Coming soon: A real, original blog post from yours truly, but until then, DON’T WATCH THIS VIDEO!
February 1, 2007
I had kind of been formulating this post for a couple of days, but it really came to the top of my attention list this evening:
A friend of mine texted my phone tonight while I was out, no big deal, right? Well, not really, except I have a landline! My phone provider left a voice message on my answering machine from their “text to landline” service which took my friend’s text message, ran it through a text-to-speech and played it back to me with a date and time attached. Really cool service, I appreciate that guys!
This kind of brought up the issue that I don’t have a cell phone, which is something I’ve been thinking about lately.
The way I see it, there are two or three really good reasons I don’t have a cell phone:
1) I can’t afford one! I’m a broke student at the moment, I’ve made it this far without a phone, so I can’t really justify the expense at the moment. I had a phone for about 6 months last year, which was because an employer wanted me to have a phone so badly that he was willing to pay for that phone and the service. This actually ended up confirming my lack of desire for a phone permanently attached to me.
2) A cell phone is basically a leash. I really like being able to disconnect – all of the internet services I use on a daily basis, no matter how invasive they are or how explicit they are about my personal life and habits, can be totally unplugged from in an instant. From the easy signing offline to the extreme end where you actually delete your account from a service, it’s relatively easy to pull your presence down. With a cell phone, once you get one and you start giving out the number you are expected to be available to answer it regularly, or at the least respond to voice messages somewhat promptly.
3) I actually hate talking on the phone. I don’t like calling people (Well, with a very few exceptions. ) unless I have a very specific purpose. And the same goes for talking to people that call me. That’s really all there is to say about it, but for me that’s a pretty good reason.
So there you go, a whole lot more than you wanted to know about my lack of a portable phone.
The Carolina Symphony was playing in town tonight, that was a great concert! The cello soloist was as beautiful as the music she played – wow, just wow!
January 31, 2007
Perhaps I’m just easily confused, but I found the following application behavior somewhat bewildering:
I use Growl for notifications on my MacBook and I was trying to change the appearance of the notification bubbles, so I went to the Growl preference pane and selected “Display Options”
I clicked “Smoke” in the left hand listbox, closed the preference pane and went back about my business. Up popped a notification and it had my old style still applied.
“That’s strange…” I returned to the preference pane and re-selected “Smoke.” Again, the next notification bore my old style.
Turns out I should have probably looked at the front page of the Growl preference pane more carefully before I just switched over to the “Display Options” tab. There is a “Display Style” drop down box on that page. However, I believe this whole thing is a bit inconsistent – to allow someone to select a style in a preference pane and then not have that style applied doesn’t quite make sense.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong?
January 16, 2007
Let me count the ways:
- No POP, or much less, IMAP (HA!) access
- Horrible interface, which makes the above even more insufferable
- A check for new email requires a page reload, wow.
- The obviously bored site admins who are too busy rearranging the widgets on the front page to oh, I don’t know, maintain any sort of uptime?
I literally laughed out loud when I stumbled upon the option to have CampusCruiser pull down email from another account.
“Oh, yes! Please! Take my searchable, AJAX-y, fast, always-up email and tie it down in a hard-to-get to box with no search capabilities, horrible contact management and an interface straight out of the early 90s!”
You’re probably wondering why I’m continuing to make use of this threat to my sanity. The answer is, of course, that my college uses it to host the official college email accounts. So, I’m forced to use this wretched thing until I can move on to a (hopefully) better school.
At the moment I’m waiting for some code to be emailed to me which I have to edit and turn in by a deadline, that deadline is currently less than an hour and twenty minutes away and I have yet to see said email. Good times.
Also, I’m trying to find a new theme for this site, I really like the theme applied to Pure Danger Tech, I’d like to find something very similar or even the exact same one.
Blogged with Flock
January 16, 2007
I upgraded to build 9106, which seems to have a few interesting issues of itself, but is free of the annoying mediabar-stuck-open issue!
I enjoy testing software, I promise. =)
January 15, 2007
As of 8:15PM EST the latest test builds of Flock have been significantly weird. (The photobar/mediabar at the bottom of the browser is stuck open with attempts to close it failing at all angles.)
Just gonna have to wait for another build or two I guess?
EDIT: As of build 9096 this is still an issue, I have filed it as bug #6382. /EDIT
For what it’s worth, if anyone is interested and reading this, I’m running OS X 10.4.8 Intel on a MacBook Core Duo 2.0GHZ with 2GB of RAM.
Also of note, I cleaned my desk today!
Before and after shots in this flickr set.
January 13, 2007
There’s been a “five things you probably don’t know about me” meme going around the net, and especially/specifically at blogs.msdn.com – I’m subscribed to the main feed from there (Hundreds of bloggers all pouring into a single feed generate a lot more content than I can keep up with! But I enjoy trying. ) and I have seen that post so many times.
It’s kind of interesting to be able to watch things like that develop and spread, something I’ve definitely been able to do.
Just a random observation.
Found out this evening that I have been accepted to the computer science school at NC State, not sure where I’m going to end up going yet.
January 11, 2007
Those are my gReader trends – I haven’t subscribed to any new feeds recently, notice how much of a traffic spike there has been from CES and MacWorld? And I still have a few hundred items to finish reading!
January 10, 2007
The number one thing I’m curious about at the moment is: “Will Apple update Front Row to keep the user interface consistent with the interface on the Apple TV device?”
If you looked at the pictures you will see that the interface is presented in a somewhat similar manner to what we are used to with Front Row, but with a significantly different appearance. (Darker, more blues, etc.)
Personally, I think this would be a great look for Front Row and I hope Apple updates accordingly. To me it just doesn’t make that much sense that Apple (and, more specifically, the perfectionist Steve Jobs) would ship two similar products with such varying UIs.
Just going to have to wait and see on this one, I guess!
January 10, 2007
This seems to happen to me a lot.
I was reading Stroustrup and working through some code examples last night. Aound 2AM I hit a bit of a brick wall – couldn’t figure out how to get the map<> function to work properly. After a while hitting this from all sides, looking in the index, trying random things, etc.
After awhile I decided to just go ahead and get some sleep – this is of course when I turned the page and discovered, right there in black and white, that I needed to #include <map> in order to use it. Doy.
I obviously have much to learn – but that would be why I’m taking the class. 
Anyways, that discovery prompted a new drive of coding, the project moved forward, and I had it working around 3AM, when I did finally go get some rest.
