NSLog();

Just curious. And for the sake of the question, interpret "recently" however you'd like in order to answer the question in the manner you feel is best.

P.S. I voted yes. 😀

Off the top of my head…

1. If you're invited to someone else's house, bring something. And don't fish for compliments later.
2. Don't ask to be invited. If you're a good enough friend with someone, they'll think to ask you about your Thanksgiving Day plans.
3. You may not bring a guest unless the host asks if you're bringing anyone. Asking to bring a guest can be okay depending on your relationship with the host.
4. On most occasions, the host gives way to the guests. They get to sit on the couch while the host stands, etc. But on "big meal" days, guests should insist the host gets to sit from time to time, though the host will probably defer to the guests. It's a lot of work, so be courteous of that.
5. Mind your conversation, particularly in mixed company. Thanksgiving is a day for being thankful, not for arguing about politics.
6. If you don't like someone, simply avoid them. There are plenty of other people to talk to. That being said, don't get mad if someone is ignoring a lot of people - it's better than causing trouble.
7. If you're a guest, offer to help clean up (and mean it) or do dishes. Most hosts will refuse, but if they accept, you can trust that your help is something for which they're thankful.
8. Don't eat so much or get so drunk that you fall asleep on your guest's couch. You don't want to be that guy (or gal) - the one everyone keeps whispering about "Do we wake him up now?"
9. If you want to eat on time and/or keep your life, stay out of the kitchen (unless you're actually productively cooking something).
10. If you bring something to eat, don't assume that there's refrigerator space to cool it or an oven or range to cook it.
11. If you're the host, expect at least half of these rules to be broken.

So, like virtually everyone else with an Xbox 360, I downloaded the "NXE." After checking that Rivet still works (it does), I set about to explore.

Avatars
The first thing you've got to do is set up an avatar (mine's to the right). Frankly, and perhaps because it goes for the "realistic look" more than the Wii's Miis, I'm disappointed. None of the hairstyles quite suited mine ((I have very short hair that's parted on my left.)), so I had to settle for a short hair style with a bald spot. I don't have a bald spot! The eyes, eyebrows, and mouths look like they're copied right off the Wii ((There's only so much you can do with eyes and eyebrows)). The noses are more realistic. Unlike the Wii, you can't adjust the position of the items. You can't move the eyes closer together or farther apart, the eyebrows up and down, and you can't resize your nose and mouth. Female avatars have a pair of rimless glasses available to them, but not male avatars (I wear rimless glasses :-P).

What's worse, some testers report that thousands of clothes were available until about a week before the launch of NXE. Then they were pulled.

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Good news everybody! Preliminary testing shows that the current version of Rivet works with the New Xbox Experience (NXE) update that came out this morning. All of the files I've attempted to play so far have played correctly. I haven't tried every file type yet, but I've tested all the most likely ones without a hiccup.

One important note: you will have to download the media pack again to play some file types. I ran into this the first time I tried to play an xvid file, for example. Fortunately, Microsoft made it really painless. The first time you try to play a file that requires the media pack, your Xbox present an error dialog telling you the update is needed and you're taken right to the download from Xbox Live. You'll be told you've already downloaded it, but download it again to your hard drive and you'll be good to go.

Brad and I have a feeling that we may be able to add a few heavily requested features to Rivet as well. We won't say what they are at this time (as we've not had any time to test beyond the basics), but we'll be exploring the possibilities and hopefully we'll be able to add a couple cool new things.

So download the NXE with confidence: Rivet should work beautifully.

In my downtime today and yesterday, I spent a few moments clicking through a bunch of submissions to JPG magazine's three Issue 20 themes. Because the position of the "Nah" and "Yeah" buttons change depending on the size of the image, it became a slow, tedious process that felt a lot more like work.

I took a few moments to write up some AppleScripts to help me automate the process. The two are simply:

tell application "Safari" to do JavaScript "document.getElementById('voteNah').submit()" in document 1

tell application "Safari" to do JavaScript "document.getElementById('voteYeah').submit()" in document 1

Using FastScripts, I assigned each a keyboard shortcut - ctrl-N and ctrl-Y - both of which are on the right hand. I can now rate images just about as quickly as possible.

Of course, I still pause to look at the good ones and I often consider my options… I just don't have to stress out my mouse arm quite as much now.

You know those photos I took of the girls in the "professional" studio (i.e. the playroom/craft room in our house)? Wal-Mart apparently thought they were "professional" enough that they had me sign a copyright form attesting to the fact that, indeed, I took the pictures.

Their copyright policy states:

In addition, we will not copy a photograph that appears to have been taken by a professional photographer or studio, even if it is not marked with any sort of copyright, unless we are presented with a signed Copyright Release from the photographer or studio.

Funny. I was somewhat displeased with the photos (too many girls wore black, the same color as the background I chose), and here Wal-Mart thought I was trying to print pictures taken by an actual photographer. 😉

Anyway, just a heads up if you ever take "studio" type shots in your home. Most professional photographers don't use Wal-Mart for their processing and printing, after all.

P.S. Save yourself time: download and fill out this PDF before going into the store.

Oh how times have changed.

My favorite (and only?) birthday party as a child involved having a few friends over to play pin the tail on the donkey (I cried because I didn't win) with four friends (one of whom I was forced to invite). We had cake and I got a few presents.

I didn't go to many birthday parties, either. They simply weren't done very often. I remember missing one (Scott B's) because I had chicken pox or the flu or something. I don't remember many others.

But these days, wowee. At certain times of the year there's a birthday party every week, including the one that just concluded here. We opted to go the route of having it in-house rather than renting a place for two hours.

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Duncan's post about his Zenfolio print store experience (or, rather, a customer's experience) led me to consider setting up a little print store of my own.

Zenfolio costs about $40/year for what I'd do. Are there any free stores out there that don't suck? I'm trying to avoid coming to the realization in a year that I couldn't even make up the $40 ((Do you even make any money at the $40 plan or is the Premium plan with "price lists with profit markups" required?)). 🙂

Parallels 4 was released a few days ago, and frankly, every new release makes me regret not choosing VMWare. I haven't even tried VMWare, but the rapid-fire nature of the Parallels releases make me feel as if I'm but a lowly cow being milked by the Parallels farmer. "$39 more, please."

To those out there with VMWare and Parallels, which do you use and why? Is it worth switching at some point?

Having learned that the Drobo slows down only when it hits 95% capacity, not 90%, I decided to up the maximum size of my backup drive slightly ((I originally sized it at 1225 GB. 1.33 TB * 1024 GB/TB * 0.95 ~= 1293 - so I settled on 1275 GB to be safe.)). I figured it would also be a good test should I someday increase the storage space of my Drobo and want to expand my Time Machine disk's size. I used the resize command:

% hdituil resize -size 1275g Bunny_0017f202b9ec.sparsebundle

Should work right? Oops: hdiutil: resize failed - error -5341 FAIL! The image was created based on the ReadMe left by Time Tamer:

% hdiutil create -size 1225g -fs HFS+J -volname "Time Machine Bunny Backup" /Volumes/Mimzy/Bunny_0017f202b9ec.sparsebundle

Disk Utility also offers the ability to resize volumes, but it fails as well. For some users, it won't report an error, but the disk will still remain the old size.

FAIL!

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On Monday, the wife, kid, and I went to a restaurant named "Twins" here in Erie. They're well known for their "broasted" chicken and, on Mondays, they had wings for $0.25.

While flipping through the menu, I saw something I last had almost a decade ago: a true deep-dish Chicago-style pizza. The menu promised that the pizza weighed almost four pounds. The waitress assured us it was good. I began salivating helplessly.

We ordered the wings and made plans to order a pizza as soon as possible, lest we forget. Tonight was that night… and man were we disappointed.

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Update Dec. 24, 2008: I've long since repurposed my Drobo after running into the same problem a commenter below had: the data backs up but doesn't show itself as a backup in Time Machine. There's a work-around, but it isn't a case of "it just works" at all, so you may want to avoid using your Drobo for Time Machine backups at all. It's way, way too much of a headache.

A few days ago I reformatted my Drobo because it was acting up. I believe this was due to a system reinstall and not the fault of the Drobo. Prior to reinstalling I was made aware of the fact that the Drobo, like virtually all expandable mass-storage devices, "lies" to the computer about its disk size.

This "lie" is beneficial if you plan to expand the size of your disk drives. It leaves "room to grow."

The "lie" is a horrible one, however, for Time Machine, which prunes its backups automatically when a disk is full. In my case, Time Machine would be led to believe I have a 2.0 TB disk even though my current Drobo configuration is only 1.35 TB. Once Time Machine had dumped 1.35 TB of data on my disk, it would not know to start pruning old backups to make room for new ones because it would believe that it still has another 650 GB of free space!

Additionally, because Drobos give you quite a bit more than half the storage space, it plays some tricks with your data to keep it safe. The long and the short of it is that once you get to about 95% ((Please see this comment for more on this number.)) of your actual maximum capacity (again, 1.35 TB in my case), the Drobo slows file copies to a crawl in order to run its proprietary routines that are designed to protect your data.

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This upgrade process is getting old. It's been going on for quite awhile too. At least it wasn't election day, but it's amazing how many things require use of the Internet. A partial list includes:

• Can't look up phone numbers easily.
• iPhones fail (we're getting tired of turning off WiFi so we can use EDGE).
• No Xbox Live, which makes me not want to play any games at all since they're so tied to the online world.
• No email, no Twitter, no AIM - no Internet for personal OR work.
• No easy way to find out what's going on in the world, both news-wise and also "what can we do tonight in Erie."
• Can't schedule DVR recordings while running errands. Well, you can schedule them, but your DVR won't get the notification.

The only upside? More time to read.

I back-dated this post. The Internet was down from Monday at 12:15 until Wednesday at 11am.

If you're a Scorecard customer and you'd like to test the iPhone application we're developing, please leave a comment below. Use at least a valid email address, too, mmmmkay?

Note: By "Scorecard customer," I mean you've got a license to Scorecard. The iPhone app will not be a stand-alone application - it pairs with the desktop app.

I've reformatted my Drobo, blowing away every Time Machine backup it had. The thing became "read-only" somehow, had trouble unmounting, and in general became a royal PITA. Of 250 GB that needed backed up ((Best I can figure is that the system reinstall really borked things up.)), Time Machine would back up about 1 GB (in about an hour) and then fail out with an error. I backed up 400 GB in about six or eight hours after reformatting.

I just have my "Media" drive - and it's 500 GB - left to go and then I'm back to safety.

One thing that's somewhat annoying: the Drobo, when it gets nearly full, will insist that I change a drive. It'll turn the light(s) yellow and everything. Can't it be told that it's a Time Machine drive and that Time Machine will automatically remove old data to make room for new data?