Author Archives: brad

Here’s a list of what not to do during Lord of the Rings. If you are faint of heart, or faint of butt, be warned: the link contains profanity.

Here’s a sample of what not to do:
In TTT when the Ents decide to march to war, stand up and shout “RUN FOREST, RUN!”

More gems await.

Daring Fireball: The entire point of the Macintosh, salve from the onset, was to focus on quality. Anyone who claims Apple could have achieved greater than 50 percent OS market share without sacrificing what makes the Mac the Mac has no comprehension of how Microsoft built the Windows empire.

I’m thinking about switching to a different web host, and I’m soliciting recommendations. Right now, I’m with SurpassHosting, and I’m reasonably content, but I’ve had several outages in the last few days that they say haven’t happened (and to be fair, it’s possible that everything was up from their end, but it doesn’t change the fact that my site was not reachable for two twelve hour periods in four days). At any rate, their prices are hard to beat: I pay about $5 a month for lots of space, 5 gigs of bandwidth, unlimited email, unlimited mySQL, PHP, cgi-bin, Perl, cPanel, Fantastico, etc. It’s a pretty good deal. One thing I’d like to do that they charge extra for is hosting multiple domains, so I could also have bradrhine.com. Anybody want to recommend anyone?

Ananova: A farmer in eastern China didn’t realise his bride was really a man until her fake breasts fell off. Ummm, I’ll refrain from further speculation and just point out that the comments are open.

Here was the planned schedule for the evening:
5:00-ish PM – Leave work
7:00 PM – Small Group
8:40 PM – I duck out of Small Group a few minutes early to make to my first guitar lesson in more than years
9:00 PM – Guitar lesson
10:00 PM – Check email
11:00-ish PM – Sleep

Here’s how it happened instead:
5:00-ish PM – Call from Jen: “Did you see the weather forecast?” “No.” “It’s supposed to start snowing any minute. We’re supposed to get 3-5 inches. Maybe we should cancel Small Group.” “OK, make the calls, but I’m still going to my guitar lesson.”
5:30-ish PM – Arrive home. Jen has called everyone but Charlene, but has called Terry who will contact Linda who will contact Charlene. I look at the forecast and decide maybe I should skip my lesson. I call my guitar teacher and cancel.
6:30 PM – It’s not doing anything outside. If it doesn’t start snowing soon, I’m calling my guitar teacher to see if I can have my lesson after all. Gracie decides to play guitar for a while, and so does Jen.
7:00 PM – Charlene arrives. Whoops. She’s totally cool about it, though, and goes furniture shopping instead.
7:30 PM – Still not doing anything outside. I’m calling my guitar teacher.
7:40 PM – Train of thought interrupted by arrival of father-in-law, who comes bearing gifts: a snowblower. Sweet! He upgraded and gave us his old one. Very cool. A brief but loud demonstration follows.
7:55 PM – Terry calls to ask if Charlene showed up. He had trouble contacting her. No problem.
8:00 PM – I call my guitar teacher. “Hey, it’s not doing anything outside.” “Come on over.”
8:30 PM – Bedtime for Gracie.
8:40 PM – I head out to guitar lessons.
9:15 PM – My 9:00 lesson begins. I learn many cool things.
9:50 PM – I leave for home. It has started to snow after all.

All in all, I’d call it a pretty cool evening.

Go to the terminal, buy cialis and type in this command:

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history | grep “LOTR”

Pretty cool. Generally useless, but pretty cool nonetheless.

Scheme writes on Slashdot: Let’s say 95% of the population were hopelessly hooked to Coke because of unknown addictive agents within it. It tastes like crap – but everybody uses it cause they’re hooked. Pepsi tastes way better, but it’s not a substitute because you can’t get the same fix that you can from the unique taste of Coke. Also, Coke users become extremely hyper and start babbling in a language (Coke-speak) that only other Coke users can understand. Workplaces decide to standardize on Coke-speak, so you must drink Coke if you want a job and be able to communicate. Read more for an insightful analysis of Microsoft and Netscape. Very well done.

I’m posting this entry with Frequency 1.6fc3. I’m hoping to release 1.6 final this week or early next week. 1.6 has all sorts of new goodies, especially in terms of adding more HTML tags to your page more easily. There’s now a popup menu on the editing window that offers 13 HTML elements you can add to your posts, in addition to the venerable bold, italic, and underline buttons. 1.6 also introduces the ability to save and retrieve draft posts on your local drive. Pretty sweet. You can also easily tell Frequency to open your links in new windows. Oh, yeah, and you can choose whatever font you want for editing and for previewing your posts.

As for Tangelo… I’m making progress on the interface, and rolling in any changes from Frequency as I go. The post editing window in Tangelo will be very similar to the post editing window in Frequency. I’ve gotten many compliments on it, and I find it very easy to use, so why mess with a good thing? The biggest question now is what database to use for the backend? I figure I have five choices. The first, and cheapest, is to use REALbasic’s built-in database. The downside is that the database files are quite fragile. I’ve learned to handle them gently, but they can only hold 8K per record (yes, Mike, you read that correctly: 8 kilobytes). This makes storing things like web page templates pretty much impossible. Scratch that. The second choice is Valentina. It would be lightning fast, to be sure, but I don’t have that kind of money to plunk down on Tangelo just yet. Scratch that. Then there’s SQLite Plugin. SQLite is quite cool, but I don’t know if I want to deal with its API. I like the RB DB API a lot, a whole lot, and I’d prefer something that works with it. That gives me more flexibility in the future. There’s SQLite Plugin Pro, which uses SQLite and does use the RB DB API. That’s an option, but not a super-cheap one, unless Will wants to cut me a break. ;). The final choice is to upgrade to REALbasic 5.5 when it comes out and use the new database engine it includes (it removes the 8K limit on records). That’ll cost a bit more than SQLite Plugin Pro, though. But it’s something I want to upgrade to anyway. What to do, what to do. I think I’m going to get SQLite Plugin Pro and upgrade later.

I wouldn’t quite call this fair.

Maybe a penguin would, but I wouldn’t.

It works!