Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
Benjamin Franklin’s daily planner:
The two things I find interesting about this:
1) He really believed in “early to bed, early to rise”. Sheesh, five in the morning?
2) I like his morning and evening questions. Maybe if more people reflected on their days like this, our world would be a little better.
An article by Charlie Brooker sums up my feelings about Apple products exactly:
Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn’t want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn’t on your side. It doesn’t even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple.
That’s how I feel about my trusty old iPod Shuffle… and my shiny new Apple TV. I’m a hacker; I’ve run Linux for a decade and a half. I’m the guy who wants to get under the hood, who wants to customize everything just so, who is always looking for the back door. And with Apple the hood doesn’t open and there isn’t a back door. Unless some enterprising hacker figures out how to fool the hardware, and comes up with a jailbreak to make people like me happy. Until, that is, Apple patches the thing that made the jailbreak possible and locks the door once more.
Sigh.
Today was sunny and almost 70 degrees, so I was able (finally!) to play ultimate in bare feet. It’s been many months since the ground was soft enough– and warm enough– to do that. Nice.
Today’s grammar police bring you this gem from an email sent by a woman at an agency I’m working with:
That’s “me”, not “myself”. I think it’s a result of kids being taught from their youth that they should always say things like “him and I” when it’s properly “him and me”. People are afraid to use the word “me”, so it’s like they grope for a word that’s similar and end up with “I” or “myself” or whatever.
By the way, I realize that my first sentence should properly end with “… at an agency with which I’m working”. Never end a sentence with a preposition.
With some help from Josh and his Mac, I finally hacked my Apple TV and now I’ve got a sweet little media center. We’re watching previews online… Laralee is making all of us laugh by picking movies like “Hello Dolly” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. The movies back in the 60’s had previews that make you want to poke your eyes out. I don’t know why people went to see movies back then, after seeing the trailers.
But anyway, despite Apple’s stupid iTunes lockdown, now that I have XBMC installed on the Apple TV it’s actually useful. Shout out to the guys out there who come up with the jailbreaks to do this.
This is a first. I have a conference call with one of my clients tomorrow, and they want to talk about restructuring their web site. To prepare for the call they sent a document with scans of their “wireframes”:
And then a video that shows the meeting where they discussed all of this. The video is an hour long and includes riveting scenes like this:
Basically I’m supposed to watch the meeting to “get some context” prior to the call. Hoo boy.
On Saturday we went to a Cub Scout fundraiser and bid on an air hockey table someone had donated to be auctioned. We bid $5, the recommended minimum, and waited for others to bid up the price. No one did. I felt kind of bad getting a nice air hockey table for five bucks, so I told Kyra we should outbid ourselves at $25. She wrote it on the bid sheet and we waited again. Still no one.
So, hey, we ended up with a $25 air hockey table. It’s great fun. Of course it takes up a bunch of space in the basement, but it’s worth it.
Today I hosted my first-ever LAN party. For a couple of years I’ve been playing Warzone 2100, occasionally with Alex and Zack, and decided to ask some friends if they’d be interested in a game or two. I took a bunch of spare hardware I had, wired it all together in the basement, and we had everything we needed. Four of them came over and we spent the afternoon building super-tanks and planning pincer strategies and whatnot.
Good times.
For Laralee’s birthday I bought her what any loving husband would.
Two tubes of caulk.
(No, I’m not kidding. She loved them.)
One day in 1994 I was driving around and looked over at the passenger seat, where I had a box of all my CD’s. Yes, back in the old days people actually bought silvery plastic discs with music on them. I had hundreds. At an average cost of maybe $15 apiece, a couple hundred of them in one box added up to perhaps two or three thousand dollars.
My thought, driving around that day, was that the box of CD’s on my passenger seat was worth more than my car itself. It was a 1982 Nissan 200SX, bought for $1,200 from a Turkish exchange student who was moving back home after the semester.
Fast forward to today, when I had a similar thought. I had lunch with my friend Lewis, who (coincidentally) I met sometime around 1994. He now works for Cisco and had some spare hardware that he offered to me because he knows I could use it in my hosting business. I gratefully accepted and was happy to buy him lunch in exchange for roughly $15,000 worth of network gear.
Driving back home today, I reflected on the fact that the box of electronics in my trunk was worth (almost) as much as my 2008 Honda Civic. Funny.