Steve Jobs wrote a love letter to Adobe today, and predictably, the internet is losing its mind. It seems like people land on one side of this argument or the other: Flash is a security hazard/resource pig/aging dinosaur, and Apple is closed/proprietary so this is the pot calling the kettle black. Personally, I’m agnostic about Flash either way, but I do know that it slows my Mac to a crawl (when it doesn’t crash my browser) and chews up battery power like a pothead in a convenience store. Adobe’s claims to the contrary are pitiful.
I’d really, really be happy if I could find a reason for why my MacBook Pro decides to wake itself from sleep at some point on my way into work every morning. I’m annoyed because sometimes I won’t know about it for a half an hour, after which I pull it from my bag and find that it’s been cooking itself to dangerous temperatures without going back to sleep—something which exacerbates the issues I’ve been having with the display. I’ve found some mentions of the problem here and there, but a year’s worth of sleuthing has turned up nothing conclusive.
At this point, I’d really just like to have a new laptop.
For some reason, my hosting provider’s pipes have been incredibly slow lately, which means this site is slow as dirt. That makes adding old content that much more time-consuming. It took me an hour to add the second half of September 2004 this evening, while jumping around doing other things.
I’ve been working on a WordPress-based portfolio site for a friend of ours, and over the course of the last couple of weeks I’ve dipped a toe back into working with PHP, which has been fun and challenging. This evening I was able to pull some snippets of code from here and there, make some educated guesses, and get a spiffy category display page working in the way that I’d originally imagined—something that I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to do. The site is coming together really well, and our friend sounded excited about it when we talked to her on the weekend.
Meanwhile, the simple fix I thought I had planned for the Slattern is not so easy after all. I read that simply manually cranking the sunroof motor would seal the window, but I couldn’t get it to budge on Sunday. So I have to pick up some Torx screwdriver bits and tear down part of the sunroof in order to slide the tracks back into place whenever the sun decides to come back out this week; in the meantime, I’m back in the Jeep. I guess it’s a good thing we haven’t sold that yet, huh?
My friend J. just stopped in my office with a beautiful new iPad and let me monkey around with it for ten minutes or so. It is as amazing as you may have heard. It’s so amazing, in fact, that I want one desperately, although I can’t afford it and don’t really need it. I’d buy it in a heartbeat if I was doing a lot of traveling. Apple is going to sell a million of these things.
At some point I’ll need to buy one so that I can design for it. Right now, there are other important things to spend money on.
From the NYT: Line2 Allows iPhone Users to Sidestep AT&T. Genius. There was a product with about 80% of the featureset called TalkPlus five years ago, something I had a hand in working on (and very nearly joined the company).
It appears, via a very interesting viral marketing campaign, that Valve will be releasing Steam, Half-Life, and Left 4 Dead on the Mac sometime in the immediate future. I’ve finished Half-Life 2 on the Xbox (one word: FANTASTIC), and they’ve only released the follow-up episodes on the 360. So I will be seriously considering a subscription.
Update: Confirmed.
“We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac and the Xbox 360,” Cook said.
I was really beginning to enjoy using Photoshop CS4, up until the point it started crashing randomly. This has been twice in one day. That’s twice more in one day than CS3 managed in the entire month of December.
Saturday afternoon, while Finn was down for a nap, I decided to try something I’ve meant to do for months. After having left it alone in disgust since early January, I finally went back out and straightened up the side porch last weekend. All of the extra bales of pink fiberglas got stacked in one pile, the clouds of blown fiber were swept up, and I filled two contractor’s bags full of assorted garbage to be hauled away. This past Saturday afternoon, in one last-ditch effort, I went back out and screwed three sheets of plywood and a bit of drywall over the open area between the front porch roof and the side room, sealing off the area above the porch into a closed cavity. I also adjusted the relief valve on the radiator closest to the front door and made sure the shutoff valve was open (it wasn’t).
The difference in the new office has been dramatic and astounding. I left the french doors closed Saturday night, as we always do, and when I stepped out there Sunday morning the front porch was warmer than the living room. It stayed like that for the rest of the day. Sunday night it got down to about 30° outside, and as I sat in the office typing, my hands were warm—and I didn’t need to wear fleece. It was more comfortable out there than sitting in the dining room, as a matter of fact. Opening the door between the front office and side porch produces a noticeable outrush of air, which confirms my suspicion that the area above the porch was subject to constant airflow, negating any heat-retaining properties of the insulation above.
After some sweat, cursing, and great exertion, we have the new laser printer sitting between our desks in the office. It’s literally a tank—I’d say over 200 lbs., and not small enough to jockey around with only two people. We had some very appreciated help from Aunt C. and Dr. G., who were gracious and kind enough, after humping the new one inside, to help me get the old one out to the Jeep. I hooked everything up, fired off a few test prints, and got the seal of approval from Mama. It’s loud, there’s no powersave mode, and the fan stays on constantly, which means it’s really better suited in a side office or well-ventilated closet, but that’s an inconvenience I’m willing to put up with for the sheer utility and flexibility of this thing. We’ll just keep it turned off when we don’t need it. Meanwhile, I brought the Xerox in to work this morning, got it set up and tested in a mixed-OS environment, and everything seems to be working as advertised.
Finn used her potty for the fourth time this evening. Sitting in her highchair, watching us as we made dinner, and eating vegetables, she got the worried look on her face and made a preliminary grunt. Jen asked her if she needed to use the potty, and she replied simply, “Potty.” We all sat down and read a book together, and the distraction made for a satisfying and successful outcome. We harbor no illusion that she will be trained by age 2, but if she continues asking for it, we’re going to keep offering it.
All of this really couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I’ve been battling a debilitating feeling of ennui the last couple of weeks, in part because I don’t feel like I’ve made many advances lately. Work has been relatively constant, my family is healthy and happy, and we are blessed with a daughter who is whip-smart and surprising us with new discoveries every day, but for me personally, I’ve been in a bit of a rut with projects here at the house and at work. These small things have got me motivated to start pushing forward again, and that’s a feeling I like to have.
Step 1: Start carrying the camera everywhere again, and take pictures.
I answered another Craigslist ad this morning, for a piece of hardware we’ve been dreaming about for years: a tabloid-sized color laser printer. Now, some of you may recall an earlier post where I’d bartered some services for just such a beast, and you’re thinking, doesn’t he have one of these already? What an idiot. Well, we do have one of these, but it’s not as good as the one I just bought.
This one is a Color LaserJet 8550DN, which is the top-of-the-line circa 2001 or so. What makes it better than the Xerox we’ve got is duplex printing, IP-based networking (as opposed to AppleTalk only), and three extra pickup trays for various sized media. It even came with its own stand. The consumables are about the same price, and this unit actually prints out an estimate of remaining consumable life. We could conceivably retire our B/W printer and use this one by itself.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to get it out of the car.
Wow. We had FIOS installed this afternoon, and at first blush, I’d say it’s faster than my connection at work 7 times faster than my work connection. Speedtest says we’re rocking 15mbps download and 5 mbps upload—roughly three times as fast as our old DSL connection. I poked around through the router settings and found that there’s a DYNDNS setup page, so I created a new account (my third in seven years) and set up the router to test at work tomorrow. Online, some people say that non-static IP FIOS accounts are blocked outbound, but I’m not sure yet.
Tomorrow, I have to lock the wireless network down tighter (WEP to WPA2, turn SSID broadcast off) and tweak out some settings, but so far I’m digging this.
Update 2.17: the IP address resolves but I can’t ping the router, most likely because all inbound connections are turned off. I’ll have to dig into the settings a bit further to investigate.