January 2002

Dude, Leo is so cool. I wanna hang out with Leo. We could bash Microsoft together... Leo, please, be my friend!

Now that Chris Pirillo guy, he's... amusing... Once day when Call For Help came on, the female said "Why did they give a 12 year old a TV show?" Why indeed!

Speakin' of TeeVeee people, don't forget about Wil Weaton!

Seriously, I think my future is headed towards the TV/web combo of some sort. I've been in the broadcasting industry for 46 years, and in all of that time, I've been behind the scenes... let's keep it that way...

Enron: Makers of fine confetti

That reminds me, I need to call Authur Andersen about doing my taxes this year...

Here's a link to a story about the sledding accident that kill Jill. This sort of stuff always kind of freaks me out. I don't know how to deal with death very well... I also wrote up a brief bit on the WATN page.

I'm glad we have a (tiny) sledding area in the park behind our house. I remember thinking it was really small, but right now it seems just right. It does have a few trees though, I might have to help them fall down one night around 2 AM...

Note regarding yesterday's mention of Rody: Rody is used for therapy of young children... in case you didn't know...

Well, the temporary filling I got after my root canal is starting to fall out. So they want me to come in and get it fixed, but they can't do the permanent one yet because they don't have time right now... I think I'm going to get steel teeth put in my mouth. That should take care of future dental problems...

Maddy's birthday (and party) was the other day. We had a blast. She got a Rody.

You know what's valuable? Someone who really knows the Mac side of things, but also knows a lot about the Windows side of things as well... and if they know some *nix stuff in addition to that, they're a keeper!

I had this url on my list for some reason... Subject: how to make a rescue macosx disk

Today I wrote a perl script to loop thru directories and delete any file not modified in the last 7 days. I wrote it while someone who doesn't really know perl very well watched me. They were amazed it took about 8 minutes. Me too, I was moving pretty slow this morning... should have took 5...

I found out that someone I knew years ago died in a freak sledding accident a few weeks ago. I found out via email. I've also found out that someone I knew died via a mailing list a few years ago (the person wasn't on the mailing list) and then there was the time I heard about someone who died and ended up seeing the story on the news, that weird too... I seem to have lots of mentions of death around here. I should dig them all up sometime.

Goodbye crazy Jill!

I know everyone is hyped up about Radio 8, but I thought I should mention that I got the BloggerAPI working in Radio 7.0... might be interesting...

Of course I really should be looking at the Perly Blog blogger Client...

mrbarrett has something to say about MacFixIt's new pay-to-play plan... I feel pretty mich the same, but wanted to wait a bit before kicking up a storm... I'd probably feel differently if I was a frequent visitor (or contributor!) to MacFixIt...

I read somewhere that the hip new approach churches are taking to pull in young people involve rock music and PowerPoint presentations... PowerPoint presentations!? That'll keep me away for sure!

Well, I ended up following The Quick and Dirty instructions for cloning a disk or backing up your drive which involves using the 'ditto' command in Mac OS X (for the faint of heart when it comes to the terminal, I'd recommend looking at Carbon Copy Cloner, which should put a GUI on ditto'ing things...)

Anyway I successfully moved everything from my 5400rpm drive over to the 7200rpm drive, made it the startup drive, and bam - it worked. My symlinks should all be fine, since they use the *nix path (/Users/raster/foo) rather than the volume name. Aliases might still need a bit of repair, since they might be too smart for their own good, doing the right thing and pointing to the original version. It shouldn't be too bad to clean those up.

Anyway, ditto seems to be the way to copy everything. A Finder copy doesn't handle the BSD stuff right, and the cp command in BSD doesn't handle the resource forks right, so ditto is the man, as the kids say... in fact typing man ditto in the terminal is something we highly recommend...

RasterWeb! Home of smooooth segue's for over 4 years...

Go read the Mac FAQs & Tips at bombich.com for other useful stuff...

Lost in Waukesha: We had to go to Waukesha yesterday, a most confusing city to be sure. I'm fairly certain that accounts for anyone I know from Waukesha being mentally disturbed in some way. I'm also going to assume that the reason Les Paul invented the electric guitar is either because he never left the house, due to the confusing nature of Waukesha, and thusly had plenty of time for hobbies, or he needed an electric guitar to craft a ballad about how messed up Waukesha really is...

Note to self: Finish the dnetc stats generator to make a nice SVG file... argh...

Maddy has one day of therapy left. I hope they can fix her. Actually she's made some great progress in a lot of ways... so things are much better than they were. It's amazing how far she has come in the last ten months... Don't worry, we still get daily reminders that we aren't done yet...

We went sledding yesterday, and I attempted to snowboard. When I say I attempted to snowboard, this means I attempted to go down the hill using an old Madrid longboard with no hardware on it. Trying to snowboard with an old skateboard deck is roughly equivalent to Ralph Malph taking an ironing board to the ocean to surf... The results can never be good. After a wipeout the first time down, I actually did ok, the trick being not standing up, but rather staying crouched low to the ground. The kids and mom stuck to using actual sleds for the sledding adventure. They are all much wiser than I...

Speaking of pizza, while Rosati's is the best, what ain't the best is waiting more than an hour for a pizza. So we thought we'd try the mom and pop place near our house. We got a 14" pizza, it took 20 minutes, and it was 7 U.S. Dollars. I had to walk a 1/2 block to get it, but that's just fine... Only a few pieces were burned on the bottom too!

I plan on 'moving' OS X from the 5400prm drive to the 7200rpm drive this week. I'm not exactly sure how to do it, disk image? *nix cp command? Reinstall? (ugh!) Hmmm... I'll have to do some research on the matter...

I've got a lot to say, much of it might not make sense... I don't care...

I can't believe Emma, little Kindergarten age Emma, got a phone call from a school chum and her chum told her who had crushes on who. Girls... sheesh!

I found out last month that I went to high school with Maddy's therapist. She's a year or two younger than me... weird...

I hate being tired all of the time. I hate being tired every night when I want to get a lot of stuff done... I hate mornings, I hate getting up when I'm still tired... argh...

Thanks snow, like we really needed you to return. I hate shoveling... to hell with it!

We do get to go sledding in the park though. It's right behind our house. (And in summer we go swimming!)

rm -f /root/canal

Got a root canal last week. "Did it hurt?" Only the bill... (no dental) 625 U.S. Dollar later... (actually I haven't paid it yet, ha!)

The car went haywire on us too, I had to get a ride from the boss one day, and try to work from home another... "Did it hurt?" Only the bill... 550 U.S. Dollars... thanks VISA

KMart might go out of business? Good! Maybe they'll close the one near us and put a Target there...

saucemaster is cool...

As long as there is silliness and meaningless songs to be written, the Mr. T Experience has nothing to worry about... bands that have to deal with real issues only have so much material to work with, yeah, war is bad, you said that already... classism is bad, you said that already...

There are too many web sites out there. Time to delete some!

Perl r00ls...

Any programmer that sets a field length of 50 chars for a company's name should be shot.

I am not the jackal!

I convinced someone that saying our system was 'proprietary' would be a bad thing... I'm not sure if that's good or not...

Mac OS X. I had to mention it somewhere...

I used iPhoto last night, it's slick. I only got the 'The application iPhoto has unexpectedly quit' alert once. (Rock solid unix, right Steve?) Since I have no digital camera, I didn't have a lot of photos handy, I'll have to gather all of my old scans and digital photos off of CD's and other hard drives. I think I'll be spending some quality time with iPhoto. (Still, I really need that iScan app... Steve?)

For anyone who thinks Mac OS X will be running on Intel hardware in the future, do you really think Steve would allow some beige-box PC on stage with him? Even if it was hidden under the table. The sight of such an 'ugly' computer must make his stomach turn. From the cube to the sphere. Maybe they should have put a flat screen on top of the cubes, hmmm...

I did catch the keynote last night thanks to TechTV. One thing I noticed when Steve talked about the digital lifestyle and the products we use was this... he mentioned DVD players (I don't have one, I have a vcr) digital cameras (I don't have one, I have a 35mm and a scanner) digital video cameras (I don't have one, I have an analog camera) MP3 players (I play audio out to cassette tapes, I use an iMic to do this) so basically the only part of my digital lifestyle that is really digital is my PowerMac G4. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to be fully digital, but until Steve loans me the money, I'm stuck with mainly analog devices, and analog to digital converters to do the hard work...

I do have a PDA, an old Palm III. With the serial cradle. It might be time to pony up $30 to Palm for a USB connector. Well, maybe when the OS X software comes out... and when Avantgo has an OS X conduit...

To those that say Apple hyped up the hype to unrealistic levels, well, gee, no shit. Here's why: every year (or is it every six months?) when Steve does a keynote, we know things will get announce, is it the Superdrive, or the iPod, or a new iMac? It doesn't matter any more. The rumor sites, and forums are filled with speculation, people enjoy it. But no matter what they announce, there will be people who are disappointed. Apple could never announce everything people think they might. The iWalk? Please... So this was a message from Apple. Screw you... Yup, from now on we will remember this, and when they say they have something big we won't listen. Then they'll announce something medium and we'll say"Gee, that is really cool." Expectations should be returned to a more realistic level. (It's just a theory anyway... I'm tired...)

Macobserver forums relating to Macworld and new Apple stuff...

Reactions to Apple's MacWorld announcements:

iPhoto - iCan't wait to use it. I've tried a few other photo/image management apps, I think I got one when I bought my scanner, and another when I bought the printer. One of them is actually ok, but I'm guessing iPhoto will be pretty far ahead of it. Now, we need iScan for those of us who have scanners connected to our OS X boxes.

iMac - It's neat looking. Yup. Nice features. I don't think it would stand up in my house. I've recently seen some articles and discussions stating that Apple's laptops are all you need now, since they have almost all of the features of desktop models, and I have the same problem with that theory. I don't want to sit my (almost) 3 year old in front of a laptop, and I'd probably be almost as hesitant to set them in front of the new iMac. I say that now, since I haven't actually seen on in person, but it looks a little delicate, like a flower, right Steve? Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but both of my kids started using computers before 2 yrs of age, and I know how rough they can be.

Mac OS X - Mac OS X will be the default system on every new Mac. OS 9 will be loaded but not the default startup system. Good move. The quicker we all move to OS X, the better... iThink...

Ok, Woz did not return to Apple... yet!

To sum up, I'm pleased as heck to own an Apple computer, and be able to benefit from having things like iTunes, iPhoto, iDisk, and iMac, etc... What does Microsoft give you, a Passport? (btw, in case you didn't know, Microsoft puts the ass in Passport...)

Jarrett House North had some good live coverage of the keynote...

Do I still have time to make my prediction on MacWorld Expo? Steve will announce that Steve Wozniak will be returning to Apple. See, while everyone either has a love/hate relationship with Steve Jobs (or a hate/hate relationship) there's nobody out there who doesn't like Steve Wozniak. Even the slashdot crowd has respect for Woz. Anyway, that's my guess. We'll know what really happens later today. And if the old VCR does the right thing, I'll be able to watch TechTV's coverage later tonight...

At least two people have told me that Mediafour will be releasing xPlay, which is Windows software for the iPod. It should be announced at MacWorld next week.

And here's a plug for MacUpdate.

If the rumors be true, and *NSync appear in Episode II, George Lucas might as well stick a blaster in his mouth and end it all, because I don't wanna see a galaxy far, far away that has been infected with the wretched scum and villianny that is a boy band of today... ugh...

The Pixter caught my attention when it came out. If you remember, the kids like to create Palm Art. Well, I wasn't about to give them each Palm based devices to doodle on, but ol' Santa came through with Pixters!

More predictions: 2002 will be the year of massive momentum for Mac OS X. It'll be interesting to see how things will look in June, September, and December of this year. Will Mac OS 9 still be around? To what degree? Hmmm...

RasterWeb (in it's current incarnation, what people commonly refer to as a 'weblog') has been around since 1997. This marks the 5th calendar year of existence. RasterWeb has existed in other forms since (I believe) 1995, which would be 7 calendar years... yay again...

2002 will be the year I finally get a digital camera!

Not having broadband can really suck.

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