2005: Year In Review
Pretty interesting.
Discuss.
Oh and in other news I got the spaceship out today and set a new personal 2 wheel land speed record: 102 MPH (indicated).
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December 31, 2005
December 24, 2005
Alex's Christmas Note
Alex's Christmas Note
Alexandria left a note for Santa tonight. The translation:
Dear Santa,
How do reindeer fly? How do you get in a house without a chimny? I hope you give all the children their toys.
With best luck and wishes for Christmas Eve, Alex.
P.S. I miss you.
P.P.S. Thank you.
Goodnight all and have a great Christmas!
December 23, 2005
That's Entertainment!
What do "professional" wrestling, soap operas, and news network talk shows have in common? Pretty much everything near as I can figure. They are all designed to contrive some controversy to keep the audience interested and hopefully talking about the latest "episode" at the water cooler to encourage more viewers/listeners. This, of course, so they can charge higher premiums to their advertisers and make more money. Nothing wrong with that. It's the American way. (if you believe you are consuming actual news you have my sympathies)
The latest example of manufactured controversy is the War on Christmas. I will grant that there are instances of entities that are encouraging the use of the blasphemous phrase "Happy Holidays". But nowhere near what the wrestling news personalities, would have you believe. I'm sure they would encourage you to buy their book if you want to know the truth. (hey this ain't no public service!)
Don't believe this "war" wasn't invented in an effort to incite controversy? Have a look at this "fair and balanced" interview.
What's the emoticon for rolling your eyes? Anyway it'll be interesting to see what muck will start getting raked come December 26th. In the meantime have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Boxing Day, or Kwanzaa or Festivus and whatever it is you Pastafarians celebrate this time of year.
(thanks to Brittney for leaving the rake out)
December 21, 2005
Here's to Griffin
Griffin's annual Christmas party was held on the 3rd floor of Bound'ry restaurant here in Nashville and it was a great time as usual. Well, I say as usual, but I've only been to one other but I enjoyed myself. Good food, drinks, and company. And you can't go wrong with a chocolate fondue fountain. And, I somehow resisted the urge to place foreign objects in said fountain.
Some of the clever folks that work here put together a hilarious slide show and song, to the tune of Walking in a Winter Wonderland. Working in a High Tech Wonderland, I believe it was. It included a picture of Mark and I posing with lightsabers in the conference room (all in the name of research... honest!). Thank you Todd, Derrick, Tom and whoever else worked on the slideshow. Brilliant!
And thanks to Jeff, Heather, Lisa, and everyone else that had a hand in the party. It was great. And finally thanks to Paul for providing such a fun place to work here in Silicon Holler.
Sadly, Sue forgot to bring our camera so we don't have any of our own pics. It was left on the counter at home. J was not so absent minded. If you have a strange compulsion to look at pictures of geeks eating, drinking and being merry, then have a look at J's Christmas Party pics on flickr.
December 16, 2005
Grieve-o
Something horrible happened this week... our beloved Tivo Series 2 died (I have been having rotten luck with electronics lately). It seems that a power outage, followed by the power flickering on and off several times might have been the culprit.
Dead Tivo
While this is an inconvenience to me, it's been devastating for my wife, a unabashed television junky. It's been pretty hard to watch her comes to terms with the loss. After I was informed that the Tivo had been stuck on the startup screen all day. I suggested unplugging it and plugging it back in, but that didn't help. So Susie called Tivo.
Sue's progression through the five stages of grief:
Shock/Denial - "The Tivo people said to unplug it and then plug it back and let it run over night. Maybe it will work itself out by then? If not, we have to sent it to Tivo and then they will fix it and sent it back to us".
Anger - "I can't believe that we have to send that back to them and wait weeks for it's return! In the meantime, I'm not getting a service that I'm paying for!". So she called support and let random support guy know how she felt. Then she proceeded to inform support supervisor guy.
Bargaining - While talking to support supervisor guy she angled for a replacement to be cross shipped in exchange for our dead box. As it seemed that this was going nowhere, she finally blurted out, "Maybe we'll just switch to Comcast!" and hung up. Alluding to the PVR available from our cable provider.
Depression - The rest of the evening and the following day. Trust me. Though this was mitigated somewhat after I dusted off our original Philips Tivo and hooked it up. Sadly, it has no schedule information, but it'll do in a pinch.
Acceptance - The plan is to box up our beloved Tivo on Monday, ship it off and hope for the best. None of the alternatives seem very appealing. Comcast's box and the required digital cable subscription would nearly double our cable bill. Besides, I've not heard good things about it's interface especially when compared to the simplicity of Tivo... though it does record in HD. Buying another Tivo while waiting for this one to be repaired seems silly. And so we wait.
By the way, I'd love to hear from folks that have Comcast's PVR service. Good? Bad? Ugly? Tivo's death (the company that is) has long been rumored to be inevitable. They still offer no support for HDTV. So, at some point we will probably have to look for an alternative... maybe I should break down and build a MythTV box?
December 12, 2005
Old Dog. New Trick.
More and more I find myself taking advantage of XCode's code completion feature. It's been in there awhile I know, but it sometimes takes me awhile to incorporate new features into my repertoire. I'm funny like that.
The thing is, now that it's becoming a part of my muscle memory, I find myself hitting the escape key all the time even to complete silly things. For example I'll type NSMutableAttributedSt... yeah, I'll hit escape about there. And XCode will happily fill in the remainder of NSMutableAttributedString for me thereby saving me 2 keystrokes. I'm not sure I'm using this right.
Oh speaking of silly things. I've been writing in C and it's assorted offspring for what? 15 years or so now? How long, O how long, before I can say I forgotten my last semi-colon!? Not that I don't normally find these right away, but how is it possible I still occasionally forget them? Sheesh.
Anyway, just thought I'd share that. Back to the tappity-tap.
December 5, 2005
Keep Out of Reach of Children
That's what the label on the curiously strong magnets I received as a birthday gift read. It did not however say "Keep Out of Reach of Children Posing as Grown Men". And that's where the trouble started.
Though I wasn't at all ready to begin the new week, I plunged ahead anyway went to work and began digging in. Fairly early on, J came by to chat about the fun time I had at the parade Sunday whilst I absentmindedly fondled an assortment of my special magnets in my left hand... the left hand which rested ever so casually on the front left portion of my Powerbook. And I some point I dropped or placed (it's all a horrific blur now) those magnets on the actual Powerbook, my brain still trying to pull itself out of the weekend fog. I could feel the tug of some ferrous material beneath my wonderful magnets. I think at this point I mentioned to J that there was metal in there, interesting huh? In response, J wondered aloud if I'd also considered the possibility that a hard disk drive lived in my laptop.
Oh. Dear. God.
Suddenly I was awake, and as my attempts to navigate my running applications resulted in the happy fun spinning beach ball of doom, my stomach became more than a little unsettled.
Reboot: Perma-Gray Screen.
Resuscitation attempts proved to be futile. Time of death: 1:30PM or so.
Fortunately the most important stuff was backed up. However, I did miss a couple things. Namely my email and address book (though I got pretty much all of that back after syncing with my phone). Also anything stored in prefs files and the like such as bookmarks and NetNewsWire's feed list. All gone.
So who else had a really good Monday?
December 4, 2005
Smyrna Christmas Parade
Today we went and braved the -12° temperatures for 7 hours waiting for Alexandria's appearance in the Smyrna Christmas Parade. Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, but it was cold and we were there for what seemed like an eternity waiting for our daughter to come walking up North Lowery Street (aka Murfreesboro Road) dressed as a giant Christmas present along with the rest of her Girl Scout troop.
Grown men in tiny cars
We arrived early, armed with a variety of electronic devices to record the event for posterity and cleverly positioned ourselves towards the end of the route insuring a good view and an easy exit. And then waited... and waited some more. Finally we could make a troop of Girl Scouts dressed as Christmas presents approaching. Unfortunately it was another Girl Scout troop and so the wait continued. Did I mention it was cold?
About 5 minutes after the wrong Girl Scout troop went by, Susie got a call. It was Alex's troop leader informing us that they had finished and she was waiting for us at her car. Huh? Susie and I looked at each other puzzled. How in the world did we miss her? Sue expressed her confusion to the troop leader and was told that Alex's troop was informed that they didn't need to walk the whole route and had stopped about 200 yards short of the end of the actual parade route. Or about 100 yards from where we were.
I was disappointed. My wife was livid. As it turns out, some dumb ass woman in the Girl Scouts organization made this decision. Why the group in front of Alex's finished, but hers didn't, I don't understand. But my wife has pledged to make a few phone calls tomorrow and identify the culprit so she can contact her for what I'm sure with be a very pleasant conversation.