Friday, October 29, 2010

Tidying up a rug

So a good friend of mine gave/lent me a rug. I should mention I've never owned a rug and my parents never owned a rugged (well late into the divorce, anyway). Keeping a rug clean without the help of a vacuum made me wonder how I'd go about doing it. What's most worrisome is that I'm the type of person that learns from their mistakes which applied to my leather couch meant allowing it to fall into ruin.

Anyway, I initially avoided using my broom to clean the rug since it's tips were shredded; I imagined it would be abrasive and give it a fuzzy look. Although, I still think this may be the case, the rug eventually needed to be tidied up so I grabbed the broom anyway.

Without thought, I started at the edges but soon realized I had to work double this way. So I stopped, applied common sense, and decided to start from the middle and work to the edges. After a few seconds, I realized that 3 sweeps for roughly each square foot was enough to get the majority of crap off the surface.

After this systemic approach, I finished in no time and the rug looked great. I plan on taking it out in the spring and beating the crap out of it with a tennis racket. I'll post an update if the rug starts looking like crap.

UPDATE: 1-27-13
Though the broom did a decent job, I ended up buying a small vacuum to take on the job. All I know is that a broom could take off so much dust. The vacuum did a much better job though the edges of the rug are starting to look a bit frayed.

SquareUp dongle arrived!

Initial testing was promising. Now to test ppl's reactions to it.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

New Curiosity

So Apple had a keynote today. Unlike their last keynote, this one wasn't a direct response to competition. They took this opportunity to show the world how they are evolving their flagship OS to survive the rise of their mobile products. It was great to see and experience. I'm glad I watched it as I believe it will motivate the programming world and challenge them to built a newer, better programs with usability in mind.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Figs

Told the old man I was interested in trying figs and he found me some. They're actually pretty good. This just stands as a little reminder that "The best time for Figs is November through January". Because I know I'll forget.

Friday, July 30, 2010

eBooks

I've been open to giving them a shot for a while but now that I've dipped my toes into the Amazon Kindle market place I've realized how nice it is. Gone is the daunting page numbers; replaced with percentages. It's much nicer, more modern.

The one thing I do miss is the feeling of a chapter and being able to flip back and forth as I wish. That hasn't been easy to replicate in my experience with eBooks. Maybe I should start using bookmarks more often when I feel lost or confused.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

WilbyQ

WilbyQ is going to take off soon. I'm going to begin advertising in the Northwest suburbs. Here goes nothing!

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Friday, April 30, 2010

Game Gripper

When I first saw Game Gripper, I knew I'd like it but I didn't think I'd love it! It arrived this morning and at first glance it wasn't what I thought it'd be. You see, it's made out of rubber. I had this expectation that it'd be an attachment that would click on; it'd be made of some kind of hard plastic. But rubber holds in place well so it works.

The design is pretty good too. When you place it over the phone, you'll notice that it's flush on the top and bottom. The sides stick out a bit and don't hug the Droid's body perfectly but it's a necessary evil: how else would you attach it?

The first game I tried out was my absolute favorite game on the Genesis: The original X-Men. In about 10 minutes, I was already in Mojo's level with Nightcrawler, of course. The controls are perfect although the pad did slip from time to time. Either way, it doesn't matter, it's still a great experience.

But as with everything in life, I did find one flaw and that's with the button scheme. I don't understand why he choose to add 4 buttons in the middle. At no point while playing X-Men did I feel the urge to go hunting for them. But what saddens me the most is that Street Fighter will not be playable with these controls. SNK games will be great if Neo-Geo Pocket is ever released but Capcom fans are in for a disappointment. I really wish the designer would have would have looked more into the traditional Sega button scheme. On the bright side, there are tons of other games you can play to relive those childhood memories so don't this oversight keep you from buying one.

Grade: A+

Note to Droid Users: This is a must have!

Monday, April 5, 2010

OSX - Substituted Fonts Issue

So a few days ago, some of my fonts were substituted for another font. I probably wouldn't have noticed the problem if it hadn't been for the fact that the font was hideous and properly called "ugly font". I should mention that researching the problem online didn't guide me to a reasonable solution. Maybe it was my inability to articulate the problem since I didn't know what was actually wrong but every guide I was finding tried to sell me or have me download some font app.

Anyway, I was able to figure out the font's name by looking through my fonts. I placed the font folder on the Dock and quickly scanned the fonts using the grid view. I've found this easy to find the font I'm looking for doing this rather than use the Font Book application. Equipped with the fonts name, I opened Font Book and searched for "Ugly Font". I quickly found the font along with a warning message. It prompted me to use the "Resolve Duplicates" tool to correct duplication issues my font system is facing. Using help, it directed me to the option; Edit > Resolve Duplicates. I quickly realized that "Select duplicated fonts" was only selecting one font at a time and resolving these fonts would take forever. So a quick solution I found was to choose "All Fonts" from Collection, then literally selected all fonts using Apple key + a, then again click edit and choose "Select duplicated fonts". This time around, it will narrow your selection to all the fonts that need to be resolved. Finally, click "Resolve Duplicates" and your system should now be fixed.

To see the fix, simply restart the application you're using or just restart the computer.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Water Fasting

So, I recently began reading "The Fasting Cure" by Upton Sinclair, a enlightened Bernarr MacFadden disciple, filled with stories that appeal to the desperately ill. It's about water fasting and for some reason, it convinced me.

Water fasting is the act of drinking nothing but water. No food is to be ingested. The fast, once gone for more than 3 days, begins to cleanse the organs and purge the body of disease and infection. Once the body switches to this "survival" is when true fasting begins.

I believe in the notion of a "survival" mode is triggered in the absence of food. It's intriguing and and simply mind blowing to think that the body can adjust so quickly. Unfortunately, I work so my aim isn't as far reaching as water fasting practitioners would set for themselves but this is my first time so I think I can slide.

The recover period should take only 2 days of a low cal diet after which I'll switch to a high nutrient milk diet, although, I'm betting I'll be switching to juice if the milk upsets me as it usually does.

Anyway, today I've jumped from wanting to fast to actually fasting. I'll start on midnight and hope for the best.

*Edit* I decided that I was rushing into the fast without properly preparing for it nor the diet that would follow. I'm falling back on my April plan and will continue to post more information on fasting in this post.

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Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Re: Top 10 Reasons Why Mac Sucks

Over at collegetimes.us, they had a post on the Top 10 Reasons Why Mac Sucks. Below the are the original statements from collegetimes.us in bold followed by my response. If you were thinking of buying a Mac or PC, these answer might help you weed out some of the bullshit "facts" there are out there on the Mac. And for the record, the concept of Windows on a computer started at Xerox.

1. The one and only business model for Apple is narcissism. Narcissism, maybe true, but if this were the case the Mac would have less features out of the box but that's not true. Out of the box, you have real compilers and a full blown development environment without even having to go on the internet.

2. Macs are ridiculously overpriced. Macs also have high resale value.

3. Macs regularly ignore mainstream industry trends. Apple has been renown for it's proprietary nature just like Sony. The only difference is that recently, Apple as began licensing it's proprietary I/O.

4. Mac OS X is merely a locked down version of open-source Linux. If you consider a locked down interface "locked down" than you're right but considering you can do just about anything without an interface this point is moot. But even then, Apple support macros, something Windows hasn't.

5. There is no right-f*cking-click! There is a right click noob.

6. The Dock, and general screen layout, is retarded. (Followed by 8 bulletpoints) All weak points:

⁃ Look at the Calendar icon
⁃ If you married the Dock and (Program) Expose you'd have the Win7 taskbar. Minimize isn't necessary because of Expose and you can visual see what's minimized on the right.
⁃ X closes the window, not the application. Command + Q is you want to (q)it. This coming from the user that presses alt + F4…
⁃ It's Command + Tab and Command + tilde on OSX.
⁃ Maximize is a little weird, it only maximizes as much as is required. I suppose this is because it's trying to stay true to the windows concept but it does help for multitasking as does Growl.
⁃ You can hit space bar to preview them easier and at least OSX can open 100 windows without crashing.
⁃ This is probably why Macs come with high resolutions and don't allow you to fully maximize windows easily.
⁃ etc? Again, weak points.

7. “It just… doesn’t work.” Macs do freeze, they're not perfect, but it's usually due to poorly written code (Firefox) or processor intensive apps (Virtual machines). I have yet to encounter a virus.

8. Software and hardware options for Mac are lame, or slim at best. Mail does the job and does it well; iPhoto, meh, I use Picasa; rather use VLC than Quicktime. Dictionary rocks, notes is cool, iCal is great with Google Caldendar, iTunes… nvm, Xcode is cool, Terminal is great, TextEdit is sweet, iChat does the job, and lastly, I prefer Google Contacts over Address Book. As for 3rd party apps, I feel that the desktop era of 100+ apps is coming to an end. I only use simple apps for most of my tasks and while I do many of them on the PC, that's only because I don't want to relearn how to do it on Mac. But I do use Coda for web dev and Xcode for some programming tasks. But lately I've been using Vi so go figure :P

9. Gaming, and graphics in general, suck on Macs. Gaming on non-consoles is dying in general. All you damn PC pirates are destroying the industry.

10. Macs are not flexible or customizable. Macros and special functions exist that allow minor customizations. The Mac interface is pretty efficient once you learn how to use it and beautiful right from the beginning. I'm sure that's the reason no apps for customizing the Dock exist.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

LibXML, LibXSLT and Windows

If you're working on any other OS and used to things just working, you'll be rudely reminded why you're not using Windows when you try and install modules using CPAN. I had no luck doing anything on the first try.

When I tried using CPAN, I realized I needed to install a C compiler.
perl -MCPAN -e shell

Fine, done. Then I tried using CPAN to install Mechanize. Worked, great! Next, LibXML.
*screech!

Lots of errors with this module. A few google searches later I found out about PPM, the Perl Package Manager. It's CPAN with a GUI! No luck using it at first. Googled some more and found I had to add a few repositories:
ppm repo add http://www.bribes.org/perl/ppm
ppm repo add http://trouchelle.com/ppm10/
ppm repo add http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/PPMPackages/10xx/

Probably more than I needed but whatever. I used the GUI to find what I needed and...
done.

Hope this was helpful.