rants. raves. random information.
I haven’t had the time to keep up the posting here but I have still been sharing out anything interesting that hits my Google Reader feed, which I then share out here. That feed gets updated all the time and usually has much more interesting things happening than what I come up with.
Chances are good your day went better than mine. After a few hours at work today I made the really awesome discovery that I had somehow ripped my pants. After heading home to change clothes I was on my way back towards the office when a terrible screeching sound starting coming from the front of the car. It was a lot like the sound a train makes when it is passing by and the rails are just screaming for mercy.
So I turned around and headed back home, changed my clothes to something I could get dirty, took the front wheel off the car, got the noise to stop, took the car for a test drive to make sure it was OK, came back to the house, changed clothes (again), and headed back to the office.
On the way back I needed to stop at Best Buy to pick up some blank DVDs. I passed a large gray van while looking for a parking space and did not see the Subaru WRX backing out of the space next to it. The driver had to hit the breaks to avoid hitting me. I parked one row over and was surprised to find the woman that was driving the Subaru waiting for me. Then the screaming started. She was really ticked off and ran out of swear words to call me. I think she actually started making up a few.
So I decided to try something new. Normally I would have thrown it back at her with both barrels but this time I just tried apologizing. She kept on yelling. I said it was an accident and I said I was sorry. She kept on screaming. It said, relax, I said I was sorry and I didn’t see you pulling out because of that van. The screaming continued. I tried one last time to be nice about it and even made sure to smile and said, last time - I’m really sorry.
Then it happened. She hit me with one final “you fat f***” and then gave me the finger and drove off. Hopefully it made her feel better.
There are a number of lessons to be learned here:
So the day was not one of my better ones but I’m sticking with the high road. I hope your day was better than mine!
Santa brought the kids a Wii Fit for Christmas and we’ve been playing with it since. If you have a Wii you know that one of the fun things about it is creating a character that resembles yourself, called a Mii. You can then use that Mii as your character when you play Wii games. When we first got the Wii we all created our little Miis and made them look as close to ourselves as possible. I’m not the smallest guy you’ll ever meet so I created my Mii to be as big as possible, but even Nintendo has its limits and my little Mii didn’t look all that bad.
With the Wii Fit Nintendo has decided to really make the Mii match your weight as I quickly found out. Once I got on the Wii Fit it took me through some tests and then pumped my Mii up to match my weight. My poor little Mii must have a glandular problem now because he is so plumped up that he looks stuffed and uncomfortable. It’s too accurate! Poor little guy. I guess I better start using that Wii Fit to get my Mii (and me) back down to a more reasonable density.
We decided to head out to Toys R Us to do a little browsing and get a few ideas. 90 minutes later it was over. Shopping done for the holidays and I’m pretty sure we single-handedly pumped enough cash back in to the system that we no longer need any kind of bailout.
We were not planning on buying a single thing today, but the sales were too good to pass up. The store was packed to the point it was hard to get a cart around in there.
Looks like the stores are going to get agressive with pricing to get people out there spending.
I’ve been fighting an issue with OS X’s Mail application and it has finally driven us apart. You see, I have a bunch of friends that like to send me email with various jokes in the form of video attachment and the problem is that once I open the email, Mail takes the CPU on my MacBook Pro to the ceiling and the fan kicks in. Eventually the only way to stop it is to force quit Mail and restart it.
But lately even that isn’t taking care of it. I’ve tried rebuilding the mailbox that I use via imap with gmail but that only lasts for a short while. So until I get this one figured out Mail and I are on a break. I have turned to Microsoft Entourage and things seem to be fine. I know many really dislike Entourage, but I’ve had pretty good success with it in the past as I used to use it to connect to an Exchange2003 server with work.
Back to the internets to see if I can find the solution.
I never paid much attention to the big red vending machines that have been popping up outside grocery stores in our area. I heard a friend talking about renting a movie from the “big red box” and how easy it was. So we stopped by on our way out of the grocery store and Redbox has definitely gained a customer.
Those of you that know me know I’m all for instant, downloadable gratification. Why go out to rent a movie when I can click a mouse and be watching it before you’d be back from the store? Redbox allows you to rent DVDs for $1 a day. That’s it. No membership. No application. Just select a movie, swipe your credit card, and within seconds you’re on your way home with a movie. As long as you return it by 9pm the next day you’re fine. If not, Redbox takes $1 from your credit card until you return it or you hit $25, which ever comes first.
But Redbox wins in an area I never expected - availability. We wanted to see the movie Baby Mama but it is not available for rental through iTunes and a few other places until 10/8. I could have downloaded it from Amazon.com for $14.99, but there is no way that was going to happen. Too much money. Redbox had it on their new releases sign but it was out of stock, so we picked another movie. The next morning I went online to Redbox.com, searched for Baby Mama, entered my zip code, and Redbox showed me all the Redboxes in our area and Baby Mama’s availability. Since it was now available at the Redbox we just rented from I rented it online and Redbox reserved it for me on that machine. Isn’t connectivity grand?
The really nice thing is you can return the movie to any Redbox, it does not have to be the one you rented from. Since I entered my email address when we rented a movie, I now get email confirmations for rentals, returns, etc. immediately. And I do mean immediately, as I was getting the emails while still standing at the Redbox. Nice touch.
So, current movies, decent availability, online reservation, returns wherever I want, email confirmation, no membership, and $1 rental fee. Looks like someone figured out how to get me out of the house to rent a movie again.
So why can’t iTunes and Amazon rent movies at the same time? Nice job Redbox.
While driving home from a party the other night I was reminded why I don’t like regular radio in Pittsburgh. The song Morning Train (9-5) by Sheena Easton came on and we were both laughing about how long it had been since we heard that one. Then we quickly realized how awful it was. But, it brought up how much Sheena changed once Prince got hold of her. So we started searching YouTube for her videos and were listening to Sugar Walls when it hit me that I may have just heard the worst lyric ever - “blood races, to your private spots.” Lame. That one gets my pick for worst.
But what about the best? I’m not sure if this one is the best or not, but it has stuck with me the longest. It came at a time when I couldn’t stand Bruce Springsteen but the girl I was dating loved him and forced me to listen to him all the time. I’m definitely more of a fan of his these days and my favorite lyric has to be “is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” from The River.
What are your picks for the worst and best lyrics you’ve ever heard?
The main reason I had a jailbroken iPod Touch is because I really liked the game Five Dice. Five Dice is an excellent version of the old dice game called Yahtzee. I was hoping that the developer would bring it to the App store once version 2.0 of the software was out and they came through.
This is not the exact same game that was available for free if you were jailbroken. This version has a lot more polish and the graphics are very professional. The game play is very smooth and the little touches of animation are pretty slick. Another big difference is that the game is no longer free - it costs $3.99.
I’m sure there will be people that enjoyed the jailbroken version complaining about the costs, but I think it is definitely worth the few bucks it costs. The game is every bit as polished as any other professionally developed game and I see no issue with the developers getting paid for their work. 3.99 - what’s that - a cup of fancy coffee or a pack of cigarettes?
Hopefully they will make a ton of money from this little application and put some of it back in to the game to provide over the air multi player capability. That would be pretty cool.
If you grew up playing the game Yahtzee you should take a chance and spend the few bucks it costs to try it out. It’s definitely worth it.
In infrastructure we face outages of systems at any time. When people can’t get to their applications, data, or email one of the most important things we can do is to communicate openly and honestly with them until the issue is resolved. People tend to be a little more understanding of the issue if they at least have some idea of what is going on.
Seeing Apple start to communicate on the recent MobileMe issues is a great start and I hope they start to be more open with any system issues they are facing to help keep everyone more current with information.
I realized a mistake I have been making with purchasing applications from the iTunes App store and the iPhone. I thought it would work like this: