Category Archives: uncategorized

Just found out that Comcast named a date for cable modem access in my neighborhood – Monday. Woohoo! What stinks is that I won’t know if I can afford it now until HealthGuard makes a decision about my wife’s surgery. I’ve waited four years for high speed access at home, and now I have to keep waiting. Hrmmmm.

Saw Fellowship of the Ring again tonight. What an awesome movie. It’s even better the second time. Ian McKellan deserves the Oscar. He is Gandalf. I also thought that Viggo Mortensen was awesome as Aragorn/Strider.

Not to be one of those Tolkien snobs, but there were a few parts of the movie where I felt the story was marred. The first was when Frodo and Sam left the Shire. I thought it was a bit contrived how they just happened to bump into Merry and Pippin in Farmer Maggot’s fields. The “conspiracy” in the book was much better. I also felt that Lothlorien was a bit rushed. Lothlorien, and Galadriel in particular, were just “weirder” in the movie somehow. I don’t know. But I’m nitpicking – I thought the movie was absolutely wonderful, and definitely Oscar-worthy.

People that complain about privacy crack me up. You know what? These people obviously don’t have kids. Grace will be three in May, and I have no privacy at all, even in my own home. I can’t even go to the bathroom in private.

Privacy. Humph.

The flu/cold/virus/bronchitis/whatever I had seems to be on the way out. I’m going to try to start exercising again tomorrow. I feel like a sloth. I haven’t been on the NordicTrac since last Tuesday.

Mmmmmm . . . HTML parsing in REALbasic. I have a working prototype. It doesn’t do much yet. Grabs the title, and does bold, italic, and underline. Task for tomorrow: text color and background color. If time allows, font color and text size. If things go really, clickable links in blue, but that will probably have to wait until Thursday.

For what it’s worth, I’m still using my REALbasic blogger application to post to my weblog. It’s pretty cool, but it requires an OS X only AppleScript. I’d like to get XML-RPC working with RB native code so I can compile for OS X, Classic Mac OS, and Win32. That would be pretty sweet. And with my HTML parsing, I can even include a preview button. Yeeha!

Grace and I are both feeling better. Jen’s surgery is scheduled for April 9. Now for the fight with HealthGuard.

So I call my pharmacy last night around 4:15 to order a refill on my cough syrup. They have a special, automated hotline for just such an occasion. I type in my prescription number and my customer number, and then it asks me what time I would like to pick up my prescription.

I figure they close at 5:00 on Sunday, so I type 4:45. “That does not give us enough to complete your prescription,” says the attendant. “Please enter a time between 5:16 PM and 6:00 PM.”

Cool! They’re open until 6:00! Now I don’t feel like a putz for waiting so long to call it in. I type 5:30. “Your order has been accepted.” And I wait.

At 5:30 I go to the pharmacy, only to discover that they closed at 5:00.

Now I’m angry and confused, so I go home and cough myself to sleep.

Viral bronchitis, possibly influenza. Either way, I feel pretty lousy. Started Tuesday morning with a slight tickle in my chest. I got worse and worse as Tuesday wore on. Get home and had a slight fever. Missed work yesterday and today. Today I got higher than 101 several times. My throat is raw from coughing, but the coughing is mostly useless anyway.

Thank goodness for my AirPort. I can lie in bed with my TiBook and get some work done: catching up on emails, reading articles online, etc. AirPort is awesome. I’ve always liked it, but this week I truly appreciate it.

Henrico County Schools recently bought iBooks for students. After some problems (pirated software, pornography), the district recalled the iBooks, tightened the security and gave them back to the students. A senior wrote this article in response to the school’s move. She ends the article: With this new technology comes a paradox and a pressing question that is here to stay: Public schools and technology, a right or a privilege? Well, it’s most definitely a privilege, not a right. If you abuse the privilege, as some students obviously did, you lose some freedoms. You want the freedom back? Earn it. Everybody. Is it unfair that a few students can ruin it for everybody? You bet. But that’s how life works.

Ahhh. My machine has a fresh, clean copy of Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. Freed up quite a bit of hard drive space. Had a few troubles with data migration.

My boss told me that you could just move your OS X user folder from the old machine to the new. Well, I did, and all of my stuff was unusable since it was now all owned by root. Crap. So I went to the Terminal and fixed it, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was a pain.

My iTunes library became hopelessly corrupt somehow, so I had to recreate that. And my Tony Hawk saved games had their permissions all screwed up. But that was easy to fix.

The hardest part was pruning fonts from my old OS 9 folder. I had a lot of dead weight in there.

Check Slashdot’s new Apple section. Nice.

My Titanium has returned from Apple Service. Woohoo! I’m building up a fresh, clean version Mac OS X (actually, 10.1.3 since it was released today). Now I can rid myself of mySQL, FrontBase, OpenBase, and several other databases that I’ve tried. Folks made really nice installers for those databases, but no uninstall facility whatsoever.

After working with the various databases and how they work with REALbasic, I decided on PostgreSQL, but I couldn’t remove any of the others!

I’ve completed my first REALbasic app! It’s based on a GPL’d AppleScript called BlogScript by WebEntourage. I doubt I’ll release it anytime soon, but I’m using it right now to post this text. Mac OS X only, though. Next I’d like to figure out XML-RPC so I can do Blog posting from OS 9, OS X, and Windows.

What’s the difference between Carbon and Cocoa and why should I care? Great article by Geoff Perlman, CEO of REAL Software, Inc. They make REALbasic.

The Anti-Bloggies. Check out the sponsors and prizes.