NSLog();

I'm going to wait for my upgrade version to arrive (I paid for two-day shipping, hoping to get it by Friday), but based on the Aperture pages and some "first impressions" posts by others, here are my first impressions.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 552); »

Sometimes I just want to view all the comments on a particular entry. Why does WordPress make this so damn difficult? I swear, as soon as I figure it out this time, I'm editing my templates to make the URL a one-click type of thing. The only place this URL is given to you is in those emails - I don't think it's given anywhere in the admin interface at all.

http://domain.com/wp-admin/edit.php?p=xxxx&c=1

Needless to say, I went out and bought a neck guard today.

What's most incredible is how lightly he seems to have been struck by the skate. It wasn't a slicing motion and it wasn't even firm enough to push his head or neck backwards. Another video can be found here.

Two games I've played recently - NHL '08 and Burnout Paradise on the Xbox 360 - have some interesting songs on them.

You know what would be nice? Being able to instantly and easily buy some or all of those songs ((Or even getting a free copy included with the game, though that's obviously so unlikely to happen I've relegated it to this footnote.)).

Unfortunately, the current means of acquiring these songs goes something like this: find a track list for the game online. Type each individual song name into both iTunes and Amazon. Listen, compare the prices and file formats, and then buy.

I ended up buying a few songs from iTunes (the DRM-free album ones), and I've not yet gone back to Amazon to pick up a few others. I may not. After spending 30 minutes doing all of the above, I had to move on to other things.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 218); »

CoreImage: slow?

We're finding that as we work on Rivet the bottleneck isn't the network, but the image itself. We're performing two operations: resizing (to the larger of 1920 x 1080) and compressing (currently, the options are none, 90, 70, 50, and 30). These operations all seem to take about the same amount of time, and that time is slower than most networks can probably just push the extra 2 MB of data we're saving per image.

Is that realistic? Is CoreImage that slow?

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.