This year was a pretty good one overall. We went down state a few days before Christmas to celebrate the holiday with my side of the family. A good time was had by all, except when I woke up sick on the morning of the 24th and remained sick until I woke up on Christmas morning. Luckily, I was pretty much over whatever it was that I had and we got to have a normal Christmas day. Quincy got a lot of good gifts from everyone in the family. I think that he is very happy with his haul this year.

My main gifts this year were… A Dremel set and RAID card from Mom & Dad. Star Wars Episode 3 from Troy & Laura. A jingle bell necklace and Pass the Pigs game from Quincy.

There were also a few smaller gifts that I can’t remember right now, but that’s the big ones. Mahra and I also got a Dustbuster from her Sister’s family and A steam cleaner from her parents. Those will come in very handy.

Oh, and a funny thing Quincy said on Christmas morning… Since I slept most of the day on Christmas Eve, I woke up at 3:30am and could not fall back asleep. I got up and laid on the couch to watch some TV for awhile. When 7am rolled around Quincy finally woke up and came stumbling out to the living room looking all dazed and confused. He looked at me on the couch then to the coffee table were there was a plate with a cookie and a half next to an empty glass of milk. Rather than running over to the tree to start tearing into presents he walked up to me, gave me a stern look and asked…

Daddy, did you eat Santa’s cookies? And did you also drink his milk?

After a few moments I finally convinced him that I didn’t not and that they were that way when I woke up. He told me that it made him mad when he thought that I did eat them, but now he was fine. Then he giggle at me, turned to see his gifts under the tree and the opening began.

Yesterday morning I finally got my invite to try out Yahoo Mail’s new beta. Wow, what a slick application. I really like the improvements. One of my favorites is a very minor thing, but something I use a lot. That is the addition of a “Show Images” button at the top of html emails. I hated scrolling all the way to the bottom and searching for that tiny link every time I wanted to load email images.

There are many other things I like about this new version, but I’m going to focus on the things I’d like to see improved, for now.

First off, I love the idea of bring my RSS feeds in to my Yahoo Mail. If Yahoo would make a few more improvements I’d completely move from Bloglines to Yahoo Mail for RSS. (And I’m a BIG Bloglines fan!) The biggest things I think that they could do to make RSS more robust is giving the ability for sub-folders and putting the feed tree on another tab. The reason behind the other tab suggestion is that I am currently subscribed to almost 100 feeds and even with sub-folders it would push my mail folders way off the screen.

I’ve whipped up a couple mock-ups showing how I think these ideas could be executed.

This is the current way Yahoo is doing RSS feeds in the mail beta.

If they would split the email and RSS to separate tabs then the right column becomes much more manageable when you have a lot of feeds.

Also, the addition of folders would help keep the feeds organized.

My only other issue with the RSS part of this beta is the performance. Everything loads quick enough, but the scrolling of the feeds page is way too jumpy. I’ve tried it on both Mac and Windows and in several different browsers, all giving the same jumpy results. Granted I’d get use to it, but I like how smooth Bloglines pages scroll when I’m using my mouse’s scroll wheel.

Finally, there are two other little tweaks I’d like to see added. The options to move the reading panel to the right instead of the bottom of the screen (like in outlook) would be nice to have. Also, the ability to have the reading panel return to a blank screen rather than the next email when you delete an email. Both of these are minor and I see them as settings you could switch off and on.

That’s all I have for now. I can’t wait to see how Yahoo continues to improve this product. Now if only they would beef up the notepad section. Then I could drop Backpack and let Yahoo handle that stuff too.

I have nothing much to say about this. I just thought this was a really cool photo my wife took of Quincy and his crazy hair.

Britain’s Sky News put it perfectly.

Quincy really gets into drawing and he’s pretty good for a 4 year old. He likes to draw something and then explain to us what he has drawn. Most of the time it does look like what he says it is. Here is a piece from yesterday that I thought was worth sharing.

Title: Butt coming out of an orange

Medium: Crayon on paper