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Warranty Fortune Smiles Upon Me

Posted on by grahams

I had a great time in Rochester for the CSH Welcome Back Party, but I think I might be skipping future Welcome Back parties… More and more of my friends are leaving Rochester, and I know fewer and fewer people who live at CSH. I think this realization comes to all alumni, but I guess I finally hit the sweet spot. It seems that each year I spend more time in Rochester catching up with my friends who are visiting from out of town, and less time doing anything with the house. It occured to us that if all we are going to do is hang out with each other, we can pick a place that’s a bit more fun than Rochester… :P This decision doesn’t effect Fucked Up Movie Night, however, so I still plan on being at CSH once or twice a year.. Of course, it’s very possible that next September I will change my mind and end up in Rochester anyway, so this could all be bullshit.

I have had great warranty luck lately… First off, Apple recalled both of the batteries I have for my Powerbook. This worked out fantastically, because I was just getting annoyed by the diminished capacity of the two recalled batteries. Around the same time, I got an email from Sirius saying that due to supply shortages, my warranty exchange on my Starmate Replay (for a scratchy 1/8″ audio jack) was being upgraded to a brand new Sportster 4, which is a much nicer radio. I got that in the mail the other day, the only sucky thing is that I have to send back all of the original equipment for the Starmate, so I had to rip out the old antenna and install the new. I had the Antenna wire hid very nicely through the trunk, and under the molding on the passenger side of the car, so I had to reproduce all of that again. Also, the Starmate ran on 12V DC so lopped off the lighter adaptor that came with it and hardwired it into the cars power inside the dash. I can’t exactly return that, and the new radio runs on 5V DC, so I will take some kind of hit on that..

and I have been trying to finish up all of the lingering projects around the house. She started staining the doors the other day, and I masked off the bathroom to finally prime and paint it. After it’s painted, the bathroom needs baseboard and door trim, and all of the old radiators still need to be painted. I want to finish all of the woodwork this weekend so we can finally clean up the apartment fully…

A Noted Harvard Symbologist

Posted on by grahams

I’ve been killing myself trying to finish this design document at work and I finally was able to send it out for review on Friday afternoon. Hopefully people won’t have too many comments about it, because I’d really like to write some code sometime this year.

Got my Powerbook back on Friday, it was shipped out, fixed, and back in the apple store in less than 72 hours. Seems to be working great now, I had forgotten how nice the keyboard backlight was after going without it for a few months. If I had known how fast the turnaround would be on the repair I would have had it fixed ages ago.

Pretty laid back weekend, saw The DaVinci Code with the film club last night. As I expected it was way better than the book, which is a worthless steaming pile of shit. That said, it isn’t a GREAT movie, just a good, entertaining flick. It was pretty much exactly what I was expecting, and I’m not entirely sure why the critics have been so harsh on it… Maybe they are all in the pockets of Opus Dei.

Go Go Gadget Dock

Posted on by grahams

I’ve heard people grumble about the OS X Dock’s behavior before, but today I had my first real problem with it, the “Finder” item in the dock removed itself from the dock and planted itself on the desktop, but it was completely non-functional and couldn’t be dragged back to the dock. Killing the dock fixed the problem.

Prediction

Posted on by grahams

Anyone else find it suspicious that ABC (owned by Disney) was the first network to offer its content through the iTunes Music Store, even though Pixar (also helmed by Steve Jobs) gave Disney the big ol’ fuck you to Disney? We all know how spiteful Jobs is… My prediction: Disney and Pixar kiss and make up…

iTunes 4.9

Posted on by grahams

I have been listening to a few different podcasts for awhile now, but the overall workflow of getting them onto my iPod has always been annoying. First of all, there was lots of software to automatically download podcasts, but none of them seemed to have the ability to get the file onto my iPod (and remove it once it’s been listened to). Some of them could add the tracks to my iTunes library, but since I have too much music to make much out of the “Library Syncing” in iTunes, this didn’t really accomplish much for me. Enter iTunes 4.9, which makes the whole process much more bearable. First of all, it provides a whole new top-level category in iTunes which makes it very easy to find my podcasts. Second, and most importantly, it can sync podcasts to my iPod seperately from everything else, so all I have to do is connect my iPod to my computer and everything else is taken care of for me.

There are a few annoyances, though. First of all, I have set iTunes to delete podcasts I’ve listened to off the iPod. Unfortunately, their interpretation of “listened to” really equates to “began listening to”, and if you play the first second of a file, it marks it as played and deletes it the next time you sync. Also, my iPod has been locking up lately, as it did before, requiring a hard reset (which loses my current position in what I was listening to in the process). Those issues aside, this had made the whole podcasting experience for me far more bearable.

And just in case you are interested in what podcasts I’m listening to:

Collapsing New Buildings

Posted on by grahams

Talk about an esoteric bug. If you are listening to an AAC Audiobook (m4b) on an iPod Photo, and pause it, and let it fall asleep (or put it to sleep manually), when you try and wake it up, it will be frozen, and requires a reset. But this only happens if you initially navigated to the file via the “Audiobook” main menu entry or a smart playlist. If you Navigate “Music -> Genres -> Audiobooks -> etc..>” then the iPod doesn’t lock up and everything is hunky dory.