Chances are you’ve seen this classic Seinfeld moment in which Jerry vents his frustrations over the bastardization of “reservations” in the world of car rentals. If you’re planning to rent a car for your summer vacation, weblog Consumerist helps you avoid these pitfalls with useful rental tips from an employee.
It may come as no surprise that the car rental employee reaffirms the problem illustrated in the Seinfeld episode as totally accurate:
If you make your reservation online, be proactive and call the station where you’ll be picking up your vehicle to verify that the reservation went through and that your desired car will be on the lot. Should you have to do this? No, you shouldn’t. But what’s the harm in giving a heads up so that potential difficulties can be headed off at the pass?
The Consumerist post covers 13 tips from the rental employee. None of them are particularly groundbreaking, but it’s a worthwhile read for adding a few items to your pre-vacation checklist to make sure everything goes off without a hitch. If you’re already an expert in car rental maneuvering, drop off your two cents in the comments.
Windows: You’ve got a web page, a file folder, and a chat window open, and they’re all about the same project. WindowTabs, a free-to-try utility, can group together all those app windows with top-most, Google-Chrome-like tabs.
The free trial of WindowTabs doesn’t have a time expiration on it, but does limit you to three tabs per group. The fully-unlocked application goes for $19. That’s pretty limiting in some ways, but WindowTabs lets you pick and choose which applications it allows tabbing for, either by an inclusive or exclusive list of program executable names. So if you already use Google Chrome, or don’t think you want email windows stacked, you can add “chrome” and “outlook” to your exclude list. Alternately, you can use that three-tab limit only for applications where it would really help, like folder views and non-tabbed chat windows.
Starting today (or at least very soon), 
Here’s how the selection and queue management should look. Search, recommendations and ratings are available from the Media Center view, and any remote that works with Media Center should be able to operate the Netflix streaming controls while it’s playing. The plug-in is Silverlight based, and requires a Netflix subscription, of course.
iPhone/
All My Mail organizes and sorts your mail primarily by contacts and attachments, and is kind of smart about it. It groups together email addresses with similar or the same contact names under one heading, and can recreate Gmail’s threaded message view by analyzing the messages you’re trading back and forth. There’s an attachment-only view you can flip to when you need to find one particular Word document from a guy named Bob, and the email search and sorting felt fairly responsive in our own tests.