Harris is a stickler for this sort of thing. When he restored Hitchcock’s Vertigo, he asked Jaguar to send him a color chip from the 1957 model of one of its cars—the same car that Kim Novak drove in the film—so that he could match the shade of green exactly.

— Your DVD Player Sleeps With the Fishes

For now, though, Jeff is holding down the fort because I’m still missing a few staples…such as a mattress. (I just bought a bed yesterday.) That’s important, of course, but there’s something else just as essential (and just as missing): broadband.

Unfortunately, for contractual reasons I can only get the building’s (overpriced) in-house Internet or else DSL. With gritted teeth, I opted for DSL. Supposedly, we’ll be hooked up by Friday, at which point I will be expected to load a CD to complete the installation that will install various craplets and set my default Internet settings to those favored by AT&T and its affiliates.

To which I say: fat chance, friends.

Thanks to Parallels, I can run Windows-in-a-window on my Mac. So I will simply clone my current Windows installation, let the CD do its worst, and then dump that instance right into the trash. The install can phone home all it likes; the Mac is unaffected.

Supremely geeky? You betcha. But it pleases me.

How right he was. Just yesterday I pulled up the following map of a Chicago landmark:

Note in particular the distinctive squiggly shape. Now check out the satellite version:

Wait, where’s the squiggly thing? That just looks like a big parking lot. And therefore we know this photo was taken before Millennium Park opened in July 2004. Well before, presumably, because the “squiggly” is actually the Frank Gehry-designed 925-foot pedestrian bridge across Columbus Drive, shown here from another angle:

Of course, even at 3 years old I’ll take what I can get. Beats getting up out of my chair in a Chicago winter.

*No, really. Even now, one block of the very street upon which he used to live is incorrectly marked as an eastbound one-way. Technically a NAVTEQ problem, but still…

Sure enough, we’re now 5 days later and JSPJ came available once again. So I’ve taken it back. I don’t really plan to do anything with it, having long since integrated my travel posts into the JSP.o mothership, but nonetheless it (re-)joins my personal stable of 20 active registrations, (plus another 12 owned by friends and family for which I provide service.)

I’m getting to be quite the little ISP. Er, JSP?

What if your phone connected directly to your voice mailbox, using your screen to provide the information normally read to you? With a voice mail menu, you could see call information merged with your in-phone phonebook. Rather than hearing “Your callback number is 3..1..2..” you could see a list:

=Thursday 2:12p
Mom, Work  -  42s
=Wednesday 11:12a
Neff Cell - 1m12s

You could scroll up and down, highlight any message and choose “play” or “delete”. No need to navigate through voice-prompts and touchtones. See at a glance what it takes RoboGirl precious seconds to read out.

Apple iPhone, coming in 2007:

Visual Voicemail
An industry first, Visual Voicemail allows you to go directly to any of your messages without listening to the prior messages. So you can quickly select the messages that are most important to you.

Needless to say, I so want one.

Then, randomly enough, it was gone.

So maybe we’ll all be seeing a minor IMDb facelift soon enough, though if so I have one recommendation: make the thumbnails zoom when the pointer hovers over them. In the test I saw, they just seemed too small to distinguish…

I got some food and sat down to eat. Shortly after I finished, a (cute) guy came up and asked if we knew anything about getting a laptop working on the wireless. Ehsan indicated me, and thus began a long session of trial and error on the guy’s girlfriend’s (doh!) computer.

I won’t get into the technical details, but suffice to say that Panera tech support* and I determined the cause was a very specific hardware combination. (“We’re not sure why it happens,” said the rep, “but it’s always with Linksys cards.”)

Essentially, the girl was out of luck. I explained her options, and she thanked me for my time, packed up, and left — or at least I thought so. A few minutes later, I saw her headed my way on the periphery of my vision.

It was to give me this:

She said a few kind words of thanks again, and gave me the card. (Note it says “thank you” for the name — she didn’t even know mine!) I was so touched, it just brightened my whole day. You’re a class act, Rachel F. I hope you kick ass on the GMAT.

* Who knew Panera had tech support? The Rhode Island-based tech seemed just as interested in me as I was in her. “That’s consistently one of our busiest locations,” she said. “Some of our stores will drop to just 1 or 2, that one always has at least 15 and I’ve seen more than 30 sessions in progress. Is it in a mall?” Nope, just near a busy intersection…