Intelligent people solve their problems by understanding existing solutions to similar problems and selecting the most appropriate route. Gifted people work to fully understand existing solutions and elect to extend or replace them with well-considered alternatives. Geniuses traverse both paths: they leverage their comprehensive understanding of best practices and extend them clearly and harmoniously in a way that others can understand.

Everyone else approaches problems using a myriad tactics, often telling themselves that their difference in strategy signifies their own greatness. Here's a hint: If you don't understand the best practices approach 1/3 as well as you understand your new and improved one, you're probably not a genius. And if you believe you're doing something that nobody else has done you probably haven't looked far or deep enough.

You can be a hero without ever innovating anything. By seeking commonality between the problems around you and the problems others have solved, you have a roadmap to making a difference. Conversely, you can do damage by placing importance on innovation at the expense of learning from others. You are limited to the power of only one mind, one pair of eyes and one pair of hands. Your legacy will probably be little more than a series of confused "WTF?!"'s

This issue hits close to home for me because I have spent time on both sides of the fence. Inheriting code from other "geniuses", nursing servers that have been taken out of commission by resource-hogging "innovations" - and creating more different-is-better strategies than I care to admit to. It has been humbling to learn that I'm not the smartest person in the universe - especially when the strongest evidence of that fact is when I'm trying to look smart.

Now, whenever I find myself doing something off the beaten path I try to ask myself whether this excursion is necessary or if I'm just becoming a victim of my own ego. If I can't clearly explain my approach in a way that makes others want to use and expand upon it, it is most certainly the latter. Innovations are worth applying only if they are helpful to others and if the combined mindshare can help it continue to evolve.

Solving a challenging problem in a new and better way sometimes means doing things differently. But no solution has ever been better strictly because it is different.

I just can't wrap my mind around jealousy.

I work hard and have very little. I am struggling, on the verge of failure and I've never been in a worse state financially. But every day I get the feeling that people around me would be happier if I had even less. What kind of progress can we possibly hope for when we want everyone else doing slightly less than ourselves? It's not even mathematically feasible.

There has always been some sort of direction to my life. I generally know what I want to look back on when I leave this world, and I have a pretty clear picture of where I'd like to be within a few year's time. My course has changed over the years but my direction has always been the same. I have sacrificed so much to work towards these ideals and I have never relied on others. But it doesn't come easy for me and I'm terrified!

It's not Google's fault, but my rankings are so impossibly low that whenever I get new business from a Google query I can assume that someone is up to no good. Another hit today, this time from bazrate@yahoo.com (at least they had the good sense to use a more generic service) and a European IP ( 192.116.105.78 ).

The credit card holder said they already tried to wire some of her funds to Nigeria and bought over $1000 of crap. On my end, they wanted to set up a lottery site. This is arguably more legitimate than the phishing customers we usually get, but does that win them any points?

This is why I prefer to host for people I know. If we all did business with people we met and could talk to, these risks wouldn't be so significant. Of course that's not a reality these days but if I work just a little harder then I can build my own isolated utopia.

So Apple's Mail.App ( Jaguar ) has displeased me for the last time, but Mozilla's Thunderbird has made astonishing progress during recent versions.

Things that make me happy about switching to Thunderbird:

• I can create multiple IMAP accounts on the same IMAP server without having my email client spew connection errors on every download
• Messages thread themselves even though I haven't purchased a new version of my OS
• I can change to a different mail folder without confusing my email client, which means I no longer have to close and relaunch it 3 times over to return to my inbox
• I can sign and encrypt messages
• I can set up different identities for my email without resorting to messy hacks
• I get to choose the way images are downloaded in HTML messages - it's not all-or-nothing anymore!
• Playing wav file attachments (voicemail) works *SO* much better!

I am *really* going to miss the ability to set up different email notification sounds based on message rules. And filtering on the message body - that's going to hurt too. On-the-fly spellcheck, that's going to be sad to lose - though I won't miss Mail.app's braindead suggestions. I need to figure out how to get it to talk to my Address Book, but I suspect that's just about knowing where to point the LDAP connection. All in all, I think I'm going to be much happier this way.

Also today, I found out there's a new google toolbar for Mozilla that tracks PageRank. This is the first of its kind and also served as the final straw for moving all of my web use to FireFox. Am I the only one who didn't know about the Web Developer extensions? Holy crap!

There should be a mozilla.org/switch page.

A few weeks ago I registered for my first hotmail account. This all started because I installed Fire, a multi-protocol IM client. I went mad with power and set up all the IM usernames I could - you know, just in case.

I've had a Yahoo! login for several years now, and have never received any spam there. Well, I have, but that was from Yahoo! themselves so it's debatable. Since I've used it to register for a few sites I'm pretty impressed.

Not so with Hotmail. In the past week alone I have received 12 spam emails - most of them for male enhancement and several providing information on how to access online porn. This address has *never* been given out, so I'm appalled at the sheer volume and nature of these messages.

I know spam is nothing new and I know that Microsoft's questionable money-making strategies are nothing new. It is not a surprise to get unsolicited email at a free email account but I would have expected them to sell my address to "Partners we think will provide valuable services you're interested in" and not miscellaneous penis cream peddlers.

I feel like someone who has spent a lifetime in a cage and just now realized that the damn thing was never locked in the first place!

All the reasons I've had for not trying new things and experiencing life now seem silly and tough to justify. I'm smart, reasonably responsible and able to take care of myself. I'm an adult and anything that passes my own standards of decency and safety should be fine, and there's no reason to create or acknowledge smaller boundaries.

But like anyone who has spent a lifetime in a cage I feel like I missed that part where you learn how to function. How do you hang out with people and make it seem natural? How do you get downtown for a night of drinking and fun without getting towed or drunkenly stranded? I haven't bought an article of clothing for about 5 years. Is my wardrobe of combat pants and cotton cap-sleeves going to hold me?

I take comfort in knowing that if I was the only one with this problem makeover reality programs wouldn't be a multi-million dollar industry unto themselves.

1. ALWAYS smile and wave at the drivers who aren't too self-involved to stop and let you pass
   If it wasn't for my body's tendency to be squishy and fragile, I would use belligerence and a fierce stare enforce the "please slow down for bikers and skaters" rule. Since I'm afraid about damage to my person, I handle my fierce staring safely on the side of the road while waiting for a driver who isn't too hellbent on getting where they're going to realize that 15 seconds spent on not committing manslaughter isn't going to make their lives any worse in the whole scheme of things. Anecdotally, the people who refuse to stop drive nicer cars and keep their windows up to ensure that the harsh elements don't invade their air-conditioned bliss.

   I figure that every time I have a nasty glare-down with one of these people I toss a little ill-will into the world (unless they're just that oblivious). So it is important to smile, wave, bow, or otherwise express my gratitude for the people who do take the time to realize there are other people around. They probably don't need my appreciation as much, but hamming it up never hurt anyone.

   By the way, this isn't the freeway I'm talking about. This is a parkway, paths around the lake and other places where you'd hope drivers were more aware of their surroundings than their destinations. I have a silly, passive-aggressive fantasy about placing one of those accident memorials on the street by a recreational path. I'd do it up, with flowers and a big, fat cross. I would post a sign with a broken heart and the plea, "Please Slow Down". Manipulative? Yes, but I have to believe that making people think would do more good than harm - even if it just gets them wondering what a manslaughter charge would do to their insurance.

2. Insoles make a world of difference
   I just added arch supports to my skates and everything changed. I'm pretty sure I added about 3mph to my average and I think about eating pavement much less now. I thought I needed new wheels, but now I can get by for quite a while.
3. It's called skating
   I don't own any Rollerblades. Well I do, but they predate Hammertime. I own inline skates manufactured by a company other than Rollerblade, which means I am Inline Skating. When I say, "I'm going out skating", people correct me or ask, "what kind of skating?" - which is probably a backhanded way of correcting me because I'm pretty sure the Greenway isn't ice skate-friendly. I could say I'm going Inline Skating, but that's just lurpy, isn't it?

Vauxia is a primitive sponge from the cambrian period (a few hundred million years ago). I always thought it sounded cool, like the Norse god of silly hats or something. More importantly, thinking about what life on this planet was like 400M years ago reminds me that no matter how evolved we think we are, we haven't reached any evolutionary destination.

I laughed out loud when I saw a commercial for Sprint PCS' new "Fair and Flexible" plan. A woman asks a bunch of children, "tell me exacltly how many minutes you plan on using this ball every day for the next two years. If you guess to few then you'll get slammed with overage charges, if you guess to many then - well, that's just a waste isn't it?". So true!

So, like a good consumer I checked out their new plan. It's nothing but overage charges, rounded up! They start with $35 for up to 300 minutes. Up until the 700-minutes per month mark, they hit you with a $2.50 cost bump for each additional 25 minutes, and then it's $2.50 for every 50 minutes extra. It's like paying .5 - .10 in overage charges but 25 minute chunks at a time. If you just stuck with their standard plan, you'd save $15 less per month using 500 minutes, $22.50 on 700, and going on up. If you occassionally go over on the standard plan, .40/minute is much easier to swallow than this lump sum silliness.

I Can't say I'm surprised, but I am disappointed. The only thing worse than shafting your customers is airing a commercial about how your customers are getting shafted and advertising a product that shafts them just as badly.

"How does your cell phone company make you feel?"

New rule: The only people allowed to comment on my choice of vehicle are people who drive hybrids and people who drive bicycles.

I drive a mini-SUV, which evidently puts me in the same category as people who are conspiring to cause global strife for their own selfish benefit. The thing is, my "SUV" gets between 24 and 28 miles per gallon - and 36 mpg on a really good road trip. This is far less than the average sedan, and people tooling around in 6-cylinder Camrys have absolutely no right to hiss and call me an SUV-driving, ugly american. What's ugly is a lack of critical thinking skills. We got ourselves into a global conundrum with mindless rhetoric, finger pointing and lack of analysis. How exactly are we going to correct matters through mindless rhetoric, finger pointing and lack of analysis?

I chose my vehicle because I wanted to be able to fill it with camping gear, servers or my personal belongings on moving day without having to borrow a truck or moving van. I wanted to transport 2-4 people, and I most of all I wanted fuel economy. The amount of extra weight expended on making my car truck-like is almost cancelled out by the fact that its slightly larger tires require fewer turns to cover any distance. I walk and bike often, take the bus when I can and I drive fewer than 3,000 miles a year while using less than 150 gallons of gas.

I feel good about the choices I make, and the fact that my car has no trunk doesn't automatically make me a Bush voter. Meanwhile, I'll bet there are self-righteous liberal-minded people out there right now selecting gas guzzling luxury sedans and praising themselves for not becoming one of those evil SUV drivers.

I'm all for passing judgment on people, but when can we do it analytically instead of categorically?