October 31, 2003
I broke down.
So I'm just browsing around, minding my own business when I see that Macintouch says that Amazon has dropped the price of Panther to $99. "Wow, that's a a pretty good price." I say to myself. "Nah, I'll wait until it gets cheaper. Lemme check what Apple charges for Jaguar so I can see how mcuh money I'll be saving if I wait." Click. Click. store.apple.com.
"What's this?"
"Hmm, lemme try this out. My wife works at a university, I should be able to use this." Click. Click. Yeah, I work for an education institution, really - I promise. Click. Click.
Mac OS X version 10.3 "Panther" - $69
Holy crap. It's normally $129. At this point I lost all control and ordered the damn thing. Free shipping too. Total of $74.69. Apple already had my credit card on file from the iTunes Music Store which made it painless.
I lasted exactly one week. That's not too bad. Now I have to go through the painful process of figuring out the places where I changed my OS X configuration and installed stuff so I can redo it in Panther. I hope PostFix is really easier to configure than Sendmail. Gah.
October 30, 2003
October 29, 2003
SideTalkin
Gizmodo really hates Nokia's new game platform/cell phone to an extreme that screams of biased journalism, but this just is just too funny not to pass on. The joke here is that the the N-Gage is really awkward when used as a phone, but much much more than a cell phone circa say 1998. From the looks of this site, you have to be a pretty big geek to take a picture of yourself holding something huge up to your ear.
October 28, 2003
R.I.P. Rod Roddy
What's with all the celebrity deaths recently? Is the rapture at hand?
God's latest "Come on down" was to Rod Roddy, the annoucer on the Price is Right.
Check this out:
Roddy, who got his TV start as the narrator on the ABC comedy "Soap," died Monday in Los Angeles of prostate, colon and breast cancer, the network said in a statement.
First, I didn't know that men could get breast cancer, though at his size, I'm not too surprised. Second, you can die of 3 cancers simultaneously? Geez, that sucks.
TiVo recommended the Price is Right last week and I put it on while I was doing other things. From watching the show, I wasn't as worried about Rod Roddy as I was about Bob Barker. He looks about as stable as a Plinko chip.
October 27, 2003
Stupid Unix tricks I learned today
If I don't write this down in the next 5 minutes, I'll surely forget it forever.
emacs had some problems opening a file when when it was checked into cvs. Then it had permissions problems when I moved the ,v file out of the way. The problem was that the disk was mounted on NFS and sudo doesn't quite work over NFS.
Instead I decided to be a real man and use vi. First thing I had to do was insert the contents of a another file into the current one. No problem: :r (filename)
Then I had to substitute all $'s with \$'s. Hmm, that was a little tougher. :s subsitiutes only the first instance on one line. Adding /g does all on the line. To do them all, I had to use this magic incantation:
:1,$s/\\/\\\$/g
The first part specifies the range to use.
Who said vi isn't intuitive?
Today is
October 27, 2003
It's the 300th day of the year, with 65 days left.
It's day 3 of resisting the urge to buy Panther.
I actually thought about where the closest place to get it would be if I broke down (Fry's). Breathing, Breathing... Macintouch is reporting some problems with it, including my video card (GeForce 4MX), so I's probably good that I'm holding off. It's on my Amazon wishlist though, so anyone feel free to buy it for me.
It's day 8 of Poison Oak
It still stinks and it's making a lovely tour of my lower extremeties. My wife is avoiding even coming close to me. Great.
October 21, 2003
Poison Oak Stinks
I don't want to itch it, but half the time I'm doing it unconsciously. I bought some 'exfoliating' cream that's basically liquid sandpaper and some hydrocortizone, but it still itches like crazy.
I'm not even sure where I got it from, but it's likely from this fiasco.
October 17, 2003
GPS Coordinate Converter
One thing that's annoyed me is that there's no easy way to enter GPS coordinates on the web and get a map or look up other info about those coordinates. There are some conversion utilities out there, but they're a pain to use, requring a lot of cutting and pasting.
I decided to build a better mousetrap with my own converter and mapper tool.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Monitor Configuration Heaven
In a previous post, I was in monitor configuration hell. My shiny new Dell 20" Flat Panel wouldn't stick to 1600 x 1200 resolution after a reboot.
Well, once they worked out the bugs in OS X 10.2.8, I installed it and the problem went away. I don't know if there was anything that specifically addressed this problem in the update or the installation just jiggled something, but it's working beautifully now. I have discovered that I have one bad pixel, but the other 1,919,999 are very nice. Most vendors won't replace a monitor unless it has several anyway. It's not like it will affect anything. Of course, as I'm typing this, I move right across that one bad pixel and it's very obvious.
When I go to work now, I'm finding my 19" CRT fuzzy and oddly curved. It's always been that way, but I guess I've raised my standards now. Maybe if I complain of headaches, they'll get me an LCD there too. :-)
October 16, 2003
I can't believe it
I can't believe it. I really just can't believe it. I'm stunned, jaw wide open.
It's my fault anyway for getting too emotionally involved, screaming and getting myself all worked up. I think there were just too many egos involved for this to ever have worked out. I suppose it's best that it ended now, before I got even more worked up, only to be let down again.
I didn't really want it to happen now while I'm living here anyway, far away from it all. Then again, I may not live long enough to see it happen again.
All I know is that someone should get fired. Too many poor decisions have been made despite others' heroic efforts.
Go Marlins.
October 13, 2003
Treo 600 is Out
And they're offering a discount for current Treo owners.
Must ... resist ... urge ... to ... pull ... out .... credit ... card.
I really love my Treo 300. It's my phone, PDA, mobile web browser and pager. And with this accessory, I'm never without a pen, which is really great, especially when Geocaching. Nothing's worse than hiking miles to a cache only to realize you forgot a pen to sign it.
This pen could have been executed a little better though. It doesn't have the same weight as the standard treo stylus. The pen rattles when the phone vibrates, which for me is almost all the time. The pen doesn't fit in as snugly as the stylus. Lastly, it would be nice if the the pen didn't have a cap since it's easy to lose and I usually end up holding it in my mouth. (yuck!) Regardless, it's so useful that I'm terrified everytime I think I've lost it. And that has has happened several times - I've found it on the ground and lying in the middle of some grass a couple of times.
Back to the new Treo, I'm excited by the sleeker form factor, getting rid of that fragile and squaky hinge, and better performance, especially when downloading web pages. Having a digital camera with me all the time would be nice as well, even if it is at a relatively low resolution. Ideally, it would have a hard drive in there too, so I could have my phone/PDA/internet access device (wifi too!)/camera/iPod/GPS/FRS Radio. Ok, maybe that's a bit demanding right now, but you know it's all going to come together eventually.
Considering my Treo is only 7 months old, it seems a little soon to make another purchase. Then again, I could sell my treo and come out with a new one for $300 or so. Hmmm...
I don't think it's going to happen though as my purchase request has already been declined by the Office of Capital Expenditures (hi Anne!). I've got 16 days to make my plea.
Is it too early to ask for Christmas gifts?
IMAP Client Search Part 2
Following up on my previous post about finding a new IMAP client, Microsoft has kindly forced the issue for me.
A week ago I started noticing that after going away from my computer for a while, I'd come back and notice that Outlook Express wasn't running. Funny, I didn't remeber closing it. Then I noticed Outlook Express was crashing, especially when I cancelled a stuck IMAP poll of my personal mail. It was happening so often that I decided to look into Thunderbird again. Dave kindly told me how to get it to poll subfolders for new mail, which was my #1 beef with it. It's still slow, at least when redrawing the window and moving between folders, but moving between and rendering messages are pretty fast.
Even though it doesn't have a specific configuration for, it I think it uses a default domain based on your email address, which is great. The LDAP and address autocomplete functions are really nice.
One thing I've had to get used to is my deleted mail moving to a Trash folder. With OE (and Apple Mail at home), I have it set up to not display messages marked for deletion, mostly because it was slow to move the messages to the trash folder. The difference with Thunderbird is that it moves it to local folder instead of a server-based folder. It doesn't seem to have a view that hides deleted messages. This is good and bad. The good part is that it's fast and it keeps my folders from getting huge with lots of deleted messages. (I tend to delete my mail rather than letting it accumulate in a huge list - that drives me crazy!) It also helps the IMAP server out to make it faster to check each folder for new mail. The bad part is that I only have access to my deleted mail from one computer. Sometimes I delete things a little too soon and I have to rescue some.
I'm surprised how flexible and powerful it is. And it's open-source software that actually looks good. After a breaking in period of learning the new keyboard shortcuts and priming the spell checker, I think it should work out well. I hope they fix the redraw problems, but I fear it's a byproduct of XUL.
It's also free - can't beat that. I had started trudging through configuring Mulberry, but the purchase reminders were pretty annoying and I didn't understand half the preferences.
It's been so long since I used Netscape regularly - I never thought I'd use another product that came out of that company. Never say never I guess.
October 09, 2003
Help! I'm living in a bizarro world!
My new governor is an Austrian bodybuilder/actor, my dotcom company is making tons of money, and the Red Sox have won 4 straight playoff games.
Now, I think these are all good things, but they're making me suspicious again that the apocalypse is near.
October 05, 2003
Geocaching blog complete!
I've finally gotten all my Geocaching log entries into my Geocaching blog. I did about 2/3 of them manually, but then thought it would be worth it to write a script to grab them off the site. The new page on the Geocaching site that shows just the log entry made this a lot easier. For now I have a script that given a list of caches, scrapes the site, decodes the logs and exports them into blogger format for importing. It even updates the timestamps with the times like '4:26 pm - ', as is my convention in the logs.
Ideally what I want is 'sync' button that will pull all changes from the site into the blog. But that will require more time. It's not so bad to log caches in both places right now.
The reason that I'm doing all this is because these little stories contain interesting anecdotes and experiences in our lives. With over 300 caches done now and what I figure as an average of 20 minutes spent on each cache, that's a written log of 100 hours of my life. Next to my credit card statements, it's probably the most detailed journal of where I've been and what I've done. I'm looking forward to much more.
October 01, 2003
Chew on This
I'm pretty sure there was a Faustian bargain made some time ago that went something like this:
Medical school flunky:"I really want to sign my checks with 'Dr.' and drive a Porsche but memorizing ALL those body parts is too hard."
Satan: "OK, I can make you a doctor, but your job will consist of menial, repetitive tasks and all your patients will hate you. You'll probably decide that suicide is a better option."
Medical school flunky: "But I get the Porsche?"
Satan: "Yes."
Medical school flunky: "Sounds good!"
Then Satan created dentistry. Suddenly human teeth required several sessions of dedicated maintenance per day brushing, flossing and washing. Otherwise teeth would become extremely painful and simply fall out.
It certainly explains why for thousands of years of human history there are no dentists and suddenly it's one of those 'required' things you must do.
How else could you explain that of all your body parts, this particular one requires so much maintenence? Skin and tissue grow back, bones heal. I don't spend any time cleansing my elbows meticulously and they seem to work just fine. My cat has yet to see a dentist and I have plenty of marks to prove his teeth work just fine.
Why is it that you only get two shots at healthy teeth and one of those comes at an age when you're too young to really care? I think we should get our second set of teeth around mid-life, say 40. Or maybe we can cross-breed humans and beavers. Their teeth never stop growing and they must continuously gnaw on hard stuff like wood to file them down. I chew up enough pens; that should be sufficient.
This is all very suspicious. It could only be the work of Satan.
Oh, if you're reading this Dr. Yu -- nice Porsche. No, no I'm kidding really. I've been flossing, really I have. Please don't hurt me (any more than usual)!