Category: musings

I ride a bike to work and back most days and though it can be tedious some days, it’s still fun most of the time. I have this cruiser bike and I had thought it might not be possible to ride it with no hands after my initial experiments failed miserably. When I was a kid I was able to ride a 10 speed with no hands with not much effort. It turns out, though, that I just needed a bit of practice! I have now begun riding as much as possible with no hands. I can sometimes make it for several blocks down my street before a dangerous intersection makes it pretty vital to use my hands for my own safety. Schweeeet! I ride among cars pretty much every time I’m out so I have to be careful, but I’m getting better at it all the time.

I had seen demos of PhotoBooth and knew pretty much how it worked but had never actually tried it out until this morning. It’s a crazy amount of fun! I’m pretty much an expert already, too. Take a look…

Vida and I took a stroll out on the Embarcadero the other night and I took a few pictures. This one’s my favorite.

I’m back from my honeymoon and I learned a few things while away…

• Beautiful tropical islands really are pretty breathtakingly beautiful.
• Relaxing is very nice but can get old after awhile.
• Reading books is fun and I should do it more often.
• The English language seems to be as close to a universal language as exists in the world, as sad as that is.
• The food where we live may just be the best in the world. We are generally at least a little disappointed everywhere else we go.
• My French still sucks.
• Taking a boat directly to and from the airport is pretty neat. Taking a helicopter directly between two hotels would be even neater (maybe next time).
• Bathing with flower petals is cool but makes a big mess afterwards.
• California-made wine is on restaurant menus even in French Polynesia. Crazy!

Now that I’m back in the real world it’s time to get back to all the things I was doing before I got all busy.

While I’ve been not updating this website I’ve gotten hitched and am now headed off to the wild and wooly South Pacific to celebrate my new status. I’m very much looking forward to spending entire days split between just gazing out into the beautiful scenery and gazing into my lover’s eyes.

I have been assured that all of the problems DreamHost has been experiencing as of late will be 100% resolved by the time I return!

See ya when I get back.

While at the local Safeway super market the other day, I spotted this bastard product on the shelf. Our San Francisco Safeway has started carrying more and more organic products in the last year or two and they now have their own organic generic brand. I don’t know if that’s the case in all Safeways or just ours. It’s nice to see bigger markets getting involved in organic, and they’ll probably keep doing it now that they know they can basically mark their organic products up 50%.

Well, anyway… now Kellogg’s is making organic Rice Krispies and Raisin Bran! WTF? This might be a good thing but it might also be just another sign of the term ‘organic’ gradually becoming mostly meaningless. First Wal-Mart goes organic, and now Kellogg’s. Who next? Budweiser? Philip-Morris?

The world just gets weirder, don’t it?

(oh, and sorry it took me two weeks to update. I’m helping to plan a major event!)

I noticed recently that this website shows up as the number one result for several google search terms. That’s something many people spend a lot of time and money trying to do so I guess I should feel lucky. For a good time try searching for these terms! It’s likely I won’t be the top result forever so do it soon! Here’s some of the terms:

overscan mac
panasonic plasma mac mini
mini overscan
rent-a-rim
rental rims dallas
mac overscan
mac mini overscan missing
force mac mini overscan

I suspect you can probably detect the pattern there. I think I might have to write more about my experience with my Mac mini hooked to my panasonic plasma TV and the overscan issues I’ve dealt with. I was the top result for ‘my ipod is full’ last week, too. I seem to have lost that one. Hrmph.

On our way back from Cancun, we got stuck overnight in Miami due to some crazy rain and lightning that shut down the airport for two hours. We think American Airlines handled the whole situation like amateurs and will think twice about flying that airline again. We did, however, get the opportunity to spend a few hours out on the town in Miami’s famous mostly art deco South Beach. Here’s a couple of crappy pictures of some interesting buildings.

Last weekend a bunch of us were at a sweet Go-Kart racing track driving like the wind (I wasn’t one of the stronger drivers) and the radio was playing some nice modern rock through the loudspeakers to help set the mood. At one point during the radio broadcast we all heard a commercial for rental rims! I guess it’s for those people who need to impress people with the stylish rims on their Escalade only sometimes. I guess for dates or record release parties or something? Or maybe people rent an Escalade on Friday afternoon, get it fitted with rental rims, roll for the weekend and return it all on Sunday? It’s a mystery to me.

As you may know, my iPod is full. Since first reporting that I have added another 5 or 6 albums to my library (I went on a CDBaby shopping spree) and have had to once again reconsider my strategy. I now have a system that requires some manual effort but I think may work for me for awhile.

Here’s the gist:

1. The iPod no longer syncs with all playlists, but instead syncs to a few chosen playlists that are handy to have around for parties and for general-purpose listening as well as a special ‘iPod’ smart playlist.

2. The iPod smart playlist is defined as so:

That first ‘3-5 Stars’ playlist is another smart playlist I’ll explain later. The ‘Not on iPod’ playlist is a regular playlist and lets me selectively exclude albums and songs. The ‘MacBreak’ one is a one-off for some video podcasts I have but don’t watch. I might just stop downloading them altogether… hmm…

3. The ‘3-5 Stars’ playlist is defined as so:

It also includes tracks not yet rated so I’m not forced to rate every new album I add before it will be copied to the iPod.

4. I have to use a smart playlist including another smart playlist so I can combine some ‘and’ and ‘or’ logic (or ‘Any’ and ‘All’ in iTunes-speak).

5. The ‘Not in iPod’ playlist is my stoke of genius that allows me to remove albums I never listen to on the iPod without setting their ratings artificially low. I have some music I may want to hear once a year in my iTunes but never on my iPod. Genius!