Not A Dollarshort

Baby News.

Congratulations to Claire and her husband on the occasion of the birth of their daughter, Amelia Joan!

(I originally placed a period at the end of the previous sentence but then remembered all the trouble that caused on one particular episode of Seinfeld.)

IBoom.

For the past couple weeks, the fan of my iBook would start to make a relatively loud whirring sound after a fairly short duration of use; this sound had occurred before, but I had blamed it on poor ventilation (it would be on my lap while I sat on the couch). After looking at some Apple discussion forums, I realized that others were having the same problem and it wasn't that big of a deal.

Then, yesterday extremely erratic lines and colors started to appear on the screen. They would intensify, and then basically freeze the screen, so that nothing was visible. I restarted, and after a disk check, it booted properly. And then it happened again, about 10 minutes later.

Out of about 6 or 7 unsuccessful reboots, we were finally able to get into the system. We backed up my essential data to Ben's computer, then Ben called AppleCare. At that point, I was not in the mood to speak with customer support since I have some sort of irrational opinion that things like this shouldn't happen. They told him to remove the third-party RAM (he did). Didn't help. Then they told him to remove the battery and adapter, and reset the "power manager". Then they tried resetting the PRAM, which didn't work (it only restarted twice, whereas it was supposed to reset as long as the keys were pressed). Then they tried to boot into Open Firmware, but the screen stayed black. We tried booting normally, and the screen came on, but the lines appeared almost right away now, and moving the screen on its hinges didn't help. Overall, the customer support person was as helpful as he could possibly be.

They concluded that it was a problem with the logic board (maybe Video RAM) or the cable that attaches the logic board to the LCD, which sometimes comes loose, particularly on laptops or other computers where the monitor moves around (like the LCD iMacs).

So, they're sending me a box to ship the iBook to Houston for repairs and I'm back on my desktop -- which thankfully, has most of the current applications that I've been using on my iBook (Chimera, NetNewsWire, Photoshop 7), and more importantly Jaguar. After importing my mailboxes, I wasn't really up to installing a slew of applications.

So what went wrong? I'm not quite sure. I know that the whirring began after I installed Jaguar. Perhaps Quartz Extreme and the increased use of my graphic card caused the fan to work overtime, and something got shifted when I would nudge the computer to stop whirring. Note that I never shook the computer -- I would just press a bit on the bottom of the case and it would stop.

Other people with similar problems.

And then, you realize you should remove Joe Dirt from your queue.

A few weeks back, Ben and I and a few others were discussing how Netflix should allow its users to share their rental histories in some form. This way, users can easily see what their friends have watched and easily add titles that pique their interests to their own queues.

I know that I find it incredibly difficult to keep a queue of more than 15-20 titles because I can never remember the films that I wanted to see in the past. And since, in the two and a half months that we've been using Netflix, I have picked out all but one of the 33 movies we've rented, I need all the help I can get.

After Jish posted this entry about what's on his queue, I persuaded (read: nagged) Ben to create a plugin for Movable Type that would pull out your queue from Netflix and allow you to display it on a MT-powered weblog. Our original idea displayed histories, but we figured that since your 3-month history is always made up of items on your queue, that would be sufficient. Still, posting only a history might make more sense since I'm not too sure if I want someone adding a movie from my queue onto their own list. Already, the availability of about a half of the films on our list is some sort of wait.

Oh well.

Read more about the plugin on Ben's site.

The plugin can be downloaded from here. Usage instructions are in the netflix-queue.pl file, or here.

Our queue can be found at the bottom of my about page

Gold Box Update

News flash! Ben was offered a gold box item which does not (1) remove hair (2) belong in the kitchen. A honest to goodness DVD appeared in his box -- Ocean's Eleven to be exact. It was offered for $15.60 or something, about four dollars off of its regular Amazon price. There is a light at the end inside the Gold Box.

Completely unrelated:

Based on Merlin's recommendation, I'm now using SlashDock (for OS X) to keep track of the weblogs I read -- at least the ones that provide an RSS feed of their content. It's a pretty neat application.

If you're interested, the dollarshort.org rss file is here.

And also unrelated, Ben has written a tutorial on how to install SpamAssassin on OS X.

A new and improved way to procrastinate!

The birds sing sweeter and the sun shines brighter now that my iBook is licensed to kill. And, I'm grinning the grin of a stupid fool^*.

In other words, I'm head-over-heals in love with SpamAssassin -- so much so that our daily conversations begin to resemble commercials for the software.

Before SpamAssassin

Mena: I can't take it! If I received one more unfiltered piece of spam, I'm going to throw this iBook and its sub-par mail program out the window.

Ben: I know. It's frustrating.

Mena: You want to know something? I shouldn't have to set up a rule to filter out mail containing the word "rape." I don't want to see that word in my inbox every day. Period. And frankly, I have no interest in seeing some guy's big, black, thro...

Ben: Okay, I get the point. Let's install SpamAssassin on our computers.

After Spam Assassin

Mena: Hit! Screw you Flash Joke of the Day!

Ben: Hit! Take that you herbal sex enhancer!

Mena: Hey, you're receiving (and blocking) more spam than me! You're so lucky.

Ben and Mena: Thank you Spam Assassin!

--

But all is not perfect in the Trott household.

The amount of time previously wasted on filtering and deleting spam is now wasted by our need to read all the entertaining spam headers and "compete" to see who receives a piece of mail with the highest number of hit points.

(Each positive test result receives a certain number of points. If the number is equal to or greater than a pre-determined number, it's considered spam.)

The current record is 37.6 hits and it's held by the perennial favorite, "Are you shopping for a MORTGAGE?"

^*Since this post, we've been told by three different couples that this now their insult of choice. I think the new dollarshort.org tagline should be: "Proudly adding dysfunction to relationships since 2002."

All that sparkles...

Has anyone, besides me, been offered items from Amazon's "gold chest?"

It's basically a promotion where, for one hour, you can purchase five pre-selected items at special discounted rates. In the top-right corner of the Amazon homepage, a little illustrated gold chest counts down the minutes remaining before the offer is discontinued (forever!)

I was offered five different cooking products, including a George Foreman mini-grill, some BBQ supplies and a rice cooker.

I turned them all down (forever!)

Now, it appears that either these are completely random items or, the fondue pot on my wish list was weighed really heavy in determining what I'm interested in buying. It's funny that none of these deals were books or dvds -- the items that make up the bulk of my Amazon purchases. Oh Amazon, play your cards right and offer me past purchase-related items and I'll buy the contents of that entire gold chest.

I like things that sparkle.

Apparently, another gold chest with new offers was supposed to appear within 24 hours. It didn't and now I'm starting to think I imagined this whole thing.

Music always sounds better in large spaces.

A downside to attending a great tech conference is that by immersing yourself in a world of possibilities, you quickly grow frustrated by how the world actually works.

For example, at one point during a break in the conference, I found myself sitting in a rather large room where music was being played on a loudspeaker. One song that I knew and liked came on and, for a few seconds, I actually believed that, with a touch of a button, I could download the song to my computer -- instantly.

Sure, I could have gone on Kazaa or LimeWire to search for and download the song, but what if I didn't even know the title or artist? What if I didn't want to "steal" the song but, as a conscientious consumer, instead wanted to simply learn who recorded it and what album it was on?

Let's say that for legal reasons the song (playing on the sound system) itself wasn't downloadable but instead you could freely download a sample, artist and track information onto some sort of handheld device. Think of all the embarrassment this would save shy record store shoppers. You've seen High Fidelity -- if you ask about the identity of a song, the clerks will indeed laugh at you for (1) your lack of musical knowledge (2) your ease of persuasion. Besides, if they wanted you to ask what the song was, they wouldn't prop the jewel case on top of the store stereo.

The key to all of this being really great (besides the assumed universal wireless access) is that every song and every location would be represented: Ocean Beach Safeway (and their never-ending Elton John soundtrack) to the Warfield (and their pre-show Outkast remixes).

(It wouldn't hurt to be able to download the songs, either)

I guess what I'm looking for is some sort of 21st-Century Personics System that actually has a decent catalog of music to choose from.

Update: Thanks, Ryan, for posting the URL to this Daily Ping entry which contains links to mentions of The Personics System on the Web.

Must-See Blog.

My dear friend Paula has totally revamped and redesigned her site, The Perils of Leisure. You must check it out, bookmark it, and email her notes of adoration since she really worked quite hard and, of course, she's moved to Movable Type.

It's been exciting to see some of my favorite blogs move to MT. And, it's even more exciting when you don't have to beg them to convert. Though that's not really true -- I have some dignity when it comes to pimping MT.

Some recent redesigns or re-imagineering (I love that Disney-coined phrase) of blogs that I read: phonezilla, Openwire (who is a certifiable MT addict), Metagrrrl, frykitty, scottandrew.com, Fireland (who has the best "powered-by" button ever), and possibly gavinfriday.com, which would be the coolest thing ever since I'm a big Gavin Friday fan and was stunned to realize that this Von B was the same Von B (no pressure, though).

I'm sure of missing some people, but just remember, as Judy Garland would say "I love you all!"

Yes, I read this book on my trip.

This is probably the most name-dropping you'll ever get out of me -- cherish it and blame it on the weather.

Ding dong.

Ms. Booboolina has started SWAB. SWAB's clearly defined purpose:

A group of webloggers, 'bloggers, diarists, journalers, online personal publishers, etc., who want to get together for planned and unplanned social events.�� This can be as formal as planned dinners, or as informal as "Who wants to go see a movie?"�� Any and all are welcome to join the list and meet and hang out with fabulous folks in the San Francisco Bay area.

Clear and simple, SWAB has the potential to really provide an offline outlet for all us geeky types who spend a bit too much time in front of the computer.

Ping this.

Because of the Weblogs.com transition, two instances of dollarshort.org now exist in BlogTracker (formerly known as the SubHonker filter).

So, if you use this service to track my site (and thank you, if you do), just go to the list of weblogs and select the other record of dollarshort.org and select "view."