Took the car in to the dealer this morning. The airbag light issue was unrelated, per them. And covered under my extended warranty. Total cost to respond to the jack-off-the-trailer episdoe was a few bucks. About 6 clips that held various cables, etc., in the undercarriage had to be replaced. Also got a new battery, also covered under warranty, also unrelated. Props to Honda; I was at a dealer, I didn't have to provide any proof that I had the extended warranty. Easy Peasy.And, yes, it would have made better sense to take the money I spent on the extended warranty and put it in Apple stock. But being able to dodge a $900 bill today was worth ever penny I spent then.
Right before I left the day job I talked to the Engineering Manager about what I'd do if I were king of the forest. One of the things I referenced was the Google 20%. Basically, as I understand it, Google folk get to spend 20% of their time on personal projects. I have no idea what the constraint is, I assume you can't develop petunia growing technology, but if it's in the information arena, I assume you could do it.I proposed to the EM that my fellow engineers were a bright bunch, knew the application they were working on very well and would love to fix the most glaring holes, or maybe add some nice new feature. The powers-that-be would have no obligation to use what the drones came up with, but how cool would be to encourage staff to think creatively about the problem in front of them.Fast forward four months, and Google releases a chart api.
If you're doing any kind of reporting you can now add charting - free and easy. It's absolutely beautiful. I've got uses for it right now.And it was developed in someone's 20% time.
The stand needs a home, so it nestles into the undercarriage of my car. It's 4:50, so traffic is moving kind of slow, so lets say I'm going 50 mph. Jamming a piece of steel into my undercarriage. Loud scraping noise. Really loud scraping noise.
Fortunately the cars behind me see the distress and slow down enough that I can pull over.
The thing is stuck in the middle of my undercarriage, dead in the middle of my front tires; pretty much even with them. I.e. I can't reach it. I decide the thing to do is jack the car up so I can get far enough under to pull the the thing out.
Did I mention it was raining? Did I mention I had to pee? Did I mention I was alongside a US interstate during rush hour?
After 20 minutes of wiggling and beating on the (now) damn thing I got it out.
The only apparent damage is that my airbag warning light is permanently on. I'm off to the dealership in the morning, fearing what replacing/repairing that will cost.
When I get home, I notice in this blog entry: A ladder, a sofa, box tops, kitchen cabinet door - things I’ve seen on our freeways. Yea, no kidding.
There must be something here you'll like. What a great way to discover new work. Here's a web page, if you don't want to mess with iTunes.
Mom and I went to Arden Fair Mall on Friday (Black Friday!) to get her a new computer (it's been four years, it was time, but that's another post). From the time I reached the mall, parked, went to the store, picked out the Mac, and left the mall was a half an hour. On Black Friday, alledgedly the busiest day of the year for retailers. I've had visits to the mall, at this time of year, where it took me 40 minutes to get out of the parking lot.Today, I went to Costco to stock up on staples (and paper clips) and there were only two people ahead of us in line.I'm not optomistic about the economic outlook.
I just updated my computer. The previous primary cpu was a 12" laptop, 1.5 ghz PPC chip. 1.25 gig of RAM. 80 gig drive. All plugged into a 23" Cinema Display. I got all that at a great deal when I was working for Apple three years ago. Right before the first time I tried to quit that job.
The new guy is a MacBook. Specs are to the right. I got the biggest built-in drive I could (from Apple), 250 gig. The built-in display is 13". One noteworthy thing that I've not seen mentioned elsewhere is that there's no non-Apple software bundled, aside from a demo version of Mac Office. The old laptop came with some serious software free-love. These days, not so much. I'm not sure who changed their minds, I'd guess it was Apple.
I've used a laptop as my primary computer for at least 10 years. I like the flexibility of having everything in one place, all the time. I've always backed up my data in a way to protect against laptop loss. I've never had a laptop die on me. (knocking on wood...)
The biggest change as I moved from the old system is the new MacOS - Leopard. I wrote about it a bit, after upgrading Molly's MacBook. (not quite so juiced, thank you very much.)
Leopard is great. The combination of a faster computer and and an OS written to take better advantage of that power is a joy to experience. A lot of the time you'll find yourself with software that is a little ahead of the hardware. i.e., it's pokey. (and I'm Gumby). So far, that's not the case with Leopard. Everything is just faster. And so far, everything works. (I'm keeping the previous laptop around. It's the Mac I'll use when I need to run a Classic app.)
There are (literally) hundreds of new features or enhancements. I'm using Time Machine for backup. Haven't tried to restore yet, but so far it looks painless. Spotlight is finally useful. In the old mac I'd get the spod almost every time I used Spotlight. Now it's fast enough to use as a launcher, so I can retire the interesting, but always flaky, QuickSilver.
iChat is improved, allowing me to retire the amusing, but flaky Adium. (Open a Console window with Adium running...)
So far, so good. I'm liking the new setup. Now, all I have to do is quit exploring and start working and I'll benefit from the productivity boost.
It should be obvious why I'm reading this guy.
The Red LeBaron
You know those stick figures that people glue to the back windows of their cars, showing their family? Dad, Mom, Little Bobby, Scruffy and Bubbles?They’re much less saccharine if you think of them as “kills.”