Sunday, November 4, 2007
Yesterday I installed Adium at home on the Mac Mini and since the Mac Mini is the only computer at home that's on all the time (because it runs the web server) I forgot to log out of Adium. However, I figured out how to configure Adium to say I'm away after 2 minutes and offline after 3 minutes. I also unplugged the Mac Mini audio so that its audio comes out of its internal speaker because the amp isn't always turned on but I have not yet figured out what sounds mean what in Adium. Chimes sound but I'm not always looking at the Mac Mini screen so I have no connection between the sound and what action is occurring. It would be helpful for the Adium preferences panel to have a Test button for each event so that one could create such associations at any time. If it has such a feature, I could not find it. While chatting with Mom Ryan yesterday, she said her doctor told her that all food from China has lead in it. At least that's now Mom Ryan's perception after having spoken with her doctor. I hadn't heard of this before, so I did some investigating. The New York Times reported on the day after Mom Ryan visited the doctor that the Chinese government barred exports by 750 toy makers due to safety concerns such as lead poisoning and that earlier this year other similar concerns arose regarding Chinese exports of tainted pet food ingredients, toxic toothpaste and seafood laced with harmful chemicals. There appear to be significant concerns, but to say that everything exported from China has lead in it is a knee-jerk reaction. I forgot to mention that on November 1 when having dinner with Chris and Nate I made us all laugh by telling my story about the vandalism I found in wikipedia. Changed a clock. Breakfast at home by myself: Aidell's mini chicken apple sausages, eggs scrambled wet with green onions, wheat toast with Smart Balance, fat-free hash browns with ketchup. Changed more clocks. Chatted with krisno3 online. All my 5dollarhosting websites are down since roughly yesterday. I haven't been able to send or receive e-mail from my primary account since sometime Friday or yesterday. Details can be found at www.5dollarbackup.com. Go to the end and read backwards; it's pretty interesting. The nutshell version: Alabanza bought by Navisite, Navisite screws up in a huge way. Already people are predicting Navisite stock to drop precipitously tomorrow morning. Before Patrick left for China we purchased Avery 8879, glossy clean edge business cards for ink jet printers so that he could make new business cards to take with him. These cards do not feed properly into our Brother MFC-845CW. The pages are not picked up properly, and sending them in singly (nothing else in the tray) helps but only sometimes. I have not been able to try these in another ink jet printer, so I am not certain if this is a problem with the Avery product or with the Brother product. Eventually we got a set of cards to print, but it was not easy. I remember it was very frustrating and I was about to give up. Read Google Blog. OpenSocial sounds promising, and its success depends primarily on how cleverly it is structured and how well Google and the other partners communicate to build it. I am hopeful; it's something that is sorely needed. I've never been a fan of closed content, so although I might have an account at Friendster, MySpace, FaceBook, or other closed content social networks, I don't actively use them because they by default do not permit people to see all your content without signing up. You might say that my RSS reading habits are closed to closed content, so that means I don't read MySpace blogs or FaceBook blogs even though I know some of my friends have them and I would enjoy reading them. It's almost the same reason why I don't read The New York Times or any other newspaper that requires registration. (Does NYT still require registration?) I might respect those newspapers, but I don't respect the limiting of their content on the web. These concepts are simply not in the spirit of the web up with which I grew. I just read an old post by Paul Stamatiou that says that on a PC keyboard connected to a Mac pressing F12 for 2 seconds will eject a cd or dvd. Will have to test that when I get back to work. Discovered NaBloPoMo and kind of rolled my eyes to be honest. The current landing page for Adobe Photoshop has a new Flash interface which is groundbreaking in web development in that it effectively brings a very rich, personal, one-to-one, human element to web communication which I've never seen before. It's not perfect; it feels repetitive after you view a couple profiles, and although there is an attempt at accessibility with the provided captioning it is still very inaccessible in a lot of ways. But aside from these complaints it's very well done. Congratulations to the team that put it together. House chores, web surfing. Late lunch: cashew chicken, steamed rice. Chatted with Patrick online. Watched Serenity (2005) on DVD borrowed from psychobauble and Nate. At 22:27:21, all my base are belong to Navisite. Still.