Looks like the iPhone made a big splash yesterday. I don’t have one yet, but I think I’ll take the plunge in a month or so to replace my aging Motorola v551. It was pretty funny to see a local pseudo-celebrity make a complete ass of himself for the 11PM newscast; when I knew him seven years ago, he was Johnny shit-on-Apple.
Yesterday we spent a good bit of time selecting, refining, and printing some photos so that we could finally hang something on our living room wall. A few days ago we spent a pile of money at IKEA for some black frames in assorted sizes and came up with an arrangement that would make a design professor proud. Guests who’ve visited must think we’re strange because our house has featured virtually nothing on the walls in the main living areas—no pictures of us, no posters, wall hangings, tapestries, or animal pelts. I admit, that is pretty weird. After all the hard work we’ve put into this dump, it’s great to finally put our personal mark on the walls and see familiar faces looking back at us.
Finally, in preparation for the Fourth of July celebration (and to take advantage of the relatively balmy weather), we did some cleaning in the yard around the woodpile, which was threatening to swallow the southwest corner of the yard. Two trips and eight boxes of dead wood later, we reclaimed a good portion of our lawn from the creeping english ivy and dead brush. This makes absolutely no difference in the condition of the lawn back there, which looks like a patch of the Kalahari desert—my attempt at tilling and reseeding failed miserably. I’ve recently come to the sad realization that the only thing that will help our back lawn is about five cubic tons of fill dirt and a truckload of sod. And I’ll hire someone else to handle that project, for sure.
Here’s a simple DIY underwater camcorder housing using a surplus ammo box and some high-grade marine sealant. Brilliant.
Shopping carts tucked neatly away under the stairs at the College Park IKEA this afternoon.
I just did a major upgrade from 10.3 -> 10.4 for a client, and ran into a problem with two of ten machines: printing from any application crashed the app without getting to the print dialog. This problem affected all user accounts and did not go away after resetting the Printer Setup Utlility (hold down Option while booting, which nukes all saved printers and preferences.) The culprit: bad/old/flaky HP drivers. The solution: delete the “hp” folder in /Library/Printers/ . Go to HP’s site, download the latest drivers (it’ll be one package containing drivers for everything) and install them as instructed. Then go back to the Printer Setup Utility and set up the printers again. (via)
Hmm. Mossberg seems to like the iPhone. The sealed battery kind of worries me, personally. I like the ability to switch between my carrier’s data network and wi-fi. I don’t know if I’d want to pony up $100 for an extra 4 gigs of memory, but having only 4 gigs would probably get crowded pretty quick.
OK, the D70 dark image issue mentioned elsewhere is fixed; at some point I set the exposure compensation to -2.0 and never returned it to 0.0.
Apparently exposure compensation is a global setting, meaning when I used it in Program mode and switched over to Aperture Priority, for example, the EC setting was still -2.0 and didn’t reset itself like my Canon does. While annoying (all the photos I shot in Curacao suffered from this oversight) it’s another thing I’ve learned and won’t forget again.
Our grape arbor is covered with bunches of fruit, a far cry from last year, when whatever it produced was devoured by birds in one afternoon. The lack of water and steady heat has been perfect for growing grapes, along with Jen’s judicious pruning earlier this year; now we just have to figure out how to protect them from varmints (a large bird net has been purchased already) and when to harvest them properly.
Gizmodo tallied up the total cost of ownership of an iPhone for the two-year minimum plan: $1974.76 for for 450 minutes a month and the 4GB iPhone. Ouch! I’ll have to add up my current phone/plan cost is (it’s only a 1-year) and see what the difference is.
I took a look at Movable Type 4 this afternoon, among other things, and poked around the documentation so far. It looks purty; let’s see if the upgrade is easy, or if it’s as nightmarish as the 3.15-3.2 point release was last year.
I rented a 40′ ladder to finish painting the siding on the house this weekend. I painted the house blue three years ago, and the west peak (the highest point on the house, at nearly four stories) was still grayish-white because my 28′ ladder won’t reach. It’s nice to not have that hanging over my head anymore—literally.
The photos are shit because the light meter in my D70 is messed up somehow…more on that later.