NSLog();

X360 is now named Rivet.

And that's all I have to say about that now. Hopefully we'll have a beta in the next week or two.

P.S. Scorecard for Windows is nearly done.

The Photo Battle Blog now has a sidebar item. Of course, you can also subscribe to the feed to be notified daily of new battles.

In Cyndicate I recommend turning the "display linked content" option on, as the daily battles are generated via plugin and the feed is, thus, rather bare. It still serves as a reminder to visit, though.

The sidebar (and the images at the site) are 800 pixels wide, so I'll check the site from time to time to see if it's having a drastic effect on load time.

Over at the Photo Battle Blog (please visit and subscribe!), I've set every post to show up at midnight: 00:00:00 (with the corresponding 05:00:00 GMT). Unfortunately, WordPress doesn't seem to care for that.

I first saw the problem yesterday (or the day before), and thought that perhaps the "all zeroes" was wigging WordPress out. So, I performed a MySQL search/replace query and now all of my dates and times are 00:01:00 and 05:01:00 (one minute past midnight). Same problem.

When I logged in this morning at about 9am, I saw the image you see to the right. On one hand, it's bad math. On the other, it's preventing my latest photo blog entry from being published at the proper time.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 312); »

Yawn.

Perhaps I'll have Aperture 2.0 and new MacBook Pros for my birthday (March 23)… dare to dream?

I've received my copy of Office:2008.

Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to un-register the previous version. I was using a friend's code (you get three licenses with the Home and Student Edition) and I'd like to free it up for her and use my own registration codes.

No idea how. I tried deleting files that looked promising, but I was never prompted for the registration again. I'm thinking it's an invisible file somewhere, but I know it's not in "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008" at least. I poked quickly around /Library and ~/Library but couldn't find anything ((I did manage to delete virtually everything from ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/ except the "Office 2008" folder. Man I had some old stuff still hanging out in there.)).

Any ideas? I'm going to feel bad despite not having done anything wrong if I have to visit hacker sites to figure out how to un-register Office so I can re-register it. 😛

P.S. Office:2008 users cannot currently register because the site rejects the product ID. This doesn't affect licensing the software to run on your computer, of course.

Six-team playoffs are a solved problem. In football, the top two teams get bye weeks. Seed 3 plays seed 6 and seed 4 plays seed 5. After that, the highest ranked team plays the lowest ranked team that's won the previous week.

However, my winter hockey league has six teams, but they're guaranteeing each team two playoff games (every team makes the "playoffs"). I can't come up with a solution that rewards the season-long record and gives teams two games guaranteed.

Three games are being played one week, three the next, and one for the finals.

Can you concoct a playoff schedule that nominates two teams to go to the finals and rewards the top seeds for their season achievements? Everything I can come up with could result in three 2-0 teams and three 0-2 teams or six 1-1 teams in the playoffs. Do you just use the season-long record as the tie-breaker in that case?

Or is there actually a schedule that could work?

I'm used to, on my Mac, queuing up commands when I know a dialog will appear. For example, I'll hit a keystroke that requires confirmation and hit the "enter" key very quickly.

In Windows, lately, I've been hitting the delete key to move a file to whatever the Trash in XP is called and hitting "enter" as a way of saying "Yes, I actually want to move the file I just told you to delete." Problem is, the "enter" keystroke is sent before the dialog appears and so Windows throws up an error saying "you can't really open sseay32.dll" with the "move to the trash?" dialog beneath it.

I only have to wait a second (sometimes TWO!!) for the "move to trash?" dialog to appear, but it sometimes seems like an eternity.

Ha! I don't believe the adage "cheaters never win" applies here, because the Patriots won 18 times this year, but given that they'd make the playoffs and even that they'd win 18 times, I couldn't have scripted it better than a loss in the Super Bowl.

The last three QBs to win the Super Bowl are named Roethlisberger and Manning, and two of them are from the same draft.

Screw the Patriots. For one day, most of the country were Giants fans. You could even hear it in the stadium.

The 70s Steelers were voted the best dynasty of all time with 29%. The Patriots finished last with 14%. San Francisco and Dallas had 21 and 17% each, I think - though that leaves a big chunk of votes unaccounted.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 141); »

Today's plan: play a lot of games. All day. Carey's going to scrapbook.

Tomorrow: reading day, probably.

P.S. Thanks to those who have visited the Photo Battle Blog. Subscribe and vote daily, please.

I'll keep this short and sweet: I've started a "photo battle blog" here: http://pic.nslog.com/.

Two pictures are posted daily by two people (one of them me). You can click the images to view them at their full size (800 x whatever) and then click a button below to vote for the one you prefer.

Please, pretty please visit daily and vote daily.

Thank you.

About the Voting: Voting is done via a special plugin developed by Aaron Linville and myself (mostly Aaron). The other WordPress voting plugins did too much. The position of each photo is randomized so one isn't consistently positioned in a "more dominant" location.

The (in)famous "Plane on a Conveyor Belt" experiment was run last night on MythBusters and, as physics dictates, the plane takes off.

That was a terrible experiment. The whole basis for the myth was that the airplane could take off from a treadmill traveling at the same speed as the aircraft. Unfortunetly during their testing they failed to keep the aircraft and the treadmill at the same speed. It is clearly evident from the video that the aircraft is accelerating faster than the treadmill is being pulled. If they were moving at the same speed the aircraft would not be passing all the cones while on the treadmill...it would remain in a stationary position relative to the cones.

The physics are totally wrong, an aircraft doesn't fly because of a propeller, ie a glider. It flys because of the air flow over the wings creating lift. If you were to run 20 mph down a road your hair would blow in the wind stream being created. If you run 20 mph on a treadmill your hair will look just as pretty as when your standing in place. Its the same principle with a wing.

The myth is a scam. They need to retry the myth with a pilot that can keep the plane at the same speed as the treadmill.

1. It's not clearly evident.
2. The aircraft would still pass all the cones (just as it would if it were on ice). It most definitely would not remain stationary.
3. The physics are correct. Lift is generated by airspeed. Forward motion is generated because the engine (jet or propeller) acts against the air, not the ground.
4. A person running has nothing to do with it. That's the "car" problem. Strap a jet pack on a person running on a treadmill and you've got the equivalent version.

Why can't these idiots get it through their thick skulls that the plane moves relative to the ground? They seem to be basing all of their opinions on the assumption that the plane stays still due to, I dunno, magic??? Even the most basic version MythBusters ran - the actual plane on the treadmill - proves them otherwise. The propeller pulls the plane through the air.

The only shocking thing to me in the entire episode was that 400 pound planes exist and they can take off going only 25 MPH!!!

More quotes below, because, well, why not? It's like spectating a car accident. In the voice of Haley Joel Osment: "I see stupid people."

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 3479); »

Why the hell is there no confirmation dialog when you delete a subscription to a podcast in iTunes? Seriously? There's not even an undo, and it's not easy to figure out what podcast subscription you've deleted.

It's easier to delete an entire subscription than an individual podcast!

P.S. Yes, I just deleted a subscription, hence the post. I used Time Machine to restore my iTunes library files from an hour ago, launched iTunes, took a screenshot of my podcast subscriptions, and then re-installed the latest database, compared the image to the list, and re-subscribed.

Pretty easy:

SetFile -a V '/Volumes/Mimzy'

Lowercase 'v' returns the disk to visibility.

• You can edit the toolbars! Yay! My first attempts to drag the stupid stupid "mini buttons" that allow you to switch from Mail view to "To Do" view and the other three or four views failed, but then I successfully removed it by editing "com.microsoft.Entourage.plist" and removing each of the lines that contained ".navcontrol."
• What's up with the font sizes? Anonymous 7 and ProFontX 7 show up as 9-point fonts. Why are they off one size? If I choose 9 points here I get massive monospace fonts. What gives? A bug?
• The icons continue to look stupid.
• The speed boost is noticeable. Bye bye Rosetta.
• I'll probably almost never launch Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. That's what Pages, Keynote, and now Numbers are for.
• Sound Sets seem to have gone the way of the dodo. I haven't yet looked to see where the new versions or stored, what format they are, or whether they can even be replaced. The existence of a popup menu makes me think they can be.
• Entourage still shows you the image of the person who sent the email if you have one in Entourage's database. Why not their picture from the Address Book?
• I like the mini calendar. I think I'll leave that up in the main window.
• All of my old AppleScripts, settings, colors, categories, etc. was imported perfectly. SpamSieve continues to work - everything.
• 107 font files, Microsoft? As much as I like new fonts (wheeee), isn't that a bit overboard? I had several duplicates I felt compelled to remove. At least all of my fonts still verify.
• Microsoft continues to ignore things like the Dock menu. I can forgive them their Time-Machine-unfriendly database, but how hard would it be to add a dock menu?

I'm not dating anymore, but a friend of mine has started a site "datingishell.net," which collects stories from the wild and woolly world of dating.