Breaking Windows

New Mac Pro, missing backed up files

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:28:47 -0500

Got my Mac Pro this morning. That is like opening your gifts at Christmas of course. Plug in my external firewire drive that I had The Answer Factory copied from my semi-FUBAR drives, and there is nothing in my Home directory, save for the Desktop folder. Well, I need that, but Documents and Library are a bit more important.

The bestest FedEx delivery person EVAR!

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:10:33 -0500

This is a pretty good story. FedEx tried to deliver a package to my office this morning (my Mac Pro) at 8:45 AM. No one was there, the intern doesn't get there until 9, and I am sure haley got there at a similar time. But since the FedEx delivery lady knows me (I get a lot of games delivered via FedEx) she drove over to my apartment and knocked on my door. Shocked, stunned, I said yes please leave them here! I sign for them, and I have my Mac Pro today instead of having to wait until tomorrow. I just wish I knew her name. Because she is the best FedEx delivery person ever! Major kudos for getting my computer to me this morning.

Always tastes better when it's free

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:06:09 -0500

As I walk into McDonalds today I see J.D. Pooley taking photos of the new McCafe setup (think Starbucks inside McDonalds, which is very odd since the new store layout seems very Starbucks-y) and J.D. says "hey you gotta try one of these." I ended up getting a free mocha for free out of it. Right place, right time. Of course it helps knowing the photogs at the local paper, too.

Time Warner Cable, not very proactive

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:41:52 -0500

So my cable modem has been working like crap lately. Have had to reset it once a day, sometimes more, because I could not get on the Internet. I finally called them and find out that my modem is in "very bad health" and that the green/yellow/red indicator light for the health of my modem is in the red zone. Really nice of them to tell me. I could have someone come out or I could just take it down to the TWC store and swap it out. I chose to go down to the store, as I don't want to wait four days for the appointment and have to be home "between 9 and 5" for the guy to show up at 4:58 PM. While swapping out and getting a new cable modem the lady at the desk tells me that my account has "old codes" on it and that she is updating my billing, and it will save me $5 a month. I was "grandfathered in" and was under a plan they no longer use. Really, I wonder how long I could have been saving $5 a month. Scratch that, I do not want to know. So not only does TWC not tell you when they know well and good when THEIR cable modem is failing on you, but I would not have gotten $5 off a month had I not made the trip the TWC store. So, why the hell couldn't the CSR I talked to on the phone have caught the fact that I was not on the correct monthly plan? Gee, I wonder. Really wonderful ISP, that.

Mac Pro has been ordered

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:06:20 -0500

As of October 2 my newest Mac has been ordered, a Mac Pro. This will be my first Intel-based Mac. Considering how fast our office Intel iMac is, I can't wait. I should have it before Friday. Here are the full specs. Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core) 2GB (2 x 1GB) 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB (Two dual-link DVI) Two 16x SuperDrives AirPort Extreme card (Wi-Fi) Apple Mighty Mouse Apple Keyboard (English) + User's Guide Accessory kit AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro I don't like the mighty mouse at all, but at least it has two buttons. I hate the touch sensitive "buttons" though, and I am not sure if I will use the new keyboard either. We have the new style keyboard on the office iMac and it is too low profile for my tastes.

Twitter needs categorization in the form of sets

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:56:24 -0500

Since a lot of news sites are using Microblogging as another way to get their headlines out, I think Twitter needs to adapt to this change too. I think it would be very beneficial to the overall design if you could create "sets" of people you follow. This is similar in design to how Facebook and now MySpace has introduced sets of users. This would allow a Twitter user create a set of news sources, a set of close friends, a set of co-workers, etc. and be able to switch between them. This would be mondo excellent for people who follow hundreds if not thousands of other twitter users.

Don't Vote

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:34:18 -0500

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Elgg 1.0 Install Script is Finicky as Hell

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:10:25 -0500

EDIT 2: It bleeping works. I honestly do not know how the installer can work at meancode.biz and have access to mod_rewrite and that .htaccess file and not have the correct access/privileges to mod_rewrite and the .htaccess file on spoiledlittlebitch.com. For that, I have no answer. To fix my problem I *DID NOT* do what the Wiki said to do (it says to add

AllowOverride all

to .htaccess which breaks the entire domain giving me a wonderful error 500) but did manually copy the entire htaccess_dist into my .htaccess file. It should be noted that for my first install, I *DID NOT* have to do that. EDIT: This has been documented. Though I do not understand how this could be an issue with my mod_rewrite, as meancode.biz and spoiledlittlebitch.com are on the same bleeping account. So I installed Elgg 1.0 the other day as a test. Went by with flying colors. Add the MySQL info, done. Not so today. Since I am installing it on the same account, just a different domain, I figured I would try and use the same database. I can do this with Movable Type, it is a great feature. Just point a fresh install to an existing (good) database, and you are set.

Mozilla Thunderbird is SLOW

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:44:17 -0500

So, I am still using my dinky Dell laptop, still no MacPro. So Thunderbird is the obvious choice for email, unless I go full out and use Outlook - which I do not want to do, this is a temporary thing. Besides, I like Mozilla and Firefox freakin' rocks. I have tried out Thunderbird before but never used it on a daily basis. Well I can tell you from using it for about a week that it is bloody slow! I upgraded to the latest version. And it still displays, and most annoyingly, deleted emails from the list slower than... paint dries. I mean click or select emails, hit 'delete' key, wait five to ten seconds, and then finally watch the junk go *poof* from your inbox. Outlook 2003 on this Dell does not lag like this. So now I deleted Thunderbird entirely from my computer and am now using Outlook until I get my MacPro.

Gems on Display Site and Newsletter Redesigned

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:19:41 -0500

Gems on Display has been a big project. The site got a major overhaul graphically, and a number of the shopping cart functions were tweaked, changed, or removed for usability. Haley did the design and Dacor, who hosts the site, made all the shopping cart modifications. That leaves me in the middle of taking the design from Illustrator and making it work in HTML, adding some nice Jquery effects along the way. The new site is really sharp and something I am very proud of. Even more proud, however, is the new newsletter, which gets sent to quite a few people monthly. For that we are using PHPList on a dedicated server. It handles the task with ease. I am most proud of this because I was able to get the newsletter to look 99% the same in GMail, Yahoo! Mail, MSN Mail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Entourage, and pretty much any other POP/IMAP mail client. That is no small feat. It takes a very odd assortment of old school HTML tricks (think nested tables and transparent .gif images) and very basic CSS to pull off and work in all the major free webmail and desktop email clients. Add to that the fact that PHPList automatically sends out text-based versions for those who do not have (or have it turned off) HTML capabilities in their email client, and this is a vast improvement. The design of the new newsletter mirrors that of the new site design.

Pro Wedding Entertainent Site Redesigned, Photo Gallery Added

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:12:46 -0500

Pro Wedding Entertainment recently relaunched with a new design and new photo gallery. One of the few sites we do in good old Dreamweaver, no CMS to speak of. Gallery added is done in Gallery, which is a nice lightweight photo gallery app. This is the first time I tried out the Spry validation included in Dreamweaver CS3, and it works pretty easily. Makes for a nice looking form. Haley Wilkins designed the site, I just did the DW templates. Home page took a bit of work because of the image in the footer, other than that, nothing too fancy. Nice simple site, much easier to read than the one it replaced.

Camo.org Redesigned, Multilingual Site Added

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:26 -0500

CAMO, or Central American Medical Outreach is a project I got involved with because of my good friend Dan Kelly. The site has been live for over a month now. It uses MTOS 4.1 and has both Spanish and English sites. Both sides have blogs, too. This means that the people in Honduras can blog in Spanish if they chose to, though I see they have not updated it, This is another site I only did the coding on, Dan Kelly did the design work. The site is a vast improvement over the existing site, and includes a lot of functions not found on the original site, including a donation form so they can accept credit card donations.

Breaking 20,000 Gamerscore

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 02:32:49 -0500

I have been meaning to post this for about a month now, but at the end of August I broke 20,000 Gamerscore points. Yes, this is another notch on the useless-achievements-in-life list. Oddly enough it was harder than you would think. I actually was sitting at 19,999 for a couple days before I sat back down and got some achievements in Assault Heros 2 (see, I am not as obsessed with these things as some people I know).

Breaking 1500 at Blogcritics

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:40:19 -0500

Soon, I'll be breaking a milestone for Blogcritics. With one more post, I'll have 1500 articles on the site. While not the highest count by any means, that's 300 articles a year on average, a crap load of writing to say the least. I don't write anywhere near as much as I used for the site, so I was surprised that I was close to anything notable. I'm not sure if I should do something special or just let it go. The next article on tap is a Blu-ray review to the simply fucking terrible sequel to Rest Stop. Hardly a celebration. But if I don't do anything special, there's always 2000, which sounds more impressive anyway I guess. If someone has an idea, feel free to post it here, but either way, something is going up in the next day or two regardless.

Peggle Nights Swag

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:33:47 -0500

You might have heard that a little known game called Peggle Nights just came out. Check out this super cute plush that came in a box this morning!