I decided to upgrade Linux on my dev box this weekend. The upgrade crashed in the middle.
Argh!
The DVD burn was done on my Powerbook and verified fine. Maybe it was a bad download?
Controlling what Plaxo sends you
I added a “Plaxo” category yesterday.
In the event I forget, this applies to everything in this category: The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of Terry Chay. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo.
I suppose when most people create a category related to their job it is to gripe—I’m only good at ranting and ranting is definitely frowned on in the company’s blog policy. Instead I thought it would be more fun to post interesting things I find while using Plaxo. In particular, restricting it to the limited things I can do from my Macintosh, since that is where my screen capture software resides.
Plaxo has a rather complete support website but I don’t operate this way. Instead I thought for some of you who are like me it would be more fun to present things as use-cases as I learn them myself.
Hopefully, I can continue to do this until I accidentally “blog about company secrets” and get fired.
A new Plaxo log-in
The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of Terry Chay. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo.
Today I signed into my Plaxo account and was met with a pleasant surprise:
Plaxo-AIM signin, originally uploaded by tychay.
The new thing that wasn’t here before is that you can theoretically use your AIM account to sign into Plaxo. (I say “theoretically” because you have to link your Plaxo account to your AIM account and this can’t be done yet.)
I know most of you are thinking, “Well he makes the damn website so of course he knew this,” but the reality is that I’m not involved with the Plaxo-AOL deal, have not coded this new log in screen, and had only given one suggestion for the log-in screen.
I bring this up because it is a really good page.
Update: The AOL/AIM binding/login stuff is now live to coincide with the beta 6 release of Triton. You can now bind your AIM account to your Plaxo one.
Also, Joseph and Huy have added more NLP madness in the Plaxo login. It’s now super smart.
A joke Blake sent me
Q. What is the difference between Iraq and Vietnam?
Conference Gnomes
When I was generating the movies for my OSCON talk, I left in a little easter egg that was too hard to notice. Doing little things like this makes things a little fun when you are bored with the tedium of making hundreds of builds for your talk. I decided to get a screenshot in before all the task items get marked as overdue.
Conference Gnomes, originally uploaded by tychay.
Karma catches up with Jack?
Trent is reporting that MacMice has shut down.
I’ve alluded to Jack Campbell’s abusiveness and deceptiveness before. One thing I never understood about the Mac world was their willingness to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Granted, you shouldn’t hold a man’s criminal record against him, but it should bias your opinions. I mean how many time does the community need to be clocked on the head to realize that enough is enough? MacTable, MacWhispers “rumor site”, Griffin/DVForge, his verbal abusiveness and lying on multiple comment boards, Kensington/DVForge, and finally this marketing stunt.
Corporate tutorials
D70 Photography Kingdom, originally uploaded by silverkeys.
I noticed on Mark Goldstein’s excellent Photography blog. that Manfrotto launched some online tutorials in conjunction with Web Photo School.
Though I have been drooling over their monopods and Caitlin uses their tripods and heads, I’m currently a Gitzo/Really Right Stuff guy. On a quick skim it seems they are using Manfrotto products in the examples but parts of it are relevent to anyone with a halfway decent tripod.
Xbox 360 dilemma
It appears that Microsoft is indeed releasing two Xbox 360 systems. The base system is $300 and the deluxe system is $400.
The addition that drives me nuts is the 20GB hard drive.1 I’ve been saying this for a while now, but I think that this is a bad idea.
Continue reading
Why I need an “abject stupidity†category
So what sort of braintrust in Henrico thought up this clusterfuck?
Here is my favorite quote:
“It’s rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer—and laptop computers that probably have less-than-desirable attributes. But I think that people tend to get caught up in the excitement of the event—it almost has an entertainment value.”
—Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County, to CNN
“rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response” You knew it was going to be bad which is why you required proof of residency and changed the date.
“laptop computers that probably have less-than-desirable attributes…” STFU. You already had to issue a redaction because you said these iBooks were always broken and Apple wasn’t repairing them according to contract when the real reason you wanted to switch to Dell is because of MS Office (a totally valid reason).
“it almost has an entertainment value” Porquoi? What is so entertaining about your neighbors getting injured and peeing their pants?
Continue reading
Pirates of Silicon Valley DVD
MacMinute clued me in to the fact that Pirates of Silicon Valley is coming out on DVD. I recorded this movie when I last had cable (back in 1999) because I was out the days it aired. I enjoyed this movie, and because of it’s high geekfest quotient, right up there with Real Genius.
I think Dave still has my videocassette of it. I had forgotten I had recorded it until a few years ago when I saw part of it with him. We had great fun watching all the 1999 dot-com boom commercials that were aired on TNT along with it (too bad the DVD doesn’t have that as a special feature.)