Mr. Martin has updated his livejournal with exciting new info! His latest update tells us all about football… or a convention he’s visiting… or some minor characters in the upcoming TV show. Sigh, I guess Brandon Sanderson will have another series to finish up when he’s done with Wheel of Time.

Not that I mind the occasional update on where he’s headed, or hearing his thoughts on the Jets’ latest loss, but it really seems he has no intentions of actually finishing the books.

I have to say, I’m really tired of all the 3-D being pushed everywhere.  Where is the market for this stuff?  No one I know cares, and many are utterly annoyed and/or unable to use it at all.

I have no desire for 3D TV or games.  I love video games, and I love pretty graphics, but making it “3-Dimensional” doesn’t seem to add anything to me.  At least not in its current form.  I love new technology and change, but this doesn’t seem to be a step in the right direction.  Now I have to wear glasses (which I purposefully take off every time I get near a computer, I wear glasses for distance viewing) just to watch a sporting event?

Some might argue that it’s no different than going from standard definition television to HD, but I disagree.  HD made things easier to see and watch, it made larger screens more enjoyable for more people, since sitting a bit closer to a large HDTV is OK, whereas with SD it was horrendous.  It made eye strain less of an issue – no more squinting to figure out what the scores are at the bottom of the screen.  3D does none of that.  It makes it harder to see, less viewing angle, and it’s uncomfortable with the glasses.

Not to say 3D will never be useful.  I can’t wait for the day things are interactive in 3D with no glasses (like Ironman movies or not, those computer interfaces were pretty damned cool).  Or better yet, Star Trek Holodeck style 3D, where your actually inside the action.

Most of this rant brought to you by news of 3D cameras, TVs, and other stuff I see pushed down our throats every day.  Send help!  Preferably of the two-dimensional, no glasses, viewed from any angle variety!

I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to do this, and after finally figuring it out I thought I would share.  I had a couple things that I wanted to know when they would arrive, but I had to add each of them the “track shipments” box every time I wanted to see where they were at.  So I searched around Google and the UPS page for a way to have multiple tracking numbers in a single URL without much luck.

Making a single URL is pretty simple, its just http://wwwapps.ups.com/etracking/tracking.cgi?tracknum=xxx (where, obviously, xx is the tracking number).  This only allows for a single tracking number, so it didn’t really help much.

I finally found out how to do multiples after putting a tracking number directly into Google.  If you didn’t already know, you can put your tracking number in, and Google will return a direct link to the UPS track page.  Useful stuff, but most of all it was interesting for the URL it links to:

http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?sort_by=status&tracknums_displayed=1&TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&loc=en_US&InquiryNumber1=xxx&track.x=0&track.y=0

You can simply add more to “tracknums_displayed” and put each tracking number in “InquiryNumberX” to have multiples on a single bookmark.  For example:

http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?sort_by=status&tracknums_displayed=3&TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&loc=en_US&InquiryNumber1=xxx&track.x=0&track.y=0&InquiryNumber2=yyy&InquiryNumber3=zzz

Hope someone else finds it useful!