Last week, I finished reading "The Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne. It's the third book in the Captain Nemo series, even though you aren't told this until the end. Given that "The Mysterious Island" has a bunch of odd things happening on it, it's kinda clear that Nemo is around. The book is the least known of the Nemo books, isn't as good as the other two Nemo series, and wasn't a very popular Verne book.

I happened to finish the book on the anniversary of Vernes' birth.

This amused me, as Google also celebrated Vernes' birthday with a Google doodle.

I have the book because it was free on the kindle. I read it because I read random books. I recall finding Candide on my mom's shelf and reading it, to the puzzlement of my mom's husband. "Why are you reading Voltaire?" "Uh, because I liked the binding?"

After finishing "The Mysterious Island," I pondered what book to read next, settling on "The Count of Monte Cristo" as I have it in paperback with a bookmark about two thirds of the way completed. Clearly I had started reading it at some point, and not finished it. I have no idea when I started it (though I suspect it was over 15 years ago), or why I didn't finish it (I suspect, "SHINY!"), but I'd like to read it now. So, I started it.

And, what happens today, but a quote from Seth Godin from the book:

Yes, I am amused by the serendipity of my choice of books.

Two things that annoy me about BaseCamp:

1. There exists no way to mark a message personally important (archive message or start message functionality)

When looking at the list of messages that have been posted, there is one indicator with two status states: read status of read or unread. If a message and all its comments have been read, the indicator is grey. If any part of the message or comment list hasn't been read, the indicator is green.

The way that messages are used across the many projects I use basecamp for, the messages have discussion followed by an action to be taken. Those actions are not copied to the to-do lists, what a waste of time to have to copy them over. The problem I have is, though, is that once I've read the message, whether or not I have completed the task in the message, the status indicator is grey. I don't know glancing at the list which messages I care about, which I'm cc'd on, which I need to take action on. They're all green or grey.

I'd like to have an all-messages view, my-messages view (ones that I've been cc'd on in some way), and an archive view. I'd like to indicate in some what that I don't care about this message, but more importantly a way to indicate I do care about a message.

The flip of the archived status (where you could achieve the elusive INBOX ZERO) could be a starred message. If I care about it in some way, any way, I can star it, then unstar it when I'm done with it.

2. Messages don't auto-refresh to indicate comments have been added since I loaded the page.

When I'm on a message page, and a conversation is happening somewhat, the page doesn't auto-refresh to indicate someone else has posted before I'm done with the page. I need to refresh the page. I find it annoying, especially when several people comment at once.

Given how much of the rest of the site is all ajaxy, I was kinda expecting this page to be, too. The refresh rate doesn't need to be high, once every few to five minutes or so. Configurable, of course, because 37Signals hates configuration pages.

If I ever write an app on top of the BaseCamp API, I'm totally fixing these annoyances.

And that app gets written after the other two hundred projects I have in the pipe.

Okay, let me state right now, for the record, I am a backseat driver. When I know where I'm going, I want the driver to go the way I would drive, which is nominally the most efficient way to go. When I don't know where I'm going, I want to learn, and then I want to know that the way we're going is nominally the most efficient way to go.

See that trend?

Right. Efficiency, in terms of either time or distance, ideally both.

That all said, Kris and I went to Whole Foods this morning. Kris started going to the nearest one, and I asked him to drive to the one slightly farther away, on San Antonio. The one in Cupertino doesn't have the low-fat Brown Cow peach yogurt, the one on San Antonio does.

Why is this important? Well, the low-fat Brown Cow peach yogurt is AMAZING. It tastes like peach custard. Yummy!

Yum.

Mee.

So, he turned around, and headed north instead of south. When he turned onto 85, I turned to ask why he was he was going on 85. He promptly said, without my finishing my question, "Bah, El Camino." I decided at that moment I wasn't going to offer my opinion on how to drive to the grocery store, I was just going to go with it.

Driving up El Camino takes about 7 minutes to get to Whole Foods. Turns out, 85 to 101 North, there is no San Antonio exit off 101 North. We drove to the next exit at Embarcadero, but there's no easy 101 South entrance from the Oregon Expressway exit. One U-turn later, and we were back on 101 South, and well past the seven minutes had we just driven up San Antonio.

I kept my mouth shut.

I kept my mouth shut as there was no 101 North exit onto San Antonio.

I kept my mouth shut as there was no 101 South entrance off Oregon Expressway and Kris made a U-turn.

I kept my mouth shut as we hit every stop light on San Antonio on the way west to El Camino, taking more than twenty minutes to go that seven minute drive.

And I was surprised when, as we approached Central, Kris asked me, "Should I turn here or go straight?"

He continued to ask for my opinion about which way to drive as we continued on San Antonio, turned left onto El Camino and parked at Whole Foods. He even asked for my opinion for how to drive back.

So, either I needed to keep my mouth shut just a little longer to draw out the need for my opinion, or maybe, just maybe Kris misses my non-stop running commentary on how best to drive.

Right.

Yes.

That is my wireless SSID on my MiFi.

Why do you ask?

That lasted all of about 15 seconds, which is how long an SSH tunnel and a SOCKS proxy set up takes me now.