... that make me happy.

Take this item from Interface Builder 2.5.4 release notes:

Popup buttons now stay open while editing.

To fix a previous bug, popup buttons closed after an item was edited. Now popup buttons remain open for editing until the mouse is clicked outside of the popup button.

I just had an opportunity to add a popup menu in IB and couldn't figure out what I was suddenly doing to make the menus stay open as they were being edited, until it occurred to me Interface Builder may have been updated along with XCode 2.3. Bless you XCode / Interface Builder team. My cube neighbors will welcome the reduced levels of profanities I'm sure. Now if I can only do something about my other emanations.

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Posted by Casey at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While we were eating last night my wife and 5 year old son, whose birthday is on June 1st, had the following conversation:

Susie: "Hey Aaron, June 1st is coming up! Do you of anything special happening on June 1st?"
Aaron: "Um.... Is it the 4th of July?!"

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Posted by Casey at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finally had cause to actually try and create something in GarageBand over the weekend. Sue is working on a DVD yearbook for Cedar Grove and needed some music to go along with it. Now I am a musical idiot to be sure, but I was able, in about a half an hour to create something that doesn't suck... much. Sweet.

After I finished my little ditty. I showed Alex how to use GarageBand. She and Aaron proceeded to make this 30 second masterpiece. It's called Stay Out of the Basement! And features vocal by Aaron (my 5 year old) pitch shifted down many octaves. Try not to be too frightened.

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Posted by Casey at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So I finally jumped on the bandwagon that is MySpace, although I've never really liked the place. Maybe because I'm all old, unhip, whatever. With every page it seem the assault on the senses only intensifies with more flashing, scrolling, sparkling, and "music" that the next (of course this doesn't apply to people on my friends list... you guys are great... honest). Fortunately only two of the five senses are within reach of the internet. God help us if they ever invent Smell-O-Net. I can only imagine.

Anyway, I figured I'd see if it was possible to create a MySpace page with a minimum of animated images, or inflicting upon visitors whatever song it is that I happen to be enjoying at the moment. I expect, if you're like me, you have your own selection of music, that you presumably enjoy, available in iTunes or your music player of choice. Perhaps even an oldfangled radio. What is fangled anyway?

Still, it wouldn't be MySpace if there wasn't something there that made you cringe and so I've made the infamous Rawr! picture available there.

Somegeekintn on MySpace

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Posted by Casey at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember when John Lennon said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus? Neither do I. I wasn't alive then, but I know of this imfamous quote. Well now we have a tool from Google that will allow use to answer this question.

Perhaps in 1966 the Beatles were more popular, but 30 (d'oh) 40 years later, Jesus wins hands down. Maybe if we look at some more contemporary artists. Like Coldplay?

Looks like the release of X&Y pushed them ahead briefly, but pretty solidly Jesus otherwise. Perhaps another demographic in music.

Britney Spears was giving The Lord a run for the money until mid 2005 or so. Ah, but Lennon said he would have gotten away with if he'd said television was more popular than Jesus. I wonder what that looks like

Though I wouldn't call it a blow out, television is winning this particular contest. Especially if American Idol is on.

So there may be some things that are more popular than Jesus, but not by much, right?

Oh... yeah... well there is that.

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Posted by Casey at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday I wrote about trouble with my new MacBook Pro. That is, the left shift key wasn't working very reliably. It was enough of a problem that I resigned myself to sending it off for repair. First though, I figured I'd stop by the Apple Store and see if they had any advice, or maybe they'd just swap it out on the spot. This is exactly what they would've done... except it's a build to order machine (2GB of RAM). So I went home figuring I'd call AppleCare and make arrangements to send it back... sigh.

The thing is, everything else was working just fine and the display and speed had already spoiled me, so I decided to take one more closer look at the troublesome key. I tried reseating the key cap, but that didn't help. I tried frowning at it quite intensely. Even this had no effect. Then I thought perhaps if I could add a little thickness to the underside of the key cap, it might extend the switch travel. So, I took a length of scotch tape (about 3 inches or so) and folded it into a strip about 1/4 inch in width, giving me a couple millimeters of thickness. I affixed this to the underside of the left key cap with another piece of tape and set the key cap back into position. Voila! Problem solved, the shift key works just fine now though I may have to devise a more permanent solution at some point.

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• shift

Posted by Casey at 10:42 PM | Permalink

This morning, I decided to check on the status of my new MacBook Pro which was scheduled to ship today and imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only had it shipped, it had been delivered and was waiting for me next door. So, a Tip of the Hat to Apple for getting my new toy here a little earlier than expected.

The next several hours was spent migrating all of the files and settings from my old machine to the new one before, finally, I was able to start playing with my new 17 inch wonder. Sadly my excitement quickly faded as I realized that there seemed to be some trouble with the left shift key. The shift key only seems to actually register about a quarter of the time that I press it. It seems to work better if I press fairly hard in the center of the key, but I'm not sure this is going to be something I can live with. So, a Wag of the Finger to Apple for spoiling the excitement I had felt earlier.

A quick Google search reveals that I'm not the only one that has experienced this problem, but sadly I haven't found a cure that doesn't involve sending the computer back to Apple. If anyone out there knows of a solution to this problem, feel free to post it here.

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Posted by Casey at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, it's done. It's been something I've been wrestling with for several months now, but I've made the decision, difficult though it was.

So, yeah, I'm canceling my World of Warcraft account. It's the longest amount of time I ever spent playing any video game regularly and so I can easily call it my second favorite game of all time (nothing will ever unseat the Zork trilogy).

But, lately I simply can't get excited about playing WoW. I could raid with the rest of my guild and I do (for the most part) enjoy the company, but it's very structured and regimented which really doesn't appeal that much to me. The encounters are interesting, but once you've seen them, you've seen them. Playing strictly for the pursuit of gear is a little baffling to me. It's really nice to get new gear, but with the expansion coming and the level cap raised to 70, all that purple gear that you ran BWL fiftyeleven times for will be overpowered by level 70 BoE random world blues soon, and so on when the level 80 expansion comes along. The Battlegrounds had a chance to be a lot of fun, but sadly Blizzard chose to reward those with the most free time as opposed to those with the most skill. I'm not saying I'd make Grand Marshall on skill alone, but at least I would have a better shot. And then, there is nothing really for a level 60 to do solo. I have alts, and they're actually quite a lot of fun... until you have to take them through Stranglethorn Vale where all the other bored level 60s hang out ganking lowbies. I don't mind the occasional knife in the back. Some folks enjoy that sort of thing, some people like kicking puppies as well. I don't really understand. But an hour of running between the graveyard and your corpse isn't really all that fun surprisingly. STV was a bumpy ride when I took my original toons through there, but now it's just silly.

So I'm letting my account expire... but don't ask me for my stuff! There's always a chance that The Burning Crusade will whet my appetite for more WoW and I'll need a little more time on the hamster wheel. But in the event that this is really the end, I'd like to say so long to the people of the Thunderlord server and my friends in SOL it's been a blast. Agrajag out.

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Posted by Casey at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you watched Lost tonight, you know where I'm coming from. If not, what are you waiting for?

I did not see that coming.

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Posted by Casey at 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last night I wrote a little plugin for Proxi to monitor stories on digg.com. The settings view looks like this:

You can do all of the usual things that Proxi allows you to do with other triggers. Me, I've got it spewing out screen messages when stories find their way to the front page. The cool bit: the Digg Monitor let me know that it had been dugg to the front page this morning :)

You can find out more about the Digg Monitor in the Proxi blog and the digg story: "Monitoring Digg by Proxi".

PS Yes, the number of diggs in the icon is intentional ;)

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Posted by Casey at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So the other day I'm gazing out a window at a lovely spring day and witness a bird alighting on a fence in my back yard. Of course moments later the bird flew off to whatever location was next on what I'm sure is a very busy bird agenda. Before parting, it left a little something for me to remember it by. Which got me thinking...

"Why is bird crap white? Are there any other animals that have white poo?". I went over the mental list of all the various sorts of animal droppings that I'd seen in my life, not that I make a habit of cataloging these things, and it seemed to me that poo is typically a darker shade. This occupied my thoughts for a minute or two and was eventually pushed out by something that I'm sure was equally as exciting. Possibly enumerating the various genus and phylum of weeds growing in my back yard. But later that evening the subjects of birds came up while out with friends which made me wonder aloud if anyone knew why bird crap was white (and now you see why I have so few friends). No conclusion was reached, but we did decide that if ever a person took a dump and it was white, they would be well advised to seek out a physician immediately.

So today I finally remembered that I must know the answer to this question and was also sitting in front of a computer. It is just this sort of "mystery of the universe" type of question that makes the internet so valuable. Google was easily up to the challenge:

The Scoop on Poop says:

Why is bird poop white?

Unlike mammals, birds don't urinate. Their kidneys extract nitrogenous wastes from the bloodstream, but instead of excreting it as urea dissolved in urine as we do, they excrete it in the form of uric acid. Uric acid has a very low solubility in water, so it emerges as a white paste. This material, as well as the output of the intestines, emerges from the bird's cloaca. The cloaca is a multi-purpose hole for birds: their wastes come out of it, they have sex by putting their cloacas together, and females lay eggs out of it.

So, there you have it, one less mystery in the world. And for all your poo related questions, head on over to The Scoop on Poop where they seem to have covered all the bases including The Poop Thesaurus. Good night, and God bless the internet.

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Posted by Casey at 1:50 PM | Permalink