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Apparently a secret trick to making a good hamburger: mix in about 25% ground pork. It keeps the burger nice and juicy.

We found, though, that some extra pepper is necessary at this point or you can just barely taste the pork. I prefer a "beefier tasting" burger, but they were moist.

Why restaurants can't simply offer a non-pre-made burger is beyond me. It's no more difficult than cooking the pre-made ones, and they're virtually guaranteed to be better.

Carey's computer, her Mac Pro - which is never on overnight - stopped working earlier today. When I say "stopped working," I mean the thing ground to a halt and she couldn't save files or do much of anything else. When I managed to free 200 MB of disk space, you could literally watch the space vanish before your very eyes.

As her computer apparently has Rosetta installed (I refuse to install it on my Mac Pro or MacBook Pro), I downloaded DiskInventory X and ran it. Thirty minutes later, it identified an 89.4 GB file in /private/var. As I write this, frankly, I forget what the file was, but it was large and unnecessary, so I removed it. I also removed some log files that hadn't been purged recently.

Reboot, and voilà - 125 GB of free space returned, and she could once again save her lesson plans from within Pages.

And, better yet, she knows to look at her free disk space remaining now and then, and to let me know if it's getting small again before problems arise.

Warm weather has finally arrived, and it's predicted to stay in the high 40s or low to mid 50s for the next eight or nine days, so maybe - maybe (and knock on wood) - we won't get that late snowstorm that just keeps everything soggy and cold for a long time.

This winter's been an odd one. We didn't get snow when Pittsburgh, NYC, Philly, etc. got snow. But when we did get snow, we got a lot. The rest of the time it was just cold.

And elsewhere it's been cold too. A friend of mine goes to Florida every year for 2-3 months. He came back two weeks early because, in his words, "he got sick of the weather in Florida." What's up with that?

I'm looking forward to this year. A lot of good things are happening. A lot is changing. More details tk, but I hope the weather this year is good, because last year was lousy.

I'm building an app that's got a library component. Frankly, it seems like a great use for a drawer, but drawers seem to have gone the way of the dodo on the Mac.

Yet there's still a drawer in Pages, so… where does that leave us? Are drawers a complete no-no, generally? What other (somewhat recently updated) apps have drawers, if any?

A friend of mine says that if he could eat any food that wouldn't count towards his calories or anything, it'd be Oreos. Regular old Oreos, not the double-stuff or the peanut butter ones or anything crazy - just regular Oreos, zero calories, and he'd eat them all day.

As a bit of a gag birthday gift I printed off a new nutrition label for Oreos with 0 calories (and a few other changes). It's funny. And I used OmniGraffle.

So, what would your "zero calorie" food be? What food would you eat all the time if it didn't count as calories and had no negative effect on your health at all?

Mine's a toss-up. I really like Cherry Coke, but I'd also have to strongly consider ice cream (less attractive if I had to pick only one flavor or even one brand), steak (mmmmm, but it's not cheap, so I'd probably rule it out for that reason). After that, my list of foods I'd consider runs pretty thin…

What's yours?

It's not as bad as you'd expect. The "diet aftertaste" still exists but it's not as strong. Perhaps it's masked by the cherry flavor - I highly doubt Coke Zero tastes quite as good.

Am I alone in that - liking the Zero variant of some Coke more than the Diet version?

Regular (all the calories) stuff still reigns supreme, but for 210 calories or whatever you save, CKZ is just fine by me.

I've disabled ClickToFlash because it's been behaving oddly lately (and development seems to have come to a standstill).

I'll often attempt to display a YouTube video, and a movie file will download. Whitelisting sites doesn't always work, and sometimes I spend five minutes just trying to get a flash movie to play in Flash instead of downloading a movie or display a white box where the movie should be (long bug discussion here - 1.6b7 linked here).

Will cross my fingers and, occasionally, re-enable. It's the easiest way to download the movies from YouTube (though I have a JavaScript bookmarklet that does it too).

P.S. And I'll try 1.6b7 as soon as I can tolerate a re-start of Safari.

I may be printing in color quite a bit soon, and ideally in a way that looks crisp and professional, so I'm looking at potentially buying a color laser printer.

What will I be printing? Some photo content, but also some text and some charts and graphs. I haven't done the research, but something tells me that buying an inkjet may not be the way to go with the cost of inks. But maybe I'm wrong there.

I know some color laser printers are $1500, but this Samsung one is $200 and has good reviews. This HP is $244 and also has good reviews (no Mac OS X support?). So why wouldn't you get one of those over an inkjet printer?

I won't be printing a LOT, but right now I just have an HP laser printer. It's served me well, but it's also black only.

So, tips? Advice? Ideas?

Why on earth won't some login items "stick" when I set them?

For a few months, things were working really well, but I wasn't adding or removing any items from the list during that time.

Since adding ClipMenu a few months ago, it's failed to launch every time I reboot my Mac. Which is, fortunately, roughly three or four times.

I'm not saying ClipMenu is the cause of the problem - I'm just saying it's the most recent addition to the Login Items list and yet, when I reboot, it's missing from the list.

I seem to recall this issue happening for years and years, dating back to earlier OS releases in the 10.3 and perhaps earlier time frames… but I can't say for sure.

I'm considering applying this tip to launch login items via an AppleScript.

Update: 2010-03-12 - I wonder if any of this has to do with the lack of ClipMenu on my portable. I synchronize via MobileMe, and one of those synced items is "Preferences," so I wonder if opening my MacBook Pro and letting it sync with MM is effectively "removing" CM from the list? I'll test it by installing CM on my MacBook Pro… makes a lot more sense than rebooting my Mac Pro five or six times.

The below video is hilarious, and in the same vein as this TV news parody video:

Seriously? Who uses SpamArrest anymore? How is that thing still around?

SpamArrest completely shifts the burden of spam onto legitimate people. I wrote to a company today with a great proposal, and fortunately saw the SpamArrest alert in my spam folder (oh, the irony).

I'm sure it's reasonably effective at blocking spam, but at what expense? Missed emails from real people? The unprofessional message you send when you force someone to click a link and enter a captcha?

Yesterday and today, for some reason, have been horrible days for my computer regarding the Spaces/keyboard-go-bye-bye bug. Virtually every time I switch spaces I have to quit my Dock.

I've quit TypeIt4Me, too - it's not that. I can reproduce the bug when TypeIt4Me is not running. Plus, version 5 is an application instead of a preference pane with a daemon (for the menu), so it's a bit "less involved" with the system as it is.

So annoying.

If 10.6.3 did nothing but fix this bug and slow down my computer 25%, I doubt I'd last three more dock re-launches before I was upgrading my OS.

I can't fathom being without one. I have a Firewire 800 one for my CompactFlash cards (5D, 5D Mark II) and a USB 2.0 one for my SD cards.

Why anyone would plug their cameras directly in to their computer is beyond me. Maybe on occasion for a portable I could see it, but for a desktop? Buy a card reader, plug it in, and leave it there.

This relates to a conversation I've had with Dave Wedzik a few times now, and we both agree and always reach the same conclusion.

In the winter, Dave's been forced to teach at the Golf Dome here in Erie, PA. I've watched a few of his lessons, and I've seen a few lessons given by some of the other local area instructors.

Virtually all of the other instructors go to the far end of the range to the right, where they have "teaching stations" set up. There are only two differences between a teaching station and the other hitting stations: they're a bit wider (ostensibly so the instructor can stand near the student and watch them make swings) and they have a curtain you can pull to prevent nearby golfers from listening in or watching the lesson.

Dave likes to teach in the open, and if I were teaching anyone something like the golf swing, I would too. If you believe in yourself, why wouldn't you want to teach in the open? It's the cheapest (free) form of advertising possible! It's "hey, look at me, I'm an instructor, and not only am I good enough that this guy here has hired me, I'm confident enough to do it right out in the open!"

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Toby Ziegler: "We're flying in a Lockheed Eagle Series L-1011. Came off the line twenty months ago. Carries a Sim-5 transponder tracking system, and you're telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?"

Everyone knows that "rule" is just to prevent people from yapping on their cell phones the entire time they're in the air, right? And the "no electronic devices" is so you'll pay at least a little attention to the stewardesses (or whatever they're called these days). Right?