NSLog();

… and it doesn't happen frequently, mind you, but when it does, why does it often take minutes for it to be able to reconnect to websites?

Other things can connect - I can ping sites in Terminal - but Safari sputters and refuses to connect to even apple.com for seconds or even minutes sometimes.

So many things wrong here, not the least of which is the sign, of course.

This woman apparently doesn't know that people only hold up cut-outs of the letter "D" and a picture of a "fence" because "D""fence" is a homophone of "defense."

Or maybe she really does need someone to de-fence her yard. Or she thought she was going to a swordsman competition, and she's encouraging the Colts to "do fence!"

Top models - leather, navigation, Bluetooth, etc. for both - is what it's come down to for Carey.

Sorento Plusses
---------------
- keyless entry/ignition
- V6 engine
- third row of seats
- included roof rack
- Sportmatic shifting
- panoramic sunroof
- longer warranty

CR-V Plusses
------------
- less expensive (~$1600)
- voice-activated commands for more than nav
- Honda reliability/resale

Decision mostly made. Still a small possibility it could change, though. Both local, which is a first for us.

Today's a car research day for me. I'm plotting charts showing the business hours that car dealers are open today and tomorrow. I'm writing down reviews and safety ratings. I'm printing PDFs of invoice cost charts.

It's Carey's decision in the end and as I said, she can't go wrong with any of the four models she's narrowed it down to, which is nice.

Amazing (if true, and it seems to be):

As Carey is in need of a new car, we spent a little time today driving around to visit some local car dealers to sit in some cars (no test drives yet!!!) after we revisited D'Amico to retrieve our forgotten garage door opener.

At the Kia dealership we looked at the Sorento. We'd later add the Sportage as something to consider later on. They've changed the look of these two models from their 2005-2010 lines and they look a LOT nicer. The Sorento is built in Georgia and comes with a LOT of features. The Sportage does as well (but is still made in Korea, I think). Incentives are $1000/$500 cash back and a $1500 competitor reward because we have a Forester (even in its current state).

We stopped in at the Nissan dealership because the Rogue was next on the list. A neighbor recently purchased a Rogue and loves it, and it comes in at a little less than the price and with similar features as the Sorento. Incentives are $500.

Then we looked at the CR-V, which we had ruled out last year because it felt clunky, didn't look very good. You still seem to pay about $3000 because the car says "Honda" on it, so that makes it cost similar to the other cars while not being as fully equipped. No incentives or cash back, but the salesman said he'd yet to have anyone walk away¹.

We stopped at Toyota, but the RAV4 still looks ugly to us, inside and out, and seems roughly as "overpriced" as the Honda without quite the same "reliability" and "safety" ratings to back them up.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 553); »

Following yesterday's crash, Carey spoke with our insurance company and the police and several other people. After one false start, we located our car at D'Amico. This image says a lot, I think, about not only the damage the car sustained but also how fortunate we are that Carey seems to be major-injury free:

We picked up the things that were sitting in the car¹ like Nat's inline skates, a coupon book, mugs, an iPod, a pair of shoes, jumper cables from the back, etc. We took what was salvageable as well - the floor mats and the trunk cargo netting.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 702); »

I spoke to Carey as she was leaving school today, and then she called again at about 3:26, crying and sobbing and screaming. I couldn't understand most of what she said, but I did hear "Nat" and "bus" and "hit me" and "my car" and perhaps "obliterated¹."

I called back in a few minutes and Carey was calmer. She'd been in a car accident near our house (on Zimmerly Road) because an oncoming car was sliding sideways on the street and hit her. We later discovered that the oncoming car, a Buick Lesabre driven by an 18-year-old who had been driving for only three months in her "new" car, had spun once or twice after plowing into the front of Carey's Subary Forester², clipping the driver's side rear of Carey's car and then hitting the side of the car behind Carey.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 639); »

This seems to be a consistent problem with a certain portion of white collar (or perhaps no-collar) work force: an inability to think rationally, honor your word, and to not break the contract they propose and to which they agree.

It's simply ridiculous how much time and energy I've wasted, my partners have wasted, and the "workers" have wasted simply because the worker is, well, a flake.

You know who I respect? People who honor their commitments, even if it comes at some sacrifice. I'm far more likely to not only use them again down the road, but to reward them, cut them some slack, and to listen to their ideas.

Nat and I went skating at JMC today. She still has the adjustable skates (single blade - none of that "training" nonsense) and though we eventually moved them from 9 to 10 (they go up to 12) to give her a bit more wiggle room, they worked out well.

Nat did incredibly awesome for her first time on ice in so long. Her instructions were to turn her toes out and to bend her knees. Turning her toes out allowed her to get more traction when she'd push backwards and keeping her knees bent (or, what worked better - "sticking her butt out") kept her a bit lower to the ice and also let her push off with longer strokes.

Beginners, if you've ever noticed, all tend to try to skate standing straight up. Bent knees not only help your balance, people, but they let you actually push so you can get around the rink in less than ten minutes.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 494); »

The Penguins have won 12 games in a row and are 13-0-1 in their last 14 games.

That said, I think they face a stiff challenge against the Flyers tomorrow night. It's in Philly (though they're 0-2 against the Flyers in Pittsburgh and 1-0 in Philly), their play has gotten a little tired lately, and the Flyers have a solid team that's taking less penalties than they usually do. If the Flyers act like it's any time from 1970 to 2009, then the Pens win another easily. But if I had to bet, I'd say 13 is unlucky…

But congrats for the streak. It helps to build a nice cushion, and is fun to watch, but having been through two runs to the Finals in the past three years, Crosby and the Pens¹ know that the streak is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Still set for an early January 2011 release, Analyzr is coming along quite nicely.

Within the next few weeks we'll have the website finished (it's started as a Photoshop document at this point), we'll figure out what we want to do with our licensing scheme, we'll set up our FastSpring store, we'll set up an LLC, and we'll ship the darn thing.

Feedback from testers continues to be really positive. A few have found bugs (all fixed, and there have only really been about three) and many have written to say specifically how awesome they think the app is and how glad they are that someone's doing something for Mac owners.

We're going to put a good amount of energy into converting Windows owners, too. After all, for many pros their computer is simply a "device." They don't care about the underlying OS so much as they care about the software they run on it. Safari and Mail will cover 90% or so of their "non-video-analysis" time, and Analyzr will cost several hundred dollars less than the "other" software for Windows.

The Sand Trap .com is switching to the Huddler platform next week. Wednesday is our target date.

I expect that the road will be bumpy. There are a LOT of things I don't like about the forum software they've got, BUT they're willing to listen and my odds of getting a feature through are about a thousand times higher with Huddler than with vBulletin.

Additionally, Huddler is going to take over any and all advertising concerns, so that I can focus simply on the "community" as they call it. Definitely looking forward to that.

It's the dead of winter and I've not made much progress on my PGA learning stuff. We're trying to get Analyzr shipping ASAP (still on target for early January, 2011), and that's taking up an inordinate amount of time. Also, The Sand Trap is converting to Huddler next week, so that is taking up time as well.

Perhaps I'll be able to study in February and March and take a trip south in early April. But otherwise, I worry that I might not finish out level 1 until early next winter. It wouldn't be a terrible thing - I'm in no real rush to finish out the PGA certification process. We're still going to be in Erie in a few years and I'm pretty well known as an instructor already, largely thanks to working with Dave and helping him to produce videos for YouTube, running The Sand Trap, working at Golf Evolution schools and on the forum, and sharing a few thoughts now and then on a few other sites.

A Mac application we're building includes the ability to download YouTube videos, and though we've previously written our own Objective-C code to do this, we're thinking of using this python script, youtube-dl to handle a lot of the process.

I believe we'd rip out (or modify) the script to simply take in a YouTube URL and to spit back out the download URL - perhaps via an NSTask - but I'm not sure. The goal is to be able to update more easily in the future when YouTube changes its URLs or HTML format as they seem to do every few months. We'd also want to get the title of the movie as well, but that shouldn't be all that difficult.

The problem is that once you hack it, it is going to take time to re-hack each subsequent version. Is the true solution to let the script download the movie and just import it immediately?

A distant alternative may be to find some way to use the JavaScript/HTML code found within the YouTube5 extension (which also works on Vimeo videos)¹, but there may be obvious licensing and copyright issues with that, so… probably not.