the new page title "Travis on Rails - Search engine optimization". So the title of the post will appear three times for each page: the page title, the URL, and in the content of the page. This should definitely boost each individual page's search ranking.

I got a free iPod Nano when I purchased my MacBook thanks to a back-to-school promotion by Apple. So, to recoup some of the cost of the MacBook, I put the Nano on eBay. The starting price was $149.99 with a "Buy it Now" price of $175. About two hours before the auction ended (no bids had been made) someone hit the "Buy it Now" button. I got the following cryptic email from them about an hour later:

Hello,
Good Morning to you,how is business,family and all other things, hope all are in good condition. well I'm Bonner Goldbach from CA(Sebastopol),but Presently i'm leading a trade fair program in Australia.I saw your item above at ebay(150022885893)and i will like to buy it for my grandson that study in a Computer science school in University of Lagos at Nigeria Next week as a gift,i will like to informed you first of all that i will be handling the shipment on my own risk over to Nigeria.Do not worry about the shipping of the item,i have an account with FEDEX and will be sending you my FEDEX account number for the shipment, and if you decedided in sending the item to so that you can add the shipping cost to the cost of the product you can still do it and you will have to calculate the cost over to Ikeja,Lagos state,23401 Nigeria.Moreover i would have prefer to send you a cheque but due to the fact that i want you to ship the item first thing monday morning,i will be sending you the payment vai PAYPAL,and so make sure you get the package ready for monday shipment ok And kindly send me your paypal email address,so i can direct the payment to your account right away.
Best Regards
Bonner Goldbach.

I immediately sent a reply giving him my PayPal email address and telling him that I didn't quite understand his email, but that I could only ship the iPod within the United States by USPS.

I didn't hear from him for two days, so I re-sent my PayPal email address and reminded him politely to please pay promptly. Well, finally after three more days, I got the following email from "PayPal" (pay attention to the grammar):

Pay With Pay Pal,
Pay Pal makes it easy to receive Dineen Villaruz money, to received this payment into your account,you will have to sent the shipment tracking number to our customer care department at the link below(payp.alcustomercare@consultant.com) for shipment verifications, then we can process and credit funds into your account. We are sorry for the inconveniences we might have caused you, as this is our new policy to protect both the Seller and the Buyer from fraudulent activities. And if there is any problem within you and the buyer you are to contact our customer care representative in the immediately. For more information please contact our customer care at the above link.

The terrible English and obviously falsified email address finally convinced me that this guy was just some moron trying to scam me out of a free iPod. This is the email that came right after the "PayPal" email:

Hello,
I have made out my payment to you for this item purchase (150022885893),So check your mail for the comfirmation mail from paypal.Get back to me immediately if you receive the confirmation mail from paypal and don't forget to send me your physical contact address and your phone number so that i can arranged for the shipment okay,and the exact time you will be at home tomorrow.So that i can schedule Fedex to come and pick it up from you in other to reduce the stress of you driving down to their location to send it.Then i can send you my grandson's address and fedex account number.Hope to hear from you soon.

Well, I was furious that I had to waste a week waiting for this guy, just to find out that he was trying to commit fraud. I sent a pretty heavily-worded email back to the guy telling him what I thought of him and his scam.

I guess this should serve as a lesson to other people that this might happen to. Pay close attention to everything.