Beta Max

I switched over to Blogger beta yesterday. There aren't a lot of changes or new features, but it is an improvement. They finally brought the spell checker up to the level of the GMail spell checker. Hopefully, this means they also improved its dictionary. The other big improvement to the publishing tool is allowing you to type the time and date of your posts instead of having to select the month, date, year, hour, and minute from select lists. The best new feature is the ability to automatically add labels or tags to each post. I started doing this by hand using Technorati tags earlier this year, but I got sick of it because it was kind of a pain to do manually.

Keeping with the beta theme, as MDS pointed out, I failed to mention Acres of Books in my post yesterday. Acres of Books, for those who aren't aware, is a huge used book store in Long Beach, CA. I would have to say that it's the best used book store I've ever seen. My first (and so far, only) visit to the store was about four years ago. I overheard a conversation between two customers while I was there that can really only be overheard at a used book store. I don't remember exactly what they were talking about, but it was basically a discussion about the virtues of Betamax. From what I heard, it sounded like these two people regularly watched movies on their Betamax machines at home. Keep in mind that this was in 2002. They either loved watching the same movies over and over or they were members of some secret underground network that is copying new movies over Betamax. Either way, they are exactly the kind of people who shop at used book stores.