Have had the fireplace going for four hours. Birch, oak. Love fires.
Just hit me how great it would be if the WordPress theme world lived on something like github. Fork! Fork! Fork! Would be great.
At a coffee shop and the woman at the table next to me is selling a Yellow Pages listing to a guy. Tough sell. Lot of work for not much revenue.
Wrestled Capistrano down today. Now have multi-stage Capistrano deployment working for this PHP application. Nice.
Today I feel like I turned the corner on two tools: git and capistrano. +1 for me.
Really digging the new album from The Killers. - Day & Age.
To all Minnesotans: it’s not that cold out. You live in Minnesota. Move on. 🥶
MacBook Battery Toast
I was just updating our oldest Mac, my original MacBook (black) that is now pretty much Tammy’s laptop. I was upgrading it to 10.5.6 and realized two things.
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It was way behind in updates. I’m usually so good with this, but 6 updates to apply? Yikes!
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The battery is so wasted that it couldn’t even make it through the update process. Ouch! I fired up CoconutBattery to see how bad it was and promptly ordered a new battery.
184 load cycles and 31 months isn’t horrible though.
New Battery
Took a quick trip to the Apple Store and got a new battery. The old black MacBook is now like new! Actually, better than new looking at the numbers.
I know they are man’s best friend and all, but sometimes there is just no way around it, dogs suck. Lately this has been applying to Chase more than Izzy. For the last few months he’s been really into eating, well, anything. Mazie’s toys. Books. Stuff we cannot identify after he’s mauled it. The newest one that just amazes us is the dimmer light switch knobs. That’s right. He pulls the knob off the wall and eats it.
Yesterday, after being out of the house for a very short lunch, I was welcomed with this scene at the front door.
Ugh! It’s every bit as bad as it looks. What did he eat? Well, it’s the back of one of Mazie’s cool Jennifer Delong Modern Ultrasuede Chairs.
He had grabbed the seat back cushion and went to town. The most amazing thing about it is that the zipper was opened, and not damaged. It’s like he gently opened it up and removed the foam to have a big foam party with. Unfortunately he did chew a hole in one of the corners so we are hoping the seat back can be replaced.
I really hope he grows out of this chewing festival soon. We’ve got dozens of toys around for him to eat, but those generally are spared.
Date Night! Great dinner at Rinata in Uptown and now movie, Four Christmases!
Mazie had Belgian waffles for the first time this morning. She’s a fan! The “big” waffles hold more syrup, FTW!
Testing out SQL schema, fixing, git pushing. Having fun. Beethoven is helping along in the background.
Downloading a 22.6MB app to decompress a 3.9MB file. This makes sense.
Creating some process flow diagrams using Instaviz on my iPhone before going to sleep. Thanks for the demo earlier Dan Grigsby.
It’s really lame that iTunes doesn’t have the classic christmas specials. No Rudolph! At least they have the Grinch. 😕
Dad: “The balloon popped, it’s broken, you can’t have it.”
Mazie: “Daddy, I want the balloon.”
Repeat x100.
I just took the plunge this evening and updated WordPress to 2.7. So far I’m pretty impressed. I wasn’t sure what I would think of the new admin interface but after using it I like it a lot. I can’t wait to give the automated upgrade feature a workout. If anything seems amiss, let me know.
Now the race is on to see how long it takes for good themes to come out that take advantage of the threaded comments feature in 2.7.
Mir:ror - RFID for the Home
I’ve been wondering when these little RFID gadgets will start to make a presence in the home. Big companies have done pretty amazing things with their supply chains using RFID, but what use will a geeky household be able to make of RFID. There hasn’t been much.
I was interested to see an email this morning from Violet, the makers of the Nabaztag. This company is definitely “out there”. I’ve tried explaining the Nabaztag to visitors and they just look funny when you tell them “it is a WiFi Rabbit”. Then it starts talking and moving its ears and they really wonder. Both Violet and Ambient Devices, makers of the Ambient Orb, are doing some really interesting things bringing the web into the real world.
Mir:ror is Violet’s newest product. This video explains it best.
It’s interesting. In essence the stamps are just RFID tags and they have made a consumer friendly RFID reader (the mirror). I can think of a couple of neat things to do with this, particularly if you keyed it with home automation. For example, take your keys and swipe them on the mirror to turn off all the lights in the house when you leave. I would love that.
It will be interesting to see what kind of applications people think of for RFID in the home. This is a cool first step.
Update: My friend John Riedl just posted about this on his blog as well.
- Installing Boxee to try it out.
- Hmm.. On first launch Boxee hard crashed my MacBook Pro. Not good.
- Boxee people - anyone know why it’s an installer? Why no drag-n-drop. (Hate installers and their voodoo.)
At Apple Store to warranty replace a defective AppleTV.
Of course Apple TV unit works great at the store. They are replacing anyway, yeah!