jeffpollard.net

Ain't like they used to be

Imagine this: You go into the Dentist's office to get some fillings. I know, I know. This wouldn't happen for some of ya'll. But just go along with it. You think it odd that they give you full knock-your-ass-out anethesia, but you agree to it. You wake up an hour later with a larger pain in your mouth than you expected. The nurse hands you a mirror so you can check out their handy-work. You hold it in front of your mouth and you can barely believe your eyes. Your two front teeth are MISSING! You ask the doc why your teeth are missing and he says, "OH no, we were just supposed to give you fillings! Whoops!" This is a big problem. Most of you are thinking: "This wouldn't happen very often..Dentists are professionals." You are correct.

Now, imagine this: You pull up to the Taco Bell drive thru. (Like my spelling of "thru?") You order a Baja Gordita and a soft taco supreme. You pull "thru", give the lady your money and off you go with your food. You get home, open the bag only to find a Supreme Gordita and a regular hard taco. Not quite what you expected. But you know what? Deep, deep down (way down in the cackles), you aren't surprised that this just happened. In fact, it's happened many times before. And you know what? It'll probably happen many times again. And not just at Taco Bell.

If you haven't gotten my point yet, then perhaps it needs more explaining. Why are our standards so low when we deal with a business with gernerally unskilled labor? Why shouldn't we expect the same level of customer satisfaction when we go to the Dentist's office as we do when we pull up to a drive thru? Furthermore, has it always been like this? Did guys in the old west ask their blacksmith for a new shoe for their horse only to receive a new belt buckle instead. Where has society gone wrong? I'd love to hear your opinion on this in the comments area.

That's my random rambling for the day. Tune in tomorrow when we examine why the word "Nation" sounds differently if you use it in "Nationality" and "National".

Could it possibly be?

Getting up earlier every morning so that I can have Olivia to work ata decent time and still get myself to work has it's perks....Ok, maybe not, but it's not so bad, right? We're really not getting up THAT much earlier than normal, but it certainly feels that way.

I couldn't believe that it was dark by the time we got home last night at 5:45 or so. Kinda depressing.

I think I may have found a calendar system that might work for CustomTacos. And just in the nick of time, too, because I promised my newsletter subscribers that they'd have their Tacoma enthusiast website shortly after Halloween.

It's called WebEvent and I spent the entire night last night tinkering with it. I got a 60-day demo of their upcoming 2.0 product. What gets me is that it's a 60-day evaluation copy that will fail to work after the time limit. After that, it's pretty expensive. Extremely overpriced, even, for a calendar system. Luckily, it's programmed in perl. *wink* *wink*

I've definitely got my work cut out for me in the next week or so.

Progress is gooooood...

As you can see, work on the truck is progressing nicely:

In every game, there must be... a loooser.

Last night's Agency Halloween bash was pretty awesome. But then again, most things are pretty cool when you're the winners! Yep, you heard me right. We (the ITS department) won the costume cokntest with our "Fish of Martin" costumes.

For those of you who don't live in Richmond and have never seen the "Fish of Richmond", here's the scoop: Every summer, people (not quite sure who) make a whole bunch of paper-mache' fish.. They all start out the same, but by the time they're done, they're all different. You may remember my photos I took of the fish earlier this year, and I think Brian took some at some point, too.

We thought the fish idea was pretty cool, so we decided to do our own spin on it. "The fish of Martin" were each decorated like client of The Martin Agency. I was the FMC fish. We also had the GEICO gecko fish, the Alltel fish, Hanes (complete with underwear), and a few more.

We were an absolute hit. The only problem is that wearing a fish on your head isn't as easy as you may think. Those foam-core fish were a little heavier than we expected. By the end of the night, my head hurt. And it was difficult to do much with a big ole' fishy on my head, too.

All-in-all, it was a great time. So now we have to figure out how we're going to divide the week's vacation that we won. Yippie!

Ahh! kids.

The agency had their annual family Halloween party yesterday. Basically, employees are encouraged to bring thier kids and enjoy a "carnival" or sorts. There was face painting, games, a haunted house type-of-thing and more. Pretty cool, cept there were kids running around everywhere.

Still looks funny not to see my truck sitting out there. I wonder how far it is along...

Tonight is the Agency's "adult" Halloween party at a local bar/club. It should be fun. Most everybody dresses up and there's a costume contest with the grand prize: an extra week of vacation. Not bad. I'll take lots of pictures and post a few on here probably tonight or Friday.

iWHAT?

Deflation. I feel sortof letdown, but I know it's only because I pumped myself up for the big announcement today.

So, it's iPod. It's a 5gig portable MP3 player that synchronizes seamlessly with iTunes, Apple's free MP3 playback software. It has a firewire port (not USB, like most) that also charges the lithium-polymer battery, which has a 10-hour battery life. Ok, so you're saying to youself: "These are some pretty kick-ass features! How much?" Here's the flaw: Price. $399.99. Yeh, a bit high. My disappointment with the pricing of the new device is echoed on every discussion forum on Mac web sites. They had one on TechTV tonight and it looks really cool..but for $400? I don't think I need one that bad. I hope they sell. Or maybe I hope they don't so that Apple gets the picture and lowers the price.

I dropped the truck off tonight with Shawn. Bye Bye! The strange thing is, I have good confidence in this guy, even though I don't know him that well. I'll probably head over there later this week or maybe on Saturday and see how things are going. Now the trick will be to figure out how Olivia and I will function with only 1 vehicle. Should be interesting.

Anxious-ness

Long, busy day today. It's another one of those nights where it's so late that I don't have too much energy to write much. I really should start doing this in the early evening, not at midnight.

Tomorrow will be a big day. Apple will be announcing...something. I just can't see it being a handheld, but I'm sure it'll be something cool. Secondly, my truck will be going away for a little while. And when it comes back, it will be different. Notched. Better. I'm pretty excited about it.

Progress with CustomTacos has been slow over the past few days. I'm sorta stuck because I can't seem to find a good event calendar system. Actually, I found a good one, but the guy who wrote it won't email me back with the download info. Frusterating. I thought I had found a good system tonight based on PHP and mysql, but it appears as though the version of mysql installed on my host's server is one .x behind. I keep getting sql errors. Grr. Hopefully they'll be able to get me through it.

And now, it's that time again. Time for me to sleep and re-energize myself for another exciting day. Wow, that sounded corny.

Humpy Wheeler

Before late Friday night, I had no idea what the plan was for this weekend. Olivia and her friend Maggie had originally wanted to go up to Harrisonburg for a band competition, but later decided not to go.

We met Maggie Saturday around Noon down in a little place near downtown Richmond called Carytown. Carytown is a neat little shopping area that has lots of little mom & pop shops, antiques shops, and some neat resturants.

We ate lunch at a little mexican place called "Nacho Mamas". Great food and a cute-sy little dining room.

One of the things I wanted to do this weekend was go to Xtreme Nationals car & truck show in Dinwiddie, VA. We left Carytown and made it to the VA Motorsports Park in time to watch some street car drag racing, the hydraulic competition, and take a BUNCH of pictures. I've posted a gallery including most of them, so go take a look!

Maggie had suggested that we go hiking this weekend, too. It had been a while since Olivia and I had enjoyed the great outdoors, so we jumped on the opportunity.

We juiced up the Cavalier Sunday morning with $.99/gal gas, picked up Maggie at her house and headed for Humpback Rocks, on the Blue Ridge parkway. The leaves were absolutel beautiful, and they continued to get better the farther north/west we went. Amazing weather, too..Just a picture perfect day.

The hike up the mountain was steeper and longer than I thought it would be, but we finally made it and got some breathtaking pictures. Since the photo gallery is so large, I opened a new Mac.com account and posted them over there. So what are you waiting for? Head on over and take a look!

More sleeeep

Today was a great end to the week. I spent the afternoon cleaning up our work room. There was stuff everywhere..cables, old hard drives, and more old junky stuff that needed to be thrown out. It seems like every couple of months that room needs a good thorough cleaning. It looks good now, though!

When I got home tonight, I was pretty exhausted. So at about 7pm, we decided to take a nap. However, we set the alarm so that we could get up and go see a 10:30 movie. In the tradition of weekday mornings, we overslept.

So, after a three-hour nap, I'm awake with lots of energy.

I talked to the guy who's notching my truck this afternoon and found out that the parts for the notch just arrived today. It looks like I'll be dropping the truck off with him Tuesday. I guess Olivia and I need to figure out how we're going to function with only 1 vehicle for a few days.

What a weirdo!

Yesterday, I outlined some of Gizmo's weird habits and fetishes. I decided that there's more to the story than I told you. To make this easier for me to organize, I'm just going to list out some of his weird habits. So, without further ado, I present to you "Gizmo: The secrets behind the teeth":

- Gizmo is most definitely a morning cat. We keep the bedroom door closed at night so that he doesn't wake us up all night and he's always up and waiting for us when we wake up at 8am or so. He usually greets us with lots of purring and rubbing. Unfortunately, this is one of the few times that he shows affection.

- His morning ritual is the same every morning: he rubs, purrs, demands to be fed, and then enjoys "belt time". What the heck is "belt time?" Gizmo has become quite fond of rubbing on my belt as I'm putting it on. Every morning.

- As you can see from yesterday's photos, he has developed some strong feelings for random inanimate objects. These include (but are not limited to): our sponge mop, our broom, our lint roller, and the yardstick.

- He loves to unravel the toilet paper and shred the tissues that stick up out of the box. If you open the cabinet under the sink, he'll make an effort to steal a cotton ball. He doesn't really like to play with it, as you might think, though. No, he eats it. We've decided that this probably isn't very healthy for him, so we don't allow him to "play with" cotton balls anymore.

- We found out tonight that he has a special place in his little heart for a new Halloween ink pen that Olivia recently purchased. He stole it out of Olivia's hand and then took off with it in his mouth. When we approached him to retrieve the stolen goods, he continued to run. We finally got him pinned in the kitchen after chasing him around the apartment for about a minute. When we tried to pry it from his jaws, he growled and hissed at us! I had NEVER heard him growl before. Wow. he must feel pretty strongly towards that pen. See the photo below of him caught in the act.

- In the tradition of Pollard family cats, THIS CAT CAN JUMP. Even though he's an indoor kitty, he has some STRONG legs. In the past few days, we have placed a "stringy" toy in the top hinge on a door in our apartment. He has (a few times) been able to jump up and retrieve the toy at that height. Now, stop reading this and look at a doorway near you. Take a look at how high that top hinge is. I would estimate that it's about 4.5 to 5 feet off the ground. Amazing.

That's about all I can think of for now. Take a look at more photos of the boy:

Click for larger
Caught in the act	Infatuated with the lint roller

What would it take to sell YOUR soul?

Exciting day today. Apple finally fessed-up to having a buggy ethernet driver that could cause OS9.04 and 9.1 machines to randomly disconnect from file servers. This, if you remember, has been a terrible problem that has been haunting me for months. I installed the updated ethernet driver on a bunch of machines, so we'll see what effect it has in the next few days.

While reporting their $66 million profit for the quarter, Apple said that they will be holding a press conference on October 23rd to announce a "breakthrough digital device." The rumor and speculation mills immediately went to DEFcon 5 on this topic. What some people may not realize is that every time Apple gears up to release a new product, the Mac community goes absolutely bonkers speculating on the product to be released. Some have called Mac users a cult. I disagree. We're much more fanatical than a cult. It really is amazing to be a part of such an energetic community of "followers".

So what do I think it's going to be? My wildest dreams tell me that it's going to be an Apple-based handheld computer. It would run a pocket version of OS X and be able to play MP3s, view and edit photos, and play QuickTime movies. It would have a beautiful color screen, handwriting recognition, and a PCMCIA or CompactFlash card slot. And it would all be packed into a really slick Titanium enclosure with a big ole' Apple logo on it. And how much would it cost? Who knows? If they DO release it, cost will not be a factor to me. I don't think I've ever said this about something, but: I think I'd sell my soul to get my hands on a device like the one I outlined above.

Back to planet Earth. Realistically, it looks as though they're going to release some sort of digital music devide that connects to an ethernet network and your home stereo (and possibly TV). It doesn't really make sense for them to develop a portable MP3 player. Lord knows there are too many on the market now to choose from. But, if it were marketed as a digital home audio device, it may be interesting. By all means, I hope it's the handheld..but something tells me that my hopes are in the wrong place.

By popular request, here are some recent photos of Gizmo:

Click for larger
Gizmo's fascination w/ our sponge mop	A handsome pose...

More tweaking

Tweak. What a cool word. It's what I did for a good part of the day. I stayed pretty busy today between work stuff and playing with the CustomTacos discussion forum. It's coming along.

I was noticing tonight that almost every car manufacturer is offering 0% finacing for at least the next 90 days. Wow. What an amazing time to buy a car. It's almost a shame that I'm not even in the market.

And with interest rates so low, what an amazing time to buy a house. It's shame that I'm not in the market for that, too. A couple of my coworkers are moving into new houses within the next few months, though.

I haven't talked about Gizmo in a while. He's getting pretty big. It's funny to look back at photo of him when he was tiny. Even funnier is that many of those were taken not more than 1 year ago. He has a strange fascination with insects. Every time we put him outside in his little cage on the deck, he lays there for hours watching the bugs flying around the street light. Then, when we comes inside, there is usually at least one bug crawling around on the ceiling. This drives him absolutely NUTS. He sits on the chair and meows at that bug for what seems like an eternity. He's usually pretty patient and is rewarded by enjoying the tasty insect. Yum. Oh, to be a cat.

Do you ever...

Do you ever get so caught up in what you're doing that you totally forget what time it is? Yeh, that's me last night. I was so busy working on CustomTacos that l looked up to find the that the clock had found it's way to 1:00am. DOH! I reluctantly put my PowerBook to sleep and then put myself to sleep.

If there were only just a couple more hours in the day...

Sleeeeeeep

This weekend was sponsored by the word "sleep". I slept. Alot. And it was nice.

Didn't really do anything that interesting, 'cept play with computer stuff all weekend. I played around with setting up cron jobs on my MacOS X server here. Because of it's UNIX underpinnings, you can schedule tasks to happen at specified intervals. It's sorta like that scheduling crap in Win98. Well, OS X comes with a few cron jobs already setup. They are small UNIX shell scripts that compile the current stats on the machine's drives, network, and other system info and send it in an email to the root user. I decided that this was a really cool feature, but I never check the root email account on that server. So, I changed it to not happen so frequently (why parse web server log files EVERY day on a server that doesn't even RUN a web server?) and to email me at an address that I check every day. Very cool. So now, every week, my server will email me a complete report of my server at home telling me how things are going. The best part about this is that the possibilities are only limited by my imagination. I could have it email me if it detects that someone has logged in as the root user...or (like the RU sysadmins used to do) email (or text page) me when the server has strange things happening. Very cool. I love cron.

Speaking of email. I've been receiving a TON of spam lately. I don't know what company got a hold of my email address, but I've gotten more spam mail in the last week than I've every gotten. everything from refinancing my mortage (which is non-existant) to viagra. One such spam message was sent to my regular email account and also to my phone, which receives text messages through email. This clued me into the fact that there must be a some web bot that has recently scanned my website and found both of those email addresses on my contact me page. So, I went in and changed my email address to be jeffATjeffpollardDOTnet to stop these pesky bots from picking up my address. If there's one thing that really gets my goat, it's spam. To me, there's nothing worse than opening up my email client of choice and getting 5 or 6 junk email messages. I've always been very careful about who I give my email address out to. And if I do give out my personal address, I always make it customized to that site, so that if I ever receive spam mail with THAT address, I'll know who sold me out. For example, if I gave my email address to CDnow.com, I'd give them "[email protected]". It seems like a pretty clever thing to do, but it hasn't helped me with this latest onslaught of spam.

I found a really cool site this weekend: JimTools.com. This site has all kinds of cool little scripts to help web geeks like me. Up until today, I didn't have any META keywords specified in my pages, which makes me almost invisible through the search engines. This site will be very helpful when it comes time to market CustomTacos.com harder.

Speaking of which, I found out that UBB is buying WWWthreads!! For those of you who don't know what this means: Those two companies sell competing discussion forum systems. WWWthreads is a much better system, in my opinion, and is the one that I will be using for CustomTacos.com. UBB announced that the changeover will take place on Thursday and that new pricing would be announced then. To me, this means that the price of the software is about to increase. So, I went ahead and purchased the system so that I would be "grandfathered in".

Ok, now that I've totally bored all of you non-computer people. I'm going to finish burning some backup CDs and then head to bed.

I'm addicted

I'll admit it. I'm addicted to OS X. In the past few days, I've only had to boot back into OS 9 a few times, but every time I do, I remember why I love OS X so much. I love how random crashing doesn't happen. I love raw, unadultrated access to the UNIX command-line prompt.

I found out today that my notch hasn't come in yet, so my truck won't be going "under the knife" until mid-next-week. Bummer.

You know, as much as the entire country doesn't want the terrorists to know that we as a country are scared and paranoid, I must admit that my paranoia meter is still in the mid to high regions. It doesn't help that just this evening, Pres. Bush told America in a speech that there have been more credible reports that more terrorist attacks are possible in the next couple of days. I think what I hate the most is the not-knowing. Not knowing if the sound I hear outside is the sound of a commercial jet flying overhead or a fighter jet. Not knowing if I'll wake up tomorrow only to find out that New York City is now a crater. I hate the paranoia that causes Olivia and I to mute the TV every time we hear a strange noise outside. And I guess the worst part is that this may not be over anytime soon.

Another FULL day..

Wow, another jam-packed day.

I arrived at the staff meeting early for the agency-provided breakfast. I loaded my plate up with a sausage biscuit and some pineapple along-side our CEO.

"Morning, John."

"How ya doin', Jeff?" he replied.

I was stunned. He actually knew me by name. Even with more than 400 people in our company, he matched my face with my name..in an instant. No hesitation. just as if we've been friends for years. He's an amazing man.

The staff meeting was really cool, as usualy. John is such an inspirational speaker. He always seems to have a little (and sometimes hidden) message in his speeches. Today's message was that we all have a creative "drive" that sometimes becomes supressed by the society's assimilation to the "norm".

He took a quick poll of employees: "How many singers do we have?" One, maybe two people raised their hands. "How many dancers do we have?" Again, one..maybe two people. "How many artists do we have?" A few more raised their hands. He then went on to explain that if you were to ask a bunch of kindergardners this question, almost every one them would raise their hands. Because everything in the world is "fresh" to their eyes. And, they don't care whether it's "cool" or "in" to be a singer, a dancer, or an artist. He encouraged us all to try to look at the world with a fresh perspective and not care about the "norms" of society. Almost a direct parallel to the idea behind Apple's Think Different campaign. Personally, I thought the ideas behind John's message were amazing. My guess is that a large percentage of our employees thought it was total crap. Boo to them.

The new Intranet was given a big, big plug and Jack and I were also given a really nice round of applause. It appears as though site usage is already up. A news article with a link to "Discuss this in the discussion forums" yielded more replies than I've ever seen previously. Very nice. I'm going to make an effort to continue the tighter news/discussion forum integration. It seems to be a hit and I think it'll make the site a more interesting place to visit.

The second half of the day was spent at the agency's Creative Director's house hooking up a Linksys router, Airport wireless base station, a PowerBook for him to use at home complete with VPN software so that he can work from at home. You see, this guy works ALOT. Just about every time I've been in there on a weekend, he's been in his office. I'm suprised he still has a wife. He's decided that he really wants to be able to work at home. So, since he IS a partner in the company, he pretty much gets whatever he wants. Even though his computer at work IS a (portable) Titanium PowerBook.

The Cherry on Top

WOW. It was COLD this morning! And my front suspension was SQUEAKY! You see, I didn't follow the part of the instructions included with the DJM suspension kit that said to install grease fittings to keep the bushings lubricated. So, now I pay the price: squeaky bushings when it's cold. I suspect that since the bushings are rubber, when they get cold, they get harder and tend to squeak more. One day I guess I'll take to take it apart and squirt some grease in there.

Today, I spent the most part of the day preparing to put the finishing touches on the new Intranet site for Martin. And, I've spent almost the entire night actually putting the new site online and making sure that everything works.

The quarterly Agency-wide staff meeting is tomorrow morning at 8am, where the new Intranet will get a fairly large plug from our CEO. Pretty cool. I had a chance to get together with him and one of the other partners to show them the new features of the site this afternoon. They were preparing their presentation for tomorrow and wanted to see what they were talking about. Our CEO, like many others, doesn't check his own email (his Secretary says so) or probably even surf the Internet. He seemed impressed, though and commented that the site is doing things that he's wanted to be able to do with the company for years. Pretty neat.

Since I have to be downtown at 8am, I guess I'd better get some sleep. Let's hope the commute to work is less eventful than the last time we had a staff meeting. Officer Reid, if you're reading this, don't sit on I-95 tomorrow morning. I need to be to work on time. Find something better to do.

Looong Weekend

Howdy. It's been a nice, loong, extended weekend and here's what happened:

Saturday was spent cleaning up the apartment and going out to dinner with Eric Hurd and his wife, Kelly. We went to O'Charley's for dinner and it was very good. The chocolate cake was especially good. If you ever go, make sure you get the cake. But then again, the key lime pie was good, too. We had a great time and and I realized that we have so much in common with Eric and his wife (except the fact that we're not married), but yet we never get together with them. Hopefully we'll plan a ski trip with them soon.

We woke up at the ass-crack of dawn Sunday to leave for Charlotte. I didn't realize until I checked it out on MapQuest that it was going to take about 5 HOURS to get there. And since the race started at 1pm, 7:30 was the intended departure time. Of course, that didn't happen. Traffic got really bad around the speedway (worse than expected), which slowed us down further.

We arrived at our seats just as they were firing up the cars. Amazing. Our seats were a little lower than I had hoped, but they were still different. We were in turn 1, in the 5th row. For those of you who aren't NASCAR fans, the best possible seats would be up high on the front stretch (where the start/finish line is). Here are a couple pictures from our seats:

I have to say that the race was one of the more boring races I've seen in a long time. There were only like 8 caution flags and not much other action like passing, etc. I'm pretty sure that Olivia still enjoyed it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Even if you're not a race fan, make it a point to go to the track before you die. Nothing beats the feeling of getting your entire body shaken by 43 900-horsepower race cars as they scream by you at 150mph. Amazing.

I had today off from work because of Columbus Day. So, I would like to take this time and thank Christopher for...letting me have the day off. Thanks, Chris! I spent the entire day working on the CustomTacos.com news interface. It was a weird and complicated process, but I have managed to figure out a way to have my news display on the web site and also on the AvantGo channel that I'm creating for the site. This way, when I add new news to the site, it automatically updates the handheld version of the page(s). Very cool. And not easy to do, trust me. I have managed to tweak Greymatter to serve a very different purpose than what Noah Grey intended it to be used for. And, amazingly enough, it looks like it's going to work out much better than any of the other free news systems out there.

And now, it's back to work tomorrow.

Somebody tell me why I'm here?

It was a really slow day at work today. I spent almost the entire day working on the links section for CustomTacos.com. It's powered by a Perl-based program called Gossamer Links 2.0. It's an amazing (and free) system. It is designed to function similarly to Yahoo's links system. Anyone can submit a link, but it must be approved by the site administrator before it enters the database. It also has a built-in link verifier that makes sure that none of the links in your database are dead. Very cool and very versatile.

That's about all I did today. It's been days since I've emailed my parents and I feel absolutely horrible that I haven't kept in better contact with them lately. I hope they forgive me.

I love it!

Not a whole lot happening today. Lots of servers crashed. I found out that a Linksys 4-port cable/dsl router with wireless functionality will NOT work with Apple's airport software. Perhaps I'll explain more about that soon.

I've been playing with CustomTacos.com tonight. You know, me playing with all of these web sites is much like an old guy going out in his rather large garage, picking a car to piddle with for the night, then getting totally wrapped up in it for the rest of the evening. I set up a basic HTML template for the site and then began installing the Yahoo-style links system that will provide CustomTacos.com viewers will a plethora of links, all in an organized manner. And, my best friend though this process? You guessed it: OS X. Since I purchased the hosting package with SSH, I was able to SSH into the server and chmod files, use VI to edit my perl scripts and many other geeky things I used to doing when I was back at Radford. And the best part? It's built into the OS..not some crappy 3rd-party telnet program. Very cool. My only problem is that I could not for the life of me remember the command to temporarily put a unix program on "hold" and go do something else and then come back to it. Anybody out there remember or know what this is? It's not cntrl-c or x..it's something different. Help if you can!

And now, I'm tired. And stuff. Good night!

TiBook @ /Users/pollardj >shutdown now

10.1: Day Two

Good day today. As I expected, using OS X.1 is still a little frusterating. It's mostly frusterating because I know that I could probably get my work done a little faster if I went back to OS9. But, I also know that in the long run OS X is much better.

I had lots of packages arrive at work today. My replacement Visor arrived, amazingly enough. I completed my tech support call to Handspring Monday at 2:00pm. By noon today (Tuesday), I had a brand new shiny Visor in my hand. I think I'll take Lauren's suggestion this time and get myself some screen protectors. They'll keep my screen from getting scratched and it'll allow me to use my fingers more often and not feel guilty.

My CustomTacos.com t-shirt arrived today, too. It looks pretty good, except for the fact that I thought it was a little..nicer? The logos on the shirt appear to be an iron-on deal..kinda cheap, if you ask me. Perhaps after I wash it once it'll look better. I hope. But, the graphics look great on it. No pixelation and the size is perfect. So, what are you waiting for? Go pick yourself up something nice at the CustomTacos.com merchandise store!

The replacement for my dead 9.1gig Ultra/Wide drive also arrived today. I got it home, installed it and am configuring OS9 and OSX on it. I left my dead 9.1gig drive inside the machine and decided to give it one last shot at reformatting it. As luck would have it, the drive reformatted fine. FIGURES! So now I have a 9.1gig Ultra/Wide drive, a 46gig IDE drive, and the new 20gig IDE drive. Way more space than I need..but I guess I'll use it all one day. Figures that the drive would start working the day the replacement arrives.

But that's just my luck.

An easy way to obliterate terrorism

Yay me! Yay Apple! Yay OS X.1!

I'm proud of myself. I stayed in 10.1 ALL DAY, with the small exception earlier today to download images from a digital camera and just a few minutes ago to use Cisco VPN software. Very cool. There were a few times I was half-tempted to boot back into OS9, but I think that's only because of the slight learning curve associated with 10. Like I told one of the guys in Studio today: OS X is finally just as fast as OS 9, but it seems a little slower just because everything is different and you have to take an extra second or two to figure out how to do something. Actions that were second nature in OS9 now take me a moment to find the OS X equivalent. Not bad, though.

I saw something today that I have a feeling not many of you will understand. It's a unix command joke, if you will. It's a real unix command, but with a humorous twist. So without further ado, here it is:

For those of you who may be scratching your head, here's a simple explanation:

"rm" is a unix command that is used to delete file and folders. It is the equivalent to dragging an icon on your desktop to the trash can (or Recycle Bin on Windows). It is the unix erase command, in other words.

The "-f" option tells the system to "just do it". Don't ask any questions. Don't ask me if I'm sure I want to do this. Just do it.

The "-r" option tells the system to delete recursively. That is, delete all subfolders of the folder being deleted.