Archive for November, 2004

Yesterday I had the first meeting from Helen’s room scheduled for this week. Tomorrow I have the one I am dreading the most.

Even worse, due to yesterday being an OFIM to remember, with problems and deadlines distracting me all morning, I was late to the meeting. And since I ran up several flights of stairs and all around the floor trying to find the room, I was very frazzled and out of breath when I finally made it. I just love Mondays.

Now for some

I’m still very pleased, and I’m learning my way around more every day. I’m starting to find solid replacements for many of the applications I used on a daily basis. Here’s what I’ve settled on at the moment, but if you know me at all, you’ll know this is subject to change on a daily basis.

I’ve switched from Firefox to Safari. Safari just feels faster, and is very well integrated, but it does lack a couple features which I miss, like tab session saving.

For mail, I’ve switched from Thunderbird to Mail.app. Mail.app is probably the best mail client I’ve ever used. It has everything I liked about Thunderbird, and many things I now can’t live without, like inline spell checking.

Itunes has replaced XMMS and/or Winamp very effectively. I did miss the many plugins I’d found for winamp and XMMS over the years, but I’ve found Quicktime components for many of them.

I’m currently using Adium for IM, but I’m looking around for an alternative, mainly because of bugs like filesending not working and occasional crashes. iChat is close, but it doesn’t support YIM, and has a really a poor conversation logger.

I’m still looking for a good usenet client. Unison is pretty good, and I might end up going with it.

I’ve also been playing with Konfabulator, which is quickly becoming an app I can’t live without. It fills in all the gaps and reminds me of Desktop X from Stardock, only much more cleanly implemented.

I’ve bored you to tears with that list of software and Mac rambling. That should qualify for my villainous deed for today. I hope everyone has a GREAT day. Thanks for reading!

I hope everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving had a highly spiffy Thanksgiving with all the food and fun one could want.

I am so glad I’m not working retail anymore. I used to dread this day all year. Please folks, be nice to the poor retail workers today. They really have nothing to do with the fact that the UBER SUPER SALE items mentioned in the ad were never in stock even at the start of the day, and were simply a ploy to get you in the store. If you feel the urge to scream at someone, find the nearest board member of the chain in question and yell at him/her.

I’m still having fun with the Mac, and it is still managing to puzzle me on occasion. Apple ships a great free IDE called Xcode that I’ve been playing with. It is excellent and I should be very productive with it. Having the familiar GNU tools around makes life even better. I just wish I could figure out WHY my itunes database keeps randomly duping large numbers of songs. I think I figured out how to stop it, but not WHY. I’ve also been playing with fink, which is a mostly source based collection of OSX ports of various open source things. It is all handled by the fink package manager which feels just like apt, so it probably is.

Apple also provides a nice X11 implementation that works right on top of Carbon. It integrates very nicely. Some of the ported apps require this (like The Gimp), but I can’t really tell it is even running other than it being in the process list, which is just how I like things.

I hope everyone has a GREAT day.

Well, I’ve really jumped ship now, and I’ve bought a shiny new dual 2ghz G5. I blame the iPod and my insanity mostly, but it has been a bunch of fun so far. I wrote a rambling boring essay about reasons that might have contributed to the switch.

I love technology and fooling around with the latest gadgets and software. When I first started fooling around with computers as a wee one, I was so intrigued with the idea of being able to have this magical box do what I tell it to do, at least most of the time. Since those days with my Commodore VIC 20, I’ve owned many different computers, and over time some of the magic has gone away.

With each new computer was a new adventure. I’d have a new operating system to learn, new hardware capabilities to play with and usually improved performance. Learning is one of my most cherished hobbies, so I would tackle the new machine with gusto and try to learn as much as I could. I also enjoy sharing what I’ve learned, although I’ve done this less than I should recently.

Alas, I found myself falling into a bit of a slump several years back. I’d lost the constant adventure of learning new things, because I was using Windows, and there wasn’t really much going on in new versions of Windows. Windows also was very obtuse. Things happened for no explainable reason, and the procedure to “fix” problems was often a very unsatisfying thing like a reboot. Then I discovered Linux (Redhat 5.something) and was overjoyed.

I found the mystery again, and had to learn an entirely new way to work. Linux was very open, and problems were almost always solved in a way I could document and remember. But most importantly, it was totally new and I had to learn all sorts of stuff.

Over the years as a Linux user, I’ve reached the point where there are really few surprises left for me. Linux as a platform is moving much more quickly than Windows ever did, but many of the changes are opposite of the direction I’d like to go. I could rant about this, but that is a topic for another really long post. Also, as I’ve become busier, I just don’t have as much time to play with a constantly changing system. My job requirements as a windows developer made it easy for me to switch back to Windows, instead of a stable Linux platform like the excellent Xandros, so I did.

I didn’t much care for running Windows, but I was gaming during much of my free time, and working on windows development projects in the rest. I became used to Windows again. Then I bought an iPod.

I was so happy with the device. It seemed to work exactly as I expected. iTunes (POMG, what is it with the iEverthing??) was fast, intelligent and made it easy for me to do all the things I’d always wanted to do with my various audio players over the years. I’m sure I could have done these things in them, but with iTunes it was easy. I just did what I thought I should do and it worked. The design itself is so elegant and thoughtful that I was floored.

My boss has always been an Apple guy, and we’ve talked quite a bit about all things Apple and the like. He recently bought a Mac with OS X, and has been very pleased with it. He was talking to me about how new everything was to him, and how much fun it was to figure everything out, and it hit me. I wanted to experience that again. I was so sick of the PC platform. I loved the power of Linux, but I wanted something that was designed with more thought and yes probably mostly, I wanted a new toy.

So I got a Mac. And I’m not sorry. It is new and different. It is so much fun. And it even feels a lot like Linux in the ways I wanted. I’ve heard that Mac users are very loyal. I wonder if I’ll become a permenant convert.

Macs are definitely fun, and I’m having a blast figuring everything out. I was very puzzled for a while as to how to open the CD/DVD drive. (there’s a button on the KEYBOARD, POMG) It is lightning fast too, but I suppose it had better be for what I paid for it.

Remember to drink Coke and use Mead notebooks to wallpaper your iPod. Have a great day!

So I mosey over to the coffee machine and get a cup. The person in front of me fills his fifty gallon thermos with ALL of the coffee leaving me none. He does this RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.

Is it just me, or is that really fucking rude?

Yes, it is friday. About bloody time. This week sure dragged on and on and on and on. Halflife 2 is really great. After looking forward to the game all this time, it is nice to be able to finally play it. But it is even nicer that the game is of such amazingly high quality. The first few hours of gameplay have been the most fun I can ever remember having playing a game. Racing around in the canals on that hovercraft/air boat was such a blast. I’m not that far into it yet because it made me get motion-sick for the first time ever. (and the second time last night) I’ve played oodles of 3d games, spent thousands of hours on boats, and never had a moment of trouble. For whatever reason, Halflife 2 makes me motion-sick. It just isn’t fair. Oh, and it has ZOMBIES, so be sure to DRINK COKE. In other news, I seem to be getting passed around from project to project at work. It is starting to make me dizzy. I suppose it could be worse. I could so little to do that I have time to be on a committie. That would be frightening, although I don’t know for whom. I need some icons. Everyone on my friends list has more interesting icons than I do. I feel left out. Happy Friday! falls asleep

So I picked up an iPod over the weekend, after much research and deliberation. (hearing the virtues first hand from  put me over the edge) After using it a couple days now I’m very impressed. The iTunes integration is seamless and fast, and I was able to copy my gigantic nearly 100% (I have some out of print stuff I can’t find) legal 31G music collection over in about 40 minutes. Subsequent syncs to update play count/times etc take only a minute or two. I also bought an album from the music store, and that was a great experience as well. I have had some stability problems with iTunes, which I’m fairly sure are because of my elcheapo AOpen CDR drive. iTunes will just freeze up if I try to rip a CD or burn something. When I remove that drive, all is well and my DVD/CDRW combo drive is faster anyway so I suppose I’ll just give the AOpen away. I really like the Smart Playlist feature, and the party shuffle. That is a great way to discover songs in my 9000+ track collection that I’ve forgotten about. In other news, Veronica Mars was picked up for a full season, which is great news. This show reminds me of both Buffy and Alias, and I’m really enjoying it. You might check it out if that description sounds interesting to you. It is on tonight at 9pm eastern on UPN. In other other news, Halflife 2 is finally out! I haven’t had time to play it yet but it sounds GREAT. I just need to KEEP THE ZOMBIES AWAY WITH MY WALLPAPERED COKE. POMG.

My XP development box at work has beaten Zidane’s uptime record soundly. H:\>uptime cherrytree has been up for: 49 day(s), 2 hour(s), 42 minute(s), 19 second(s) What is the world coming to? Oh, and just in case you didn’t know to do so already, you really should WATCH OUT FOR ZOMBIES.

I finally got around to filling in that mini-bio box on my profile. I guess I missed the mini part, because it is on the long side. The goal I set for myself when writing it was to fill in some of the blanks that reading this journal might leave. I don’t really get into my interests or things like that which you’ve probably already picked up on if you read this. I tend to be a private person, but after reading a few bios of friends and friends of friends, I decided that I’d post the bio anyway. It may dissapear if I lose my courage.

You should pay close attention to this if you own a domain name. A fairly brain-dead change of  ICANN’s transfer rules will make it much easier for registrars to steal your domain registration away from your chosen registrar or even the domain itself. If your current registrar doesn’t allow you to lock the domain, you really should consider switching to a better one. If you are still with Network Solutions, not only are you paying much more than you should be, but you are supporting one of the more evil companies out there. You really ought to switch. Here’s more details from my friend Bob Thompson: If you own a domain name, this is important. In the past, if anyone attempted to transfer a domain name, the current registrar notified the domain owner and waited for approval before transferring the domain to the new registrar. If the domain owner did not respond, the domain transfer was denied. Under new (and inexplicable) ICANN rules that take effect tomorrow, if the domain name owner does not respond, the transfer must be approved. This raises the very real possibility that domain “slammers” will be able to hijack your domain. Note that if you respond to the notification email and explicitly deny the transfer, that still prevents the domain from being transferred, but in this age of spam filters it’s quite possible that you’ll never receive the notification and will lose your domain. Nor is the risk only that your domain will be transferred to another, more expensive registrar, but remain under your control. If I’m reading the rules correctly, a malefactor could transfer ownership of your domain as well. I have all of my domains at GoDaddy.com. GoDaddy offers free “domain locking”, which prevents any unauthorized transfer. If your domain is registered at GoDaddy.com, I strongly recommend that you update your account information to enable domain locking. If your domain is registered at a registrar that does not offer such a feature, I recommend that you transfer your domain immediately to GoDaddy.com or another registrar that does offer domain locking. Under this new and unjust ICANN policy, I foresee a flood of bogus transfer attempts to hijack desirable domain names. Make sure yours isn’t one of them.

I can second his recommendation of Godaddy. I’ve about 10 domains registered with them and they’ve always been very easy to work with, have a great interface to make changes, and one of the lowest prices in the industry. If you’d like to switch to another registrar, but need help / have questions, comment or IM me and I’ll be happy to help if I can.

3300 words. I am so far behind. Whatever shall I do?