See what happens when you try to cook fish sticks? You get shot.
After my previous bad fish stick experiences, I tried again last weekend. I burnt them to a crisp.
But wait! Last night I got some different fish sticks from costco (118 per bag!) and stuck them in the regular oven rather than the toaster and they came out ok! They were edible! So maybe you can cook fish sticks, but they will only work 1/4 of the time.
Well, if Jeremy can do it, so can I.
I'm hiring. That's right, if you're a nerdy type that doesn't like to sleep and you've got mad programming or operations skillz, Yahoo! might be the right place to you.
Caveat: I'll be your boss.
Mitigant: Reading my blog is encouraged but not required.
Software Engineer - Yahoo! News and Weather
Operations Engineer, Yahoo! News
I'm really getting tired of all these sites that insist on adding 'ster' to the end of their names. First there was Napster, then AIMster, then Feedster, and now Eurekster, a personalized search engine. I'm sure there are many more; those are just what I can think of off the top of my head.
Shawn Fanning at least had a reason for naming his app Napster - it was his nickname. Little did he know that he would invent a whole new suffix. If Yahoo was started today, would it be called Yahooster?
Someday all of these unoriginal names are going to look like all those tech companies ending in 'tron' do today - obsolete.
If you're going to name your company, come up with a name that's a little more original than taking a common word and slapping 'ster' at the end of it. That's just lamester.
I finally got going with the MySQL server on the machine that hosts boulter.com.
One of the first things I did was import MT into the database, for two reasons: having all this stuff in db files is scary and mysql makes it a lot easiser to delete all the comment spam I've been getting lately. There's gotta be a better way.
It would be great if MT had an approval process for comments, so I could just click to approve posts and the rest it would just ignore.
Maybe I should feel honored that spammers think my blog is popular enough to spam. :-)
It arrived at my desk Friday, my 40GB iPod, disguised in a rather large box in which was a much smaller box with the actual shrinkwrapped box inside. Once all that was out of the way, I actually got to open the thing. The box has a sheath that comes off, then folds open with flaps on the inside. It's a beatiful thing that belongs in a museum.
The hardest part was getting it to hooked upwith my Windows 2000 box at work.
Since I don't have firewire or USB 2.0 on my work machine, I borrowed a USB adapter and plugged it in. Windows did its thing and identified it and installed some stuff, but it iTunes didn't recognize it. Reboot. So I downloaded the latest version of the software from Apple and tried that. "You need Windows 2000 Service Pack 4." Great. Download, install, wait, wait, find an opportunity to reboot as I headed into an interview with a candidate.
I then ran the iTunes updater software again and no go, so I uninstalled what windows had autoinstalled, and used the software to install it first. Finally it worked and it went about reformatting the drive on the iPod. I threw a few songs on there for fun even though I planned to just take my entire music collection at home and throw it on there that night. USB transfer was slow, but not as slow as I though it would be. Those flash-based players take forever to get songs on them. This one took about 10 seconds per song.
Once I got it working, I had some time to check it out. Some of my first impressions were:
- The dislay uses the Geneva font, the original Mac menu font. Interesting.
- The devices is smaller than I had imagined, but heavy for its size.
- The ear buds are supposed to be great, but I wasn't very impressed with them. The sound didn't seem all that rich and those in-ear types always end up hurting my ears after a few hours.
- The iPod is almost entirely a read-only device. You can put songs into ONE "On-The-Go" playlist, rate songs, and change settings, but that's about it. It feels strange to have all my contacts and calendar on there but not being able to change any of them. Then again, my Treo serves that purpose just fine.
- The scroll wheel is very fast and makes it easy to rip through long lists of artists and songs.
- Going "forward" in the menus is intuitive enough - just hit the button in the middle of the scroll wheel. Going "back" is not. You have to hit the "MENU" button which is above and to the left. Why not just split the middle button in two and put arrows on them?
- Somehow I already had some scratches on the back. The shiny metal case picks up fingerprints and looks dirty really quickly. It sure looks cool when it's clean though.
- You can't view album covers from the MP3's. They might not look great in grayscale, but Apple went to the trouble of making them really easy to add in iTunes, so why not put them on the iPod too? I'd love to browse music visually by album cover.
- The battery status is a little weird. I let it charge all night and when I pick it up in the morning it still displays the charge left from before I charged it. Then sometime later it figures it out and shows the full charge
When I got it home, I just plugged it until my (until now) never-used Firewire port on the back of my G4 and it just started throwing songs on it. Wow, it probably downloaded 2 songs a second and within 45 minutes, all 6093 songs of my collection were on there with 10GB to spare. iSync did its thing too, grabbing my calendar and contacts (previously synced from my Treo) onto the iPod.
After that, I plugged into into my receiver in the living room and let it play. It sounded pretty good and it's nice to have a convenient way to listen to all our music in the living room again.
I've been bringing it to work, running the line out of the dock into the computer and playing them through my computer speakers. That's a nice way to listen to music and I always have a little display showing me what's playing and an easy way to pause it. It's definitely a cool little device. I'm especially looking forward to using it on plane trips and in the car. I just need an iTrip. Maybe I could buy one for myself for my 29.5th birthday coming up in a few weeks. :-)
Every day I use Firefox, I find something else about it that just kicks ass. It's mostly little stuff, but quickly improves the way I've been doing things for years.
Some people have switched for "religious" (Micro$oft sux!) reasons. Other people have made their lists of why to switch. I've just found it to be a better hammer, so I guess this is my list of why you should switch:
- Favorite icons (the little icons for websites) show up everywhere. It's mostly eye candy, but it makes it easy to identify bookmarks.
- The Live HTTP headers extension makes debugging http easy. I used to use a program called naviscope, but it slowed down browsing because it tuns as a proxy server. It also crashed a lot.
- View source is syntax highlighed and has good searching abilities. IE uses notepad.
- The javascript console allows you to jump directly to the line an error occurs on. That's a huge timesaver.
- Tabbrowser extensions makes tabbed browsing nearly perfect. You can save a group of tabs so when you start up your browser all the pages you've loaded come back.
- I haven't been able to make it crash yet.
Overall I've been very impressed with this browser that isn't even a 1.0 yet.
Last weekend I was literally wading around in poison oak. In shorts. There were huge walls of it in Sierra Azul. Once it started getting scary, I liberally applied TechNu and then again later in the day. Once I got home I took a good shower.
Tuesday (poison oak day) came and went and I've only had a few itches and no visible rashes. Either this stuff really works or my body has just given up reacting to poison oak.
More good news is that I've finally figured out how to identify the nasty stuff. Hopefully I'll never go through this again.
Lately, I've been writing a lot of blog entries (mostly on my Treo) and I've got ideas for a bunch more, but I haven't had time to edit and post them.
I think that plague that's been circulating around work has finally caught up with me, so I'm vegging out at home and let's see if I can't get some of those up there...
Man, I love Amazon. It's not that the site is easy to use, loads quickly, has great wishlist functionality, and ships virtually everything for free. It's that you can save a heck of a lot of money if you do it right.
Last week, I decided that I no longer wanted to be the last kid on my cube block to have an iPod. I managed to control myself though and not buy one immediately. I looked around a bit for the best price (from someplace legitimate) and found that Amazon would be cheapest, at least for me.
Checking out dealmac, Amazon regularly has sales on the 40GB iPod for $463 or $36 off. I figured if I waited long enough, they would have another one. Sure enough, today they did and I snatched one up.
But I didn't pay $463. I paid $362 after cashing in gift certificate from my last quarter's referral credit and a certificate from my Amazon.com visa. Of course, this purchase will count towards credit for those same rebates, so I'll get a $30 referral credit (to myself!) and another $12 back eventually for using their credit card.
Net cost: $362.69 or 27% off with no shipping and no tax. Not bad at all. And while I chose the free super saver shipping, they appear to be preparing it to ship right now. Sometimes I've even seen packages arrive from them before I got the shipping notice, literally overnight. Can you tell I'm excited? :-)
40GB is a lot of music. Now I just need to figure out where to get cheap iPod accessories...
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UPDATE: I miscalculated the referral credit and my actual cost was $362! Woo hoo! It arrived today and iTunes is almost done copying 6,000 songs onto it. Yum.