atomicthoughts.com

One of the podcasters I listen to mentioned that he had seen a lot of Christmas displays up already. According to a trade publication he checked out, the theory is to capture as much christmas lucre as possible before people get their first, larger than expected, heating bills.

That’s some parts shrewd, some parts shitty, and all around sad.

Item: DirecTV remote. MIA: 8 weeks. Status: Found.
Item: DirecTV remote. MIA: 7 weeks. Status: Found.
Item: T-Bone sippy cup. MIA: 8 weeks. Status: Found
Item: Wallet. MIA: 4 days. Status: Found, in washing machine. Wish I had thought of that before the dog’s cavity search.

Item: Padlock. MIA: 1 month. Status: Unknown
Item: Shoes. MIA: 2 months. Status: Found
Item: Wallet. MIA: 4 days. Status: Unknown. Maybe dog ate it.
Item: Roll of Film. MIA: 12 years. Status: Presumed lost.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months playing with new technology. All web stuff since my gadget lust has been pretty well sated over my years of acquisition. My sidekick is getting pretty creaky and the HTC Universal is awfully sexy, but the price tag squashed any such desires.

I’ll start posting some of the tech stuff I stumble across or is forced down my throat. I saw a dozen references to Flock today, for instance. I downloaded it, of course, and it was interesting. It’s based on Mozilla and is being called “social” browser. Your bookmarks can be stored on del.icio.us, which is pretty nifty. It also has a small blog editor built right in, as well as a few other nice touches, and it looks pretty. But it won’t support any of my FF extensions right now (more accurately, the extensions don’t support it), and I got my fill of beta’s and nightly releases in the pre FF and Thunderbird 1.0 days.

A lot of the cooler tech things are built on the Google Maps API. I keep meaning to start using it myself one day, to plot population densities of classes across campus throughout the day. I’m such a wild man! Some of the “apps” are interesting to use once, and others are useful tools. This one is great, Gmaps Pedometer. I can tell you my walk home the other night was 1.67 miles.

I hate it when you’re looking for something else and you’re carrying something. And while you’re looking for something else you put the something down. And then you finally find something else, but the something is nowhere to be found, and now the something becomes the something else.

Here are some ways I like to spend my day:

• Sleeping
• Hiking and picnicing with the kids
• Redesigning business processes
• Having fine food with good friends
• Quiet time and reading

Here is how I actually spent my day:

• Carrying boxes up stairs
• Loading the van
• 3 trips to goodwill
• 1 trip home
• 1 trip to the dump
• Changing a flat tire at the dump. The Aroma, the Sweat, The Fun!

Picture if you will a burly blond man sweating up a storm unloading bricks and lumber at midnight in Tucson, AZ. Wearing his ipod a favorite song comes on, “The Beautiful Ones”, by Prince. Now picture the same thing, except crying while unloading.

There’s something about the song that just gets to me. A big part of it is the emotion of him singing it. Here’s a bit that captures my feelings pretty well:

I may not know where I’m going (babe)
I said I may not know what I need
One thing, one thing is for certain baby
I know what I want, yeah
And if it please you baby
Please you baby
I’m begging down on my knees
I want you
Yes I do
Baby, baby, baby, baby
I want you

I just had the worst software install since I tried to change my screen resolution on a Linux machine. I was trying to install Macromedia Captivate, and it only took 3 hours! Now, it can take 3 hours to install a whole OS, or even Visual Studio if your machine is slow enough. But this was 3 hours of 20 or 30 installs, 10 or 20 uninstalls, and more than a few reboots.

I’ll save myself the pain of going into every detail. In case any of you have the misfortune of needing to install this software, here are the highlights. This software, which has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE WEB, needs a whole lot of access to IE. Captivate turns things into flash movies, so it needs to have flash installed. How does it verify that flash is installed? By firing up IE and checking. But it doesn’t fire up IE to check, it fires up your default web browser to check. And if that’s not IE, you’re screwed. And if you have some resc\trictive security options set up in IE like any sane person should, you’re screwed. So to summarize, to install Macromedia Captivate, make sure IE is your default browser, you have enhanced secuirty disabled, and flash is installed.

As someone who has never had an internal alarm clock, it still freaks me out that my kids pop up like clockwork between 7 and 7:30, devoid of any external stimulus.