Suggestion to make Google docs more usable (for me!) 

I've been without Word at home for several weeks now, and getting along pretty well without it using Google docs (formerly Writely), despite the facts that I do a lot of work at home, and the editorial staff at work starts everything in Word.

I like the feature that lets me forward an e-mail with attachments to a specific address for my Google docs account, which adds the document to my collection and notifies me in Gmail when it's been imported (usually almost instantly).

But -- I really need for Google docs to give me the option of saving as plain plain plain text for newsletters made in our CMS but ultimately delivered as HTML e-mail, so things like smart quotes and apostrophes don't disappear when mailed. My work-around has been to save as RTF, then save again as ms-dos text and open in Notepad. That sets to rights the quotes problem.

There is usually some cleanup involved in removing garbage from bullets. I'll never object to having to put in [ul]s and [li]s since I'm always hounding the writers to break up long paragraphs into bullets for online reading.

Amazon unbox missed my boat 

I bought last night's episodes of 24 because I tuned in late and didn't want to start watching and spoil the story. I didn't get them on bittorrent because I really do want to pay something, sometimes. I thought I'd try Amazon's Unbox service, but they missed the sale because iTunes had the newest episodes up and Amazon didn't. That's the kind of thing that makes you tend not to try again.

Haven't watched them yet. I'm so sad that Jack's dad turned out to be a bad guy because I love the actor -- too lazy to look him up, but it's the guy who played Zephren Cochrane, the wild inventer of the warp drive in that Star Trek movie, and Babe the pig's "dad."

Dreaming small 

Looks like there's quite a developer community springing up around the Nokia tablet. I found maemo.org and a Nokia podcasting page after a comment on Scripting News reminded me I was curious about it. I'd like to get an N800, but can't quite justify the expense, even though at $399 it seems like a good value. I tested an Archos a year ago or so as part of a marketing research panel, and was very sorry to have to hand it back...

You don't hear much, do you, about the nexus between widget development and developing for teeny devices? Seems to me it would be a natural to take a bunch of widgets intended for use on the desktop or in a sidebar or start page, and craft them into sort of a card deck for mobile use. Stack up the widgets one on top of the other and provide some navigation, or even something like a playlist? Just thinking out loud. Never mind me. What do I know?