Year: 2011

kicking and screaming

OK, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into 2011. I finally upgraded my home desktop machine to Firefox 4 and IE 9. (The work machine, of course, has had both installed for quite a while.)
I didn’t want to upgrade either until I was sure at least one of them would work with LogMeIn. It does seem to work OK in both Firefox 4 and IE 9 now, so there’s no reason for me to not upgrade now.
On a related issue, I was testing HTML 5 video in IE 9 last week, and ran into a really annoying problem.  For some crazy reason, my work machine has Windows 7 N on it, the version without Media Player. Well, it turns out that IE 9 won’t play HTML 5 video if Media Player isn’t installed. And it won’t show you a useful error message either.  It just won’t play. I eventually figured this out, and installed the Media Feature Pack for Windows 7 N. Now, all is well.

many things

Lots of things going on right now, and I just feel like I should dump them all into a blog post. This isn’t necessarily going to be an interesting or useful post for anyone but me, but I feel like I need to write it.

  • My brother Mike is in the hospital with pneumonia.  I haven’t been able to talk to him yet, so I’m not sure how bad it is.  (I’m in NJ and he’s in GA, and I haven’t been able to reach him on the phone.)
  • My brother Pat’s widow, who remarried a couple of years ago, just had a baby girl.
  • I met with someone today to organize an estate sale, so I can finally empty out my parents’ old home.  It looks like we’ll be doing it in about a month, so I really need to finish sorting through everything down there and make some final decisions about what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of.
  • My allergies have been pretty bad over the last week or two.  I went to the doctor yesterday, because I was starting to worry that it might be more than just allergies, but there’s no sign that there’s anything else wrong with me.  So, now I’ve got a prescription for Nasonex, to go along with the over-the-counter Zyrtec that I’ve been taking.  Hopefully, the combination of the two will help me out.

The next few blog posts will be about computer programming or comic books, I hope.

iMac


iMac
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

When I agreed to develop a Mac app for a client, I’m not sure why I agreed to make it backward-compatible to OS 10.4. Now I’m stuck testing my app on this crazy thing.

The weird thing about Cocoa development is that there are perfectly innocuous things that work fine on 10.6, but don’t work at all on 10.4. And that don’t throw errors either, so it’s pretty hard to nail them down.

Netgear ReadyShare

I bought a new router back in July, a Netgear WNDR3700-100NAS. It has a USB port that can be used to share a USB hard drive on the local network. I’d been meaning to use that, but just never got around to hooking a drive up. Well, I finally started playing around with it last week, using a 1TB MyBook drive that has been sitting in a box on my floor since November 2009 (long story). I didn’t quite manage to get it working then. (Another long story.)

I tried again today. I didn’t get it working at first, so I tried to upgrade the firmware on the router, thinking that would help. I couldn’t manage to get that done, at first, but I hit upon the brilliant idea of power cycling the router, and that allowed me to finally download and install the new firmware. (“Have you tried turning it off and on again?“)

With the new firmware, I had much more luck. The router recognized the drive, I could browse to it on my desktop PC, and I even managed to connect to it from my MacBook.

I think I’m done with this for the night, but I’m hoping to try backing up my MacBook to it at some point, maybe next weekend. I really need to start doing backups again.

Charlie Chaplin

I was flipping through channels this morning, and landed on TCM right as the final scene in The Great Dictator was starting. That final speech is great:

We think too much, and feel too little.
More than cleverness, we need kindness.

And so on. I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen this whole film, all the way through. I’ll have to see if it’s coming up again on TCM and set up my DVR to record it. Either way, that final speech is worth watching and re-watching.

After I originally posted this, a friend pointed me a Roger Ebert article on this film. It provides some necessary context for this movie, both in terms of Chaplin’s career, and the larger historical context. He mentions that the film “comes to a dead end” with this final speech, and that it “deflates the comedy and ends the picture as a lecture.” True enough, I guess, but I kind of like it.

Little Dog Lost

OK, I know it’s sappy, but I like it.

Also, in the “dubious achievements” department, I have finally caught up and read all of the comic strip e-mails that have been piling up in my GMail account. I subscribe to GoComics.com, and get a daily e-mail with about a dozen strips. I fell behind in reading them quite a while ago and never caught up. Until this weekend, when I inexplicably had an urge to read about six months worth of comic strips. (One of the things that helped me catch up is that the older e-mails largely consisted of broken image links, since they apparently don’t keep the image links functioning forever. Except for those on Garfield and Doonesbury, for some reason.)

Kindle 3

I’ve been catching up on some reading today, working my way through some old e-mail newsletters that have been piling up in my inbox. I’m in August 2010 right now, so I just hit David Pogue’s Kindle 3 review from the NY Times. I’m using my Kindle 3 about as often as I was using my Kindle 1. I’m in the middle of a “dead tree” book right now, but when I finish that, I’ll probably go back to the Kindle, and pick one of the many unread books I have on there to read next.

And here’s a Times article from Sept 2010 about e-readers vs dead tree books: Of Two Minds About Books. Somewhat interesting.

I’ve also just started messing around with Instapaper. I bought the iPhone/iPad app, but I think the best way to use Instapaper is to use the feature that sends your unread articles to the Kindle. That works well, but it’s frustrating that, unlike the iOS app, you can’t interact with your account in any way. You can’t mark articles as read, for instance.

I’ve been thinking about writing up a long blog entry on the way in which I’m currently consuming news, and Instapaper is part of that. I’m still organizing my thoughts on that, though, and I’m not yet sure if I have anything to say that’s interesting enough to write up.