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Today I'm off the Filemaker train. The only thing for which I've used FileMaker in the past decade has been to archive some email. I have email dating back to 1996 in FileMaker databases. Do you know how often I've looked at the emails? Never.

Monday to Friday I open a single FileMaker database and store my A.Word.A.Day subscription emails in there. That'll be the toughest for me to get past, but I'm done paying what's become a yearly tax of $179 on FileMaker. I'm done archiving data that I'll almost never use.

In typing that, the one file I do use from time to time is my "Saved/Reg#" file. It contains registration numbers for software, but perhaps I should migrate that to 1Password or something. Something that doesn't cost $179/year and which I only use a few times a year, tops.

Nissan Leaf, an all-electric car.

100 miles on a single charge isn't bad. The price ($30k) isn't bad. The fact that you need to have a charging station installed in your home may put some people off.

But the thing with electric cars is this: you still get your energy somewhere. Batteries still have to be made (and that's not great for the environment), and your energy comes from somewhere. If you live near a nuclear facility, it comes from that and may be the "best" method, but most people get their energy from places that use fossil fuels.

Your gas costs will drop, but your electric bill will shoot up a good amount. I wonder if they're close to equal? The electric bill might be lower… because you can't drive 200 miles in a day like you can with any other car. 😉

Is all-electric the way to go, or is a hybrid (with advancing fuel technologies) or even straight up "advanced fuel" the way to go?

For a few months now, Casio's EX-F1 camera - a camera which shoots pretty reasonably sized video at 300 FPS - was selling for $699. Now it's jumped back up to $999 for seemingly no reason.

What's up with that? Is a replacement coming? Have they stopped producing the camera?

Anyone out there use DiskWarrior for preventative maintenance or simple optimization? Disk Utility just found some errors in my boot volume that will necessitate a restart (and likely Firewire disk mode simply so I can run Disk Utility repair on the other volumes too), so I'll probably also run DiskWarrior when that's done just to "tune things up."

So imagine a drawing application which maintains a library of your drawings on the left (kinda like iTunes) with a standard NSToolbar at the top which contains items for things like "Print" or "New Drawing" or "Import" or whatever... but which also ideally contains drawing tools - a rectangle, oval, and line tool, for example - as well as items that interact with the canvas, like "Zoom +" and "Flip" and so on.

Almost every application which has an NSToolbar contains things which you click and are then done. Some will show state - for example "Group/Ungroup" or "Mark as Read/Unread" - but none will show "selected" because, despite the name, the NSToolbar is not actually a great place for tools.

In this particular application the use of a floating toolbox (like most drawing applications) is not ideal or even necessarily possible. The drawing tools need to be contained in the main window, so Photoshop or Pixelmator type interfaces are not possible.

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Holy crap, when did eSellerate get so freakin' expensive?

What is up with that?

I'm going to be launching an application in a few months and now is the time to start looking around for licensing schemes and account managers. Back in the day I remember thinking the 5% eSellerate took was reasonable. Maybe even the 10%. But 11.9%?

And who knows? Maybe I'm wrong and eSellerate is still the best way to go because rates across the entire industry have shot up. Or because other stores simply don't have some of the capabilities of eSellerate.

If anyone has any thoughts, share 'em in the comments.

Seriously, wasn't that supposed to be available by now?

Look, I don't really have a problem with AT&T. I don't have dropped calls, 3G coverage is pretty good in my area (probably because not many people have iPhones - Erie isn't NYC, after all), and the rates they bill seem to be in line with other companies.

That said… it'd be nice to have some access by now, or the option for access, when it was made available so long ago.

We're using a Verizon hub - Sprint has one too - at the Golf Evolution academy building this year. Everyone with an iPhone essentially has the same bit of hardware, yet AT&T won't enable the functionality.

Today we drove to Pittsburgh and spent the morning checking out the birds at the National Aviary. The aviary is quite small - you could walk through the entire thing in five minutes - but the proximity to the birds is incredible. I shot the below image - a sea eagle - from only a few feet away (through some plexiglass, yes).

I've begun my PGA Pre-Qualifying level course work. This consists of reading the PDFs and, eventually (and within six months), taking a test at an ACT test center. I won't likely do so before May 7, however, because that's when I play my PAT (playing aptitude test).

INTRODUCTION TO THE PGA PROFESSIONAL GOLF MANAGEMENT PROGRAM
QUALIFYING LEVEL: COURSE 1 - 40 pages

PGA HISTORY AND CONSTITUTION QUALIFYING LEVEL: COURSE 2 - 36 pages

THE RULES OF GOLF QUALIFYING LEVEL: COURSE 3 - 46 pages

These should be fairly straightforward. There are self-check type quizzes at the end that I'm tempted to skip to to see how much I really need to read, but I like the topic (golf in general, naturally) so I'll probably just read through them in order.

It's iPad Launch Day, and I remain 100% entirely unenthused.

Between my combination of Mac Pro upstairs, iPhone with me always, and MacBook Pro downstairs by the couch, I have no need at all for an iPad.

I will buy one - likely very quickly - when I can get most of my magazine subscriptions on one, as I've said many times before ((I'm too lazy to link to them.))

http://dslru.com/ - the "DSLR University" - is now open. The site is free, has a free forum and blog, and several free classes.

Other classes are available for as little as $0.99. Drop by, sign up, post in the forum, and peruse some of the classes. It's been a long time coming, but it's here now and we're pleased to make it available to everyone.

Still not fixed. I'm afraid to try the Spaces bug, but I have a hunch that's still broken too.

Update: Nope, not fixed. Booo.

Update #2: These bugs.

Though technically my time as an amateur golfer ended prior to this afternoon, I crossed a barrier today that cements my decision to become a golf instructor: I gave my first official lesson.

I've been observing lessons given by Dave Wedzik for quite awhile now. My trip to Scottsdale, though ostensibly for the capturing of images, was also and perhaps even primarily geared towards continuing to further my understanding of the golf swing.

As of today, I'm a professional golfer. OK, that felt weird to type…

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