Powdered Non Sequitur Man

Hey, Portlanders: Information Society, Crystal Ballroom, July 29. I can’t be the only one with a soft spot for their work… wanna go?

Found while browsing the CSS Zen Garden for inspiring designs to swipe be inspired by: the CSS Hen Garden.

On Saturday, fawnapril and I did the Tour D’Organics bike ride. We took the “wimpy” 30-mile route, and it kicked our asses but good (so to speak).
Part of the fault was ours — one doesn’t train for a 30-mile ride by taking two 10-mile rides the weekend before — and part of it was [...]

Unlike the aforementioned WKRP employee, I actually do have an actual office with actual walls and an actual door. I may have to give it up in the event of child, but for now, at least, my home office is a physical thing.
But it’s the “home” in home office that gets tricky. When [...]

To quote Joel Spolsky from all the way back in 2000:
One of the most important things that made Microsoft successful was Bill Gates’ devotion to hiring the best people. If you hire all A people, he said, they’ll also hire A people. But if you hire B people, they’ll hire the C people and then [...]

In the past week, I’ve tried out over a dozen text editors for Windows. Every single one of them sucked. Most of them sucked a lot. (And no, I didn’t look at any variant of emacs or vim; learning one of those is a last resort. Also, I didn’t look [...]

Few experiences in my life thus far have sucked more than watching a cat stop eating and die. Watching it a second time, not quite two months after the first, is one of them.
The worst part is how long it takes: seeing a friend and companion fade away slowly, bit by bit, and [...]

…at the primitive state of Rails development on Windows. Gack.

I was a bit distracted yesterday (and didn’t get around to reading anyone’s blogs), but I did remember it: happy birthday, the_misha!

Had a moment of panic in the Apple store today when the Genius pulled back part of the plastic around the screen and said, “we can’t return this, it’s been opened.” (Naturally, I hadn’t even noticed this… come on, I don’t work with hardware; that’s why I bought a Mac in the first place!)
Fortunately, [...]

So those video artifacts I was complaining about before?
Turns out quite a few MacBook and Mac Mini owners have been complaining about them. (I searched for this before, but apparently it took a few weeks after the release of the MacBook for people to start writing about it and, then, for Google to spider [...]

I posted something yesterday about having an iBook for sale, and my MacBook promptly started acting up again. (So I’ve deleted the iBook post, for now… though it still seems to be in the LJ feed.)
Yeah, I said “again.” I’d had some odd problems with the laptop since I first got it. [...]

At approximately 2:03 AM, I went from sound asleep to wide awake in a matter of about five seconds as someone went riding down my street on one of those stupid gas-powered scooters.
Now, I personally do not own a gun. But in this neighborhood, that probably puts me in the minority. So how [...]

…but it seems that Sacramento will have to wait a bit longer for a citywide wifi network.
From Macworld:
MobilePro Corp. last year won a contract to build and operate the municipal network for Sacramento. Now it appears that the city and the company weren’t able to agree on how the network should be offered to users. [...]

Some time ago, I installed the Akismet plug-in for Wordpress. It’s a comment-spam filter that flags comment spam and quarantines it, which has the nice side effect of cutting down on my email (since my blog emails me every comment on the site). One slight downside is that I forget it’s there, and [...]

Curious what the relative speed difference was between my 1-year-old Dell and my 3-week-old MacBook, I ran a benchmark on both of them.
The comparison isn’t particularly fair on several dimensions, but at first glance, the MacBook generally compares favorably.
The Dell: a Dimension 3000 with a single Pentium 4 CPU (with hyperthreading) running at 3.0GHz, [...]

Whose bright idea was it to make the default alarm time for alarm clocks 12:00 AM? I can see why that’s as good a time as any for the clock itself. But why on God’s (pardon my French) green Earth would anybody want an alarm clock that, if you somehow accidentally set it [...]