12 hours later my Cocoa application has the properly syntaxed command I wanted. Turns out, Script Editor caches data about your application, so I spent about 10 hours wracking my brain as to why nothing I tried worked. I finally quit Script Editor, opened my script again, and it worked.

UGH!

Now onto the hard stuff…

I had a really nice date with a woman I met online. We had lunch, saw the latest Bond flick (her idea!), shopped and talked. Anyone who likes South Park is a friend of mine! I hope we hang out some more.

I started working last night on a solution for my Mom, so she could finally switch to OS X. She uses an older chat application which will never be ported to OS X, and she likes the voice feature, which does not work well under Classic. So I am writing a Cocoa application to handle the speech, and a plugin for the chat client to pass off text to the Cocoa app! So far, so good. I am battling making the application AppleScriptable now.

My TiVo just got new software. It has rebooted, installed the patches, rebooted, again, rebuilt the database and just got back to working (13 minutes downtime) I wonder what is new…

Ah the new DirecTV merger has finally happened. DirecTV is running all TiVo apsects now on the combo boxes. The main menu is awful DirecTV purple now, yuck. My programs are still there. The system version jumped from 2.5.2 to 3.1. My account is in Good Standing.

There is a new Show Type recording option: All (with duplicates) I guess this gets around the 28 day limitation. Gonna turn this on for Boston Public since I missed the season premier (due to our Fox/WB stations doing a merge dance)

Those who know me know that I don’t read very much. I just finished the Lord of the Rings trilogy, some 20 years late. Now, onto Asimov’s “I, Robot”

Eminem’s uncle sold their family home to a lawyer for $41,000 recently. Now on EBAY, this auction is over twelve million now.

I went down to the PMUG offices tonight to use the SuperDrive in an iMac/800 there to burn my first DVD.

It was a 10 minute movie of three of the iMovies from the iMovie Class I helped teach in October. I had saved the DV movie ahead of time, which was ~2gb in size.

Moving the 2gb over firewire took about 16 minutes. Making the DVD project in iDVD took 2 minutes (I didn’t get fancy).

Encoding the movie into MPEG-2 video took 30 minutes. The resultant media was about 600mb.

Burning the DVD took about 6 minutes. I burned two just to keep one as a backup.

And it even works in my Toshiba SD-9100 player!

Kudos to Apple for posting these ads which poke fun at the switch campaign.

See the Ads

This is a week of thanksgiving for those of us in America. Times are hard, not so hard for us as in the rest of the world, but these times do tend to bring out the insecurities in us all.

To those friends of mine starting new lives, we have the thanks that life brings us change, gives us chances to try something new and grow as people.

To those friends of mine going through hard times, we have thanks that we have friends, family and loved ones not only to rely on, but to just be there to listen.

To those I don’t know, whether you are reading this looking for technology news, or just passing by, I hope you find thanks in those around you, in something to hold on to, in charity and hope.

Happy Week of Thanksgiving! May each day this week give us each something to notice to be thankful for.

I saw Maggie off tonight. She is headed to LA, then to Sydney, to live with Sarah in the wild (or not so wild) outback.

I was around at the beginning of their budding romance, during the trip to Timberline, witnessing them making googly eyes at each other, sharing fog drawings on the bus window, and I was blessed to be there at this stage too. I am sure this is the first of many wonderful journies they will share together, and I wish them the happiness, joy and love they both deserve.

‘Course if I ever make it over that way, I’ll be stopping in!

I’ve been blessed in my journey through life. I have had friends, family, a wife. Some things have changed, some have stayed the same - All have made be a better person.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend a couple of days with Maggie and Sarah before they leave for Australia. Sarah left this evening, Maggie leaves tomorrow. I’ll miss them for sure.

I can worry about things that life, or I, have made curiously challenging for myself, but all of that folly is for not if I end up in a pile of mental goo at the end of the day. Rather I choose to look to the sky and move on with my life. This shall be my charge for the coming days of this year. I shall present those in my past with presents of hope and future, and I shall seek out that which will help me grow in both my personal relationship and relationships of the other person.

Life is a precious thing - Some come into it, some leave, but the touch of a kind soul stays with us until we die. Sad we are to see some leave, but happier in that they move onto new adventures, new growth of their souls, and in that, the Earth will be a better place to live.

I can tell you one thing - Skipping a wire, while nice to save the time, is painful! My teeth are telling me “You dumbass!” Add in the rubber band doing it’s thing, and I think I need some advil.

I got my first rubber band for my braces today. I only have one, from the right upper rear tooth (#7) to the front lower teeth. It makes eating on the right side a pain in the butt.

The idea is to pull the lower teeth back so my bite is correct.

On the good news front, my teeth are moving so well, we skipped a wire. I am now on my final wires, unless they decide from xrays some other root movement is needed.

If you like wartime strategic/shooter games, be sure to check out:

Battlefield 1942

Ryan and I played for 5 hours the other night, using Roger Wilco to communicate. It was reminiscent of my Magic Edge days. You can play 1 of 5 roles, from scout to engineer, and drive up to 35 vehicles.

The game’s AI is a little dumb, but they can fix that. Co-operation mode is the most fun, working with your friends to defeat the enemy.

Available for PC only, this is a must have game if you like this style of gameplay.

As reported on MacMegaSite

If you use Jaguar, download Keychain First Aid The link is to the version tracker page.

KFA found four problems with my keychain - I had been experiencing the “.mac password forgotten” issue now and then. Hopefully with 10.2.2 and a fixed keychain, we’re good to go!

And while I can’t really say that I voted for him, I’ve known Maf for a terribly long time and can vouch for him being one of the nicest guys I know, not to mention a good influence on MS.

I am sure the best reward in life to come to him though is the love of his life. Anyone who would nominate you for this category has to be a wonderful, supportive person!

Check out the awards article

Apple’s Mac OS X 10.2 email client, Mail, has a very easy to use junk spam mail system. When email comes in that is spam, you simply select the email, click the “Junk” button and now Mail knows a little more about the spam you get.

You continue to train Mail until it is marking the spam for you on it’s own. Now you can put Mail into Automatic mode, which means when junk mail comes in, Mail automatally moves the spam to your Junk folder.

Automatic mode has another interesting side effect which actually bit me subconsciously.

I was noticing that more and more of my good email was showing up in the junk folder. “Hmm, I doubt Mail is screwing up this often, let’s watch my habits,” I thought to myself. After awhile I noticed I was marking good email that I no longer wanted as Junk!

“Why am I doing this?” I wondered. So a little more paying attention and I figured it out. In Automatic mode, if a spam comes in that mail does not think is spam, when you select it and mark it as junk, the mail immediately moves into the Junk folder. This has the same visual effect as being deleted.

I get plenty of spam, so I guess after awhile my brain merged deleting spam and deleting normal email and I started using the Junk button to delete all email!

This may just be conincidence, but I seem to have lost a couple of emails from a friend. In other words, I never received them. I had not emailed this person until the day 10.2.2 came out, so it may just be conincendental.

However, if you have emailed me and I have not responded, please email me again.

Ok Mac users, run to versiontracker and download NetNewsWire Lite!

NetNewsWire is a RSS news reader which lets you read news from many sites. You can even subscribe to this blog by clicking subscribe, then enter the following URL:

http://www.geeksrus.com/index.rdf

Now all new entries will show directly in the news reader! This will probably work with any Windows or Linux RSS Newsreader also.

I picked up the extended version of Lord of the Rings - Fellowship of the Ring today. Most of the additional footage was subtle and didn’t make the movie seem longer.

The sound is incredible! I also got a free pass to see Two Towers, that was a really nice bonus!

This is just too cool!

Pencil Clock