MacDude Musings

Moving MacDude Musings

2003-09-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

MacDude Musings

I'm moving. I'll try to get these posts moved over, but I probably won't try too hard. iBlog is super cool, and I'm sure I'll have fun messing with the css over there too.

Come on over and find out what's happening.

2003-09-25T12:09:00.000-07:00

Landlording at the beginning
For those of you who don't know, Shawn & I are now landlords. I guess we have been for a while because we've been renting half of a duplex to Shawn's parents. But now, we've bought the other half of that duplex from my Mom and we're renting it out to three ladies who we have only met once.

My Mom and step-dad, Ed, officially moved out yesterday. They've been moving stuff by the van load to their new house in Roseville, which is just east of Sacramento. Yesterday the moving van showed up and hauled all their remaining stuff (except for some stuff in the garage) off to their new home.

But our story starts before that. My mom and I had purchased this duplex about eight years ago. Each side has 3 bedrooms and 2 baths (sort of), and each side has about 1700 square feet (is there an HTML glyph for the square foot symbol? I don't see one in BBEdit. I suppose you could use [|], but it's not quite right.) Anyway, because it's on a busy street and it doesn't have a very big yard, we decided to find another place to call home and raise our boys. During the time that we were there, Shawn's mom, Faith Gibson moved in with us. When we left, she stayed behind and became our first tenant.

Over the years, my mom met her husband via Third Age, (which didn't start out as a dating service, but looking at their page now, it seems to have that aspect) and they lived very happily in the "back half". However, neither is a spring chicken (who is?) and the fact that the place has two floors started to become a problem for their knees.

So, they found a new house in a new development in Roseville. Why Roseville? It's a nice place and my oldest sister, LeeAnn and her family live. Plus, it's a lot cheaper to buy a home there than in Palo Alto. They got a lovely 2400 sq.ft. place on near a new shopping center. Fun stuff, but there's not much work to be had up there, so it's not an option for us.

Anyway, the last couple of weeks has been a series of events leading up to now that involved trying to get new carpeting (old ugly brown carpet has to go!), moving bits & pieces, boxing up stuff, and eye surgery for Ed (better vision is a good thing!) Throw in the fact that they are A's fans and go to games on the way to and from Roseville and you can see that they've been busy. We've been trying to help them too. Yesterday (moving day) we got a call at 6:30 AM from my mom asking if we could come over and help before the Van arrived... I was there from 6:45 until around 10 and Shawn got the kids to school and showed up around 8:15. She was there all day. Wow!

Ask me about Home Depot. We're trying to get carpeting installed before Monday

2003-09-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

Lost in my garage
Ok, so Neal Stephenson is coming to Kepler's for a book signing! Yay! However, there are signing regulations:

SIGNING REGULATIONS: Neal will sign one non-Quicksilver item for every copy of Quicksilver purchased at the store and signed by him on-site. No flash photography.

Hmmph. Since I've already ordered a copy of Quicksilver from Amazon and it' s being preped for shipping and cannot be cancelled, I think I'll only buy one copy and get him to sign my first edition of Snow Crash.

Easier said than done. We moved things around a bit ago and I lovingly packed up all my books and put them in the garage... Then Shawn hired ClutterBoy to rearrange things, and our garage now has more room, but the things that are stored are pretty inaccessible. Yuck. I've got four days to find the right box (I labeled them). and get the book to Kepler's.

I hope it's worth it

Way, hey up she rises!

2003-09-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

In hon'r of Talk Like a Pirate Day , I'd like to giva ye a song or two.

What shall we do with a drunken sailor? (midi file)

A piratey haiku:

a goblet of grog
soon is, when drunk very quick,
a bucket of chum.

Oh and they've put the older translator back into action:

Aye, ye scurvy dog! Arrrr! Arrrrr! I've a fierce fire in m belly t' pillage an' plunder.

Ahoy! Merchant ship to the starb'd bow!!

2003-09-18T17:18:00.000-07:00

No news for today
I attended a manager training session on how the law effects managers in the workplace. Pretty straightforward. In our seemingly litigation centered society, this stuff is important. unfortunately.

Ok, so I'm off to Home Depot to get a deal on slumlord carpeting. I'm thinking a nice cappuccino. I'm against berber carpet, I've seen it unravel and it's not a pretty sight.

You want to install it when?!

ShawnieBear Blog

2003-09-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

ShawnieBear Blog Look there's a new blog in town. The ShawnieBear blog is by my wife, Shawn. Welcome to the blogsphere!

now I just need to get her to post

2003-09-15T07:45:00.000-07:00

A friend ...
... is someone who'll let you borrow something to check it out.

A good friend is someone who'll warn you what to look out for when you do.

My buddy Schoun (not my wife Shawn), loaned me a variety of music to listen to. Some of it was interesting (such as the extensive "Pickin' on" stuff), then there were the more interesting things like Crank Calls, 70's collections, Dr. Demento, Rock versions of Cartoon Themes and Schoolhouse Rock.

So anyway, I've been listening to this stuff for a while and every once in a while I have to slap my keyboard (or speakers depending on what's close). Ya see, I'm listening to it at work and some of it is "inappropriate". Then this morning, I get an iChat from him letting me know that I need to be careful with some of the content. It turns out that he had to be aware of it because of his daughter.

Being a parent makes you grow up. If it doesn't you may be doing something wrong.

2003-09-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

Arrrrr! Cap'n on Deck!
As you should know by now, September 19th is Talk like a Pirate Day! I went to their site and took the "personality" test:

You are The Cap'n!

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some slit the throats of any man that stands between them and the mantle of power. You never met a man you couldn't eviscerate. Not that mindless violence is the only avenue open to you - but why take an avenue when you have complete freeway access? You are the definitive Man of Action. You are James Bond in a blousy shirt and drawstring-fly pants. Your swash was buckled long ago and you have never been so sure of anything in your life as in your ability to bend everyone to your will. You will call anyone out and cut off their head if they show any sign of taking you on or backing down. You cannot be saddled with tedious underlings, but if one of your lieutenants shows an overly developed sense of ambition he may find more suitable accommodations in Davy Jones' locker. That is, of course, IF you notice him. You tend to be self absorbed - a weakness that may keep you from seeing enemies where they are and imagining them where they are not.
What's Yer Inner Pirate?
brought to you by The Official Talk Like A Pirate Web Site. Arrrrr!

w00t! ;-)

2003-09-09T10:12:00.000-07:00

A beautiful blog entry
No, not mine, Mark's. It's a wonderful, informative ramble. He seems calm and collected, happy and satisfied. He talks about TiVo, trees, babyproofing, spring cleaning...life.

I read Mark's site more for his insight into various web standards and such, but over the year or so that I've been reading it, he has allowed people to read about him and his life. I think it's what really keeps me coming back. After all, if i really want hoo-hah on CSS or some such, I could just Google it and find stuff.

Thanks Mark

2003-09-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

Turn off your light!!!
Last night was one of the worst night's sleep that I've had in a long time. The neighbors behind us had their rear porch light on all night and it was visible from our bed. Ugh. And of course, I get up at 6 AM on Mondays...

Ack!

2003-09-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

Football is here
So, I went to the Stanford/SJSU football game. It took forever because the teams combined through 112 passes, so the clock was stopped a lot (especially since the SJSU QB missed more than half the time.) The next three games will be very telling for Stanford. Either way, I'm really looking forward to next year already with the talented Freshmen they have.

Now if the band would play better...

2003-09-04T17:27:00.000-07:00

G5 arrived
I got one of the G5s I ordered for work today. It's the 1.8GHz model and I've not had a chance to do much with it. having said that, there are some good pictures of one on the net.

I was able to plant more of the Elfin Thyme in my courtyard yesterday and also got three morning glories in the ground and strings put up for them to climb upward on.

Off to try out the G5 graphics

2003-09-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

Productive Weekend
I spent the weekend cleaning house (literally) and getting it ready for a birthday gathering form my wife's grandmother. FayeGram turned 80 last week and her sister and brother-in-law are flying out from Birmingham this week. After the inside of the house was cleaned up (including sorting a huge pile of Rory's toys), I started in on the outside.

Mostly, that involves ripping out weeds and the dead spring flowers. Then planting the new Sword Fern, Australian Tree Fern, Coreopsis , Cyclema, Lantana, English Lavender and tiny thyme. I didn't buy enough of some of these, so I'll have to go back...

Many thanks to my buddy Daryl Alt, who is now working at a nearby Garden shop.

2003-08-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

I could work for the feds!Government office adds Mac OS X to list
The U.S. government is now officially recognizing and supporting Mac OS X as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has released a revised version of its Technical Reference Model (TRM) that adds the operating system and Linux to its list of "supporting platforms," according to Federal Computer Week. Mac OS X and Linux were added because "more and more" agencies use these technologies, reports Government Computer Week. [MacCentral]
w00t!

Let's get that big machine going on OSX!

2003-08-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

NetNewsWire
So, I'm trying out yet another method for posting. NetNewsWire from Ranchero. It has a weblog editor built into it. Since I am using it to view RSS feeds and you can set it to open the Weblog Editor automatically on launch, it should help remind me to post. On the other hand, if I leave it open, then it may not (since it will only open the editor when it's launched.) Hmmm. Maybe a cron job would help! It would probably help to get off of Blogger and use Moveable Type or Blosxom or ... I could also quit my job so that I'd have more time to work on this.

Automation is *a* key to laziness.

2003-08-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

Anti-BOFH
I wanted to tell you about a post on How to be Nice to Users posted by Mike Kruckenberg. if you're a syadmin, it's fun to talk about BOFH senarios, but it works a hell of a lot better to treat them well.

2003-08-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

URLs and how to spread them around without breaking them

OK, I've got a pet-peeve to share with you. Or perhaps it's more like a windmill that I'd like to take a tilt at. Have you ever recieved a message from a friend that contains an interesting URL? (I thought you might have). Ever clicked on that URL and had your web browser open a page (or not open the page) because it's not there?

Maybe, if you're used to this stuff, you check the URL that got pasted and see the error, but a lot of people either just give up or they go back tot he email and click the link again and have the same problem.

I'll use an example that hapened earlier today to explain this. My friend, Allen, in addtion to sending me typical friendly "how ya doin?" personal messages, also sends out humor and interesting stuff blasts to a larger audience. Today he send a quick blurb about the Stanford Manufacturing "How Everyday Things are Made" site.

Here's what he sent:

A new Stanford website, "How Everyday Things Are Made" (http://manufacturing.stanford.edu), takes a look at the manufacturing process for products including candy, clothes, airplanes and steel. The site, an online educational experience targeted to the general public, will give non-engineers a window into manufacturing technology. Stanford's Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing (AIM) funded the site, which was designed and produced by Design4X Inc. of Oakland, Calif., an education and information resource for engineers.

So I think this is worth looking at, so I click the URL and I get (graphic):

Hmmph. Having been through this before, I notice that the URL reported is:

http://manufacturing.stanford.edu),

Yuck. There's a parenthesis and a comma at the end! I get rid of these and proceed to the proper site. Then, I remember that I'm on a crusade! I'm out to teach the world how to make these URLs clickable!

Folks, there's an easy answer to this. Follow the RFCs.

What's that? Oh. An RFC is a Request For Comment. They run the internet. It's a set of rules set up by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). For more information on RFCs, check out <URL:http://www.rfc-editor.org/>.
The particular RFCs that we care about in regard to this whole URL thing are:
RFC-1738, RFC-1808, RFC-2368 RFC-2396, etc. Going all the way back to RFC-822 (which has been obsoleted by RFC-2822). A good interface to look at the cross references to all of these is Zvon's RFC Repository.

Now then, you don't need to rush off and read all those, but you're welcome to. The basics are that RFC-822 (the obsolete one) tells us about mail headers. Within mail headers, you should only use angle brackets as delimiters to define the beginning and end of things so they can be interpreted. Originally, this was used to denote addresses in email headers. It evolved when the World Wide Web was created and other Uniform Resource Locaters (URLs) were needed. And so RFC-1738 was born.

This document describes the syntax and semantics for a compact string
representation for a resource available via the Internet. These
strings are called "Uniform Resource Locators" (URLs).
One big thing about RFC-1738 is that it tells you what not to use as part of a URL.

Characters can be unsafe for a number of reasons. The space character is unsafe because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URLs are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs. The characters "<" and ">" are unsafe because they are used as the delimiters around URLs in free text; the quote mark (""") is used to delimit URLs in some systems. The character "#" is unsafe and should always be encoded because it is used in World Wide Web and in other systems to delimit a URL from a fragment/anchor identifier that might follow it. The character "%" is unsafe because it is used for encodings of other characters. Other characters are unsafe because gateways and other transport agents are known to sometimes modify such characters. These characters are "{", "}", "|", "\", "^", "~", "[", "]", and "`".

So, because URLs can include things like slashes to denote different levels in a directory structure, ampersands to denote a connection in a database, question marks for queries, etc., there needed to be some way of denoting the beginning and end of a URL. They choose angle brackets.

Thus when you're sending a URL to someone, wrap it in angle brackets. It will make it so that people will get what you want them to. It evens works for those huge URLs that you get from map sites or databases. As a bonus, you can include "<URL:" as part of the URL to let people know that you undersand the RFC.

Examples

Apple Headquarters via Yahoo Maps:
<URL:http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?ed=Qhv9Sep_0TpMK_N0ZiGCFtdN02ktvmAL&csz=Cuperti
no%2C+CA&country=us>

Apple Headquarters via MSN (formerly MapBlast):
<URL:http://mappoint.msn.com/(53amzv45isbphq45rcneqd45)/map.aspx?ID=27CiJ.&C=37.33182%2
c-122.03118&L=USA&A=12&PN=1097513573&S=800%2c740&P=%7C37.33182%2c-122.03118%7C1%
7C1+Infinite+Loop%2c+Cupertino%2c+CA+95014%7CL1%7C&TI=1+Infinite+Loop%2c+Cupertino%2c+
CA+95014>
Trickier is to embed a URL in a sentence like:

To get to Apple HQ, check out <http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?ed=Qhv9Sep_0TpMK_N0ZiGCFt
dN02ktvmAL&csz=Cupertino%2C+CA&country=us>. Feel free to zoom in!

I hope that helps. I'm trying to get at least one web browser to properly wrap URLs dragged from the location area to a text area, but I haven't succeeded yet.

2003-08-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

Sheesh.

I guess I am better at reading blogs than writing them. Of course the fact that I've got a cheap blog that doesn't have comments doesn't help. I've never gotten any feedback on this, and it seems that mostly i write about bloggin' rather than about anything interesting doesn't help.

maybe I need to write reviews of Mac hardware and software? Or break the blog into detail catagories and see if anyone bites? i suppose i could bite the bullet and transfer MacDude.com (which is currently in dns secondary limbo) to a machine that I have more direct control over and spend a heap of time fiddling with it.

On the other hand, I could just talk about what's going on with me. Ya know, talk about what it's like to be a 41-year-old dad of two boys, working at Apple, sharing my life with Shawn, life of a Palo Alto native (who still lives there), etc. etc.

2003-05-07T15:37:00.000-07:00

Ignore this
So, iTunes 4 is very cool in a nice corporate environment. There are plenty of other people sharing their music and I just got a nice complement on my toonz. I'm not sure how much I like Kung-Log... Maybe I have to use Kung-Tunes too. Or maybe it's just more suited to Movable Type. :-\ I'm thinking that I need to wrestle macdude.com out of the hands of the people who are currently hosting it. Ah, to have the time to really geek out and host the domain from my own machine. . .

now playing: Anybody Seen My Baby from the album "Forty Licks (Disc 2)" by Rolling Stones

2003-05-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

Kung-Log
Ok, so now I'm trying to use Kung-log. Maybe it will inspire me to post more. :-P

Angie from the album "Forty Licks (Disc 2)" by Rolling Stones

2003-04-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

Now I'm really bad.
It's April and I'm not keeping up. I'm in NYC now traveling on Apple's dime. Out here to scout out good training locations. Can't resist going to the SoHo Store.

I hope everyone had a good Passover and Easter. BoingBoing had an interesting link to WebZen and it's silly stuff about religion.

I know I can do this...

2003-02-19T10:43:00.000-08:00

There seems to be no end to the amount of information, automation and saturation that's going on. It's raining again (Not much snow in Palo Alto for the last 25 years or so), and there's a lot going on that effects a lot of people. There's this whole Iraq thing, and then there's stuff like Konfabulator by Arlo Rose and Perry Clarke, Various Blogs (I'm adding some to my sidebar.) raising kids, keeping myself and my wife sane, and working at Apple.

not that there isn't joy in the world.

2003-02-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

More stuff you must know

So I followed a link on Dive into Mark that plopped me down at The Morning News where I found Men's Fashion: Part 1 Suits. Wow. I wish that I had found that in my twenties.

That was twenty years ago...

2003-02-07T13:02:00.001-08:00

Morcheeba

Ok, so I bought Morcheeba's latest album, "Charanga". I wasn't too impressed. It seems to lose the thing that I liked best about their music, which is that it does a great job of blending different musical styles. (thus defining the genre of "Trip-Hop")

I've had "Big Calm" and I think it is one of my favorite albums. So now I've got to figure out if I want to get their other works.

More later on this subject

2003-01-26T21:59:00.000-08:00

good game

Overall, I think it was a good game. The Raiders didn't really show up until late in the third quarter, but I think that the Pepsi commercials won. The one with Ozzy came in first followed by the baboons (since Sierra Mist is a Pepsi product.)

outta here

2003-01-24T12:46:00.000-08:00

overload predicted in 28 seconds

Man, there's a lot of stuff going on behind blogs. You got your template stuff, which could include javascripts and the rest of the *ml stuff, and pictures, and content and different main blog servers competing over content, counters, feedback/coment buttons, and more!

I think I've spent about 4 hours over the last 2 days just adjusting or researching how my blog should work and how it should look. I'd love to have a counter and comments functions, but I'm not sure that anyone is reading this stuff anyway. :-\

I need to write something other than this self-referential garbage anyway.

chow;-)

2003-01-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

Blog blog bloggin' along

OK, so I'm gonna try to change the template in use here and see if I can make it a bit prettier (er, um nicer in a masculine sort of way I mean. ;-)

So, I wonder how I enable comments here at blogspot, or a counter... I guess i'll poke around some more...

OK, so if you are viewing this on a Mac running Mac OS X (and not using IE), you get to see the pretty blue ripples background. If not, you see a nice warm yellow background.

paw, paw, bite!

2003-01-22T16:15:00.000-08:00

Life goes on

Well, two people were laid off in my department yesterday. I'm very sorry to say that they are gone. Both will be missed. The odd thing was that they were laid off so suddenly and no one else was. It was said to be a 'structural' layoff and not one based on performance. :-\

Now maybe I'll get cracking on the stuff that needs to be done. :-D Like paint the bathrooms, install a new dishwasher, muck out my office and the garage, etc. Oh, I haven't taken down the xmas lights yet... Maybe this weekend.

OK, so I may need to determine what the theme of this site is. Should I write about my life? life that happens around me? the various web issues? Things I'm interested in? (I guess it wouldn't be a good idea to start a monologue about things I'm *not* interested in.)

Oh, I did say that I'd write more about myself...

I'm male, about 40 years old, I have a lovely wife and kids and I am lucky enough to be able to live in the same place that I grew up. I have several core interests that seem to do a great deal to influence my underlying structure. Off the top of my head I'd list these as:

Family
Education (Because of my mom & dad)
Palo Alto & Stanford (home town)
Fantasy & Science Fiction (and associated items)
Macintosh Computers

Obviously, there's some things missing, but that's a start.

later

2003-01-21T15:01:00.000-08:00

So, here it is...

Free weblog for me. I'll probably upgrade eventually. ;-) But for now, since my web site MacDude.com seems to be stuck in limbo because i can't ftp to the host server and I can't use ssh becasue I have /bin/false as my shell... :-P

Hmmm. Seems really lame, doesn't it. It started out innocently enough, I got a domain name and found space on a friend's site... Only the friend's site got moved to another friend's site (I only know his name and email address) where it was broken into a couple of times and so he's locked up so securely that it's nearly in stasis.....

Wow, is blogging really just a venting vehicle? Next time I'll try to be more up-beat and tell you something more about myself....

bye