Through a completely random scan, I found a site which has a user-contributed list of photobooths by state. Apparently there’s one in the basement of the American Visionary Arts Museum, which I would like to visit sometime soon.
Jen came upstairs as I was hunched over the computer to show me this. With the exception of the basket, everything in there came out of our garden, and there’s a lot more to come. We have a ton of corn coming in, the squirrels seem to have left the second wave of beans alone, and there are several eggplant growing larger. The green peppers are getting pretty big, too. Plus, we’ve already used a couple bushels of basil leaves.
!!! Holy CRAP, I want to buy this place and live in it! (via)
update: I had no idea these were in Waldorf! Apparently, though, the gubmint wants someone to come and tear them down.
Tickets are being purchased for another business trip, this time to sunny Orlando, home of the Mouse. It’s been a few years since we were there (This child is now a part-time model and Harvard law professor), but we had lots of fun while we were there; instead of relying on Corporate America to entertain us, I went looking for some alternatives. Jen has already been to Gatorland and Kennedy Space Center, but I’d like to see both, if possible. Any suggestions?
Saturday evening Jen treated her sister, her sister’s boyfriend and I to a crab feast on the picnic table out back. Happy Birthday to the twins, and thanks for the Old Bay, baby.
That’s a Seagate ad, spied in the Towson CompUSA this morning. They make hard drives. You may have heard of them.
Bush Aide: Military Could Go Into Pakistan.
So, let me break this down a little here. Our president, whose approval numbers are in the dumper, but who still controls the Senate, has a plan to make America love him again: He’s thinking about going into Pakistan to get Bin Laden because Musharraf hasn’t done so.
I can’t think of a more misguided foreign policy that that, other than, perhaps, just nuking Russia for the hell of it. Pakistan is already a pretty shaky ally, and Musharraf by all accounts is walking a thin line between secular progress and another Islamic state. (Remember, Pakistan and India have been lobbing ‘test nukes’ at each other for ten years, and Pakistan is also pretty cozy with China.) What our government still hasn’t grasped is the fact that things aren’t black and white like they insist on believing—and why their policy in Iraq has gone so badly. A thousand years of tribal, ethnic, and religious quarrels between hundreds of separate groups is not going to miraculously work itself out after the tanks enter town and everyone gets a Hershey bar.
The simple idea that the leadership of this country is even considering entering another country and destabilizing the government there—can anybody say Cambodia?—makes me shudder. I hope to god the commanding generals find their balls and talk some sense into the cowboys in the White House.
Also, why isn’t this the top headline in today’s news? Seriously, in about 30-point type?
This is the front end of a beautiful little Austin-Healey I spied in a parking garage where I’ve been doing some consulting this week. It took a herculean effort not to commit Grand Theft Convertible, so I opted for pictures instead.
What rock have I been living under that I missed Pandora? I mean, seriously, where the fuck have I been? Enter a couple of artists you like, start the playlist, and edit to your heart’s content. I’ve already found three albums I want to buy based on my love of drum & bass/trip hop/DJ mix, and other suggested artists I already like have come up in the mix. Plus, it works with a Squeezebox, another electronic gadget I lust after.
Or, maybe I should finally just subscribe to XM Radio.
From TidBITS this week: a review of OfficeTime, another time tracking app for OS X (Windows version in beta). From what the review says, it has more features than our current tracking app, On The Job, including iCal integration, report generation, expense tracking, and flexible category pricing (handy when doing tasks with different hourly rates.) The review was good, so I’m going to try it out for a while.
We went to see the new Harry Potter movie this weekend, and everybody in our party enjoyed it very much. I’m going to have to read all those books after all.
The Apple Store called yesterday to inform me that IdiotCentral, my MacBook Pro, was finished and ready to be picked up. “We didn’t even need to replace the logic board,” the Genius told me. “It was the LCD.”
I stopped in this morning, weaved past the consumers ogling the iPhone display, and a nice tattooed associate brought my baby back to me. Within two minutes I had signed the paperwork and was ready to leave—with a gentle reminder that AppleCare might be a good idea for a portable.
My new screen is bright and clean, and the hinge is actually a little tighter now. After a failed attempt to migrate my data back onto the machine this afternoon, I rooted out the cause (permission issues) and I’m now 2 minutes away from restarting into my old work environment—not a day too soon. At the client site where I worked on Friday, the guys helping me get up to speed (and the IT guy they sent over) looked at my battered eight year old stunt laptop and shook their heads in amazement. (Apart from a failure to be able to connect to their wireless network, my eight year old laptop worked fine, thank you.)
Overall, besides a week’s wait to have the unit repaired, my customer experience was flawless and professional, something I’ve come to expect from Apple, and something I always recommend to friends.
Last night at 2AM, I finished a month-long project I’ve been working on late nights and on weekends: consolidating, normalizing and archiving my master music library to a backup disc so that I can swap drives around. To make a long story short, the drive in my iMac music server went bad enough that I can’t use it as a boot disc anymore, so I had to compare the music on two separate drives (the working iTunes library and the backup I made a few months ago), make sure the backup was updated, and then get the bad drive ready for its new job. I tried using a couple of utilities for this task, SuperSync and syncOtunes, and found them lacking in many different respects. SyperSync does a pretty fair job of working through two iTunes libraries to find duplicates and differences, but its UI is a nightmare of little icons, buttons, and lists, and the ‘filtering’ features are arcane and nonintuitive. I found myself spending more time reading the manual repeatedly to make sure I didn’t erase anything than I did syncing files, so I gave up on it. syncOtunes semed to work, but my experience was that it didn’t find all the duplicates or missing files. Instead, I resorted to looking through side-by-side folder directories and comparing file sizes to see where I had differences from one side to the other. This was time-consuming and tedious, but it satisfied the anal-retentive part of my brain and helped me prune the duplicates and bad files from the library.
My plan is to build a Smart Folder for the iTunes server, which will import any music file I add into iTunes and then write out a logfile of the additions so that I can keep track of the changes. I had a basic version of this on the old music server I ran at work, but I found it would get backed up as iTunes added the files and cancel itself out, which was unreliable and annoying. I’d also like to make a script that will create a record of which files get metadata additions or changes so that I can update the backup drive, but that’s a little more involved.
Carbibles.com, a site written by a non-expert in a normal (and UK-based) tone about, well, car stuff. Interesting reading. (via)
I’m doing some research on automating workflows for a client, and I figured I’d need to brush up on my Applescript. Here’s a link to the Applescript Sourcebook, a fantastic collection of tips, tricks, and lists of scriptable applications. Through this page I realized I might be able to use the Automator to build my workflow—something I hadn’t even considered. Automatorworld has a pile of workflows and actions, although it’s weighted towards the Apple-authored applications.
Update: FontDoctor, the app I’m trying to automate, crashes with a -609 error (connection is invalid), even when I use the included scripts.
Update: This error simply means the Applescript can’t run because the application crashes.
I saw this in a parking lot on a way to a client meeting this morning. It’s a miniature pole dancer that hangs off a car radio antenna.
Our power blinked out at a little before 2PM this afternoon. I hope this is not a common occurrence this summer, because handling conference calls at the local Panera with my backup laptop is not optimal.
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