NSLog();

Torero's recently opened up in Erie behind Damon's on Peach Street (in the old Fazoli's). Carey and I have gone a number of times and really dig it.

Torero's is authentic Mexican food. If Taco Bell is your idea of Mexican, you'll want to either stay away or prepare to have your eyes opened. It's good food at a pretty good price. I've gotten the chalupa each time, and one of them fills me up just fine.

One quirk: the pop often costs more than the margaritas and/or beer. So… if you like to drink…

Soon an O'Charley's will be open here and they're putting a McDonald's in nearby as well, both in that lot that's just across the street south of the Millcreek Mall. Hopefully O'Charley's has a good burger (their triple-bacon looks good) and the McDonald's will save us a mile or so of driving to the one in front of Sam's Club.

All males older than 18 with any combination of three working arms and legs should apply. Crutches count. Apply at Heinz Field, Pittsburgh, PA first thing Monday morning.

P.S. Players who do not meet the above qualifications may still apply for the position of offensive coordinator.

Evan's Skate Land West is apparently up for sale. If I could round up $10k I'd make an offer. The carpeting in there (including the shag carpet on the bathroom walls) hasn't been replaced (or cleaned) since about 1973.

And I know everyone goes to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, but why?

The manager of a local CellularOne office today told me a few interesting things:

• The merger officially "closed" (went through, finished, completed) yesterday.
• As soon as early December, CellularOne here will be running two systems - AT&T's and theirs, I assume - and should be able to set up iPhone accounts.
• I can "switch" now, and keep the 20% discount we get off our plans.

In other words, great news.

Update: I called AT&T later in the evening and set up our three lines. They sent us two free RAZRs (yeah yeah…) to go along with my iPhone. It's the $129.99/month plan which, after the 20% discount, is just under $105. Add in the $20 in taxes and we'll have a plan for about $125 compared to $90 currently, but with rollover minutes, 500 more minutes, 200 text messages, and my unlimited data iPhone plan.

Since all three of our phones are currently month-to-month, I don't suspect that will be a problem. Also, we can shave $20/month if we drop down to 700 minutes - which we'll probably do after a month or two of carrying over 800 minutes out of 1400. 🙂

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 324); »

For those who don't like the Dock in 10.x, check out Quay. It's a simple "configurator" application that creates special "documents" that run in Mac OS X 10.5's dock. When clicked, they exhibit traditional (i.e. "sane" or "pre-Leopard") behavior.

Currently it's at 1.0b4, but I expect a release fairly soon.

I had a gift card for Circuit City, so ever since a few days ago I've been playing around with a Garmin Nüvi 200W GPS. Three of the first four locations I tried to find in Erie weren't listed in the mapping software - including the Circuit City where I bought the darn thing.

Being a geek, I figured out the POI ((Point of Interest)) format and added them myself. Unfortunately, they don't show up in general named searches. I can search for "Gamestop" and not get the custom POI I added named "Gamestop." They only show up in a separate custom POI menu.

It's probably not entirely fair to base my opinion of the Garmin unit on how it maps Erie, but that's all I've got right now. I only bought it because a) I had a gift card and b) I could easily return it. I'll be "easily returning" it shortly, I believe.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 411); »

I used to wear a watch all the time in college, but ever since then, I've not worn a watch anywhere. If I really need to look at the time, I check my phone. When I'm working, a watch would just get in the way… and duplicate the one at the top of my computer screen.

I've passed this article along to my wife (as have thousands of others). Here's to hoping she actually reads it.

One of the biggest problems I continually face online is that I prefer to communicate "briskly." I view small talk as even more pointless when it occurs online, and I'm not a fan at all of "flowery" language meant to spare feelings. Mistakes happen - so what - it's learning and adapting and not making the same mistakes again that I care about. Very few other people work this way - they prefer the "flowery" language - and I'm often misinterpreted as rude when I'm simply trying to be efficient.

As for projects, I have two or three ongoing right now, yes. 🙂

A few weeks ago (I think), I noticed a new menu item in my DVR: "On Demand."

My HR-20 HD DVR (from DirecTV) has always worked pretty well, so I haven't visited DBSTalk.com since shortly after getting the HR-20 (and comparing it to my TiVo). I'm not sure how long VOD has been available, but I do know this after watching the little five-minute video: it's only available to HR-20 owners who have their DVR hooked up to their network.

VOD, in my limited testing, is off to a good start. I can download an hour-long show in 10 minutes. That's not full speed, but it's a good balance between speed and maintaining the usability of the network for other computers.

The VOD library appears to be rather large. Granted, most of it's stuff I'll never, ever want to watch, but there are some nice finds. I can download every episode of Dirty Jobs, for example, including one that is set in Erie, PA.

There's also pay-per-view content available. The intro video told me that you're only charged if you watch the video, so folks can delete shows after they've downloaded them if they change their minds.

All told, and combined with DirecTV's recent addition of 100 HD channels (of which at least 20 matter to me somewhat), I'm a very happy DirecTV customer.

Over six years ago, when I purchased ((On Microsoft's dime.)) my first home audio setup from a Best Buy in Boca Raton, my needs were fairly simple: an optical port or two for a PS2 and a DVD player were all I needed, and something that could do surround sound.

Six years, a few moves, and countless "adjustments" to the setup must be the life span of that receiver, because recently it's begun "clicking" a lot and oftentimes after a "click" the center speaker would shut off. After re-checking the connections, verifying that it's not the speaker or the source (usually the DirecTV DVR), etc., it still misbehaved. It was easily fixed… if you didn't mind waiting either five seconds to ten minutes or getting up and walking across the room to gently tap the receiver a few times until the sound would "come back."

So, I set out to find a new receiver that would simplify my needs.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 825); »

On my recent trip to North Carolina, a playing partner had a little portable TomTom. He'd snagged it off of woot one day for $180 - a pretty good deal.

I see at the TomTom site there are several models available for use in cars.

The TomTom site is a little dense. The $249 has "spoken directions," but the One XL S has "text to speech technology," which seems to be lacking on the S-less One XL. Am I just to assume that they will speak directions, too? I want to avoid paying subscription fees, and if possible, I'd like to avoid having a wire hanging down to power the unit, too - I'll bring it inside and charge it if that's an option.

The purpose of this post is to ask anyone out there a few questions:

Do you have a TomTom? Which model? Do you like it? What don't you like about it? Is there another company making a better product?

I don't go on that many excursions, but the times when I do go it'd be nice to have something like this.

I made an off-hand remark at the end of a recent post about Al Gore stopping by with a "low-energy [dimming] bulb" which I claimed had not yet been invented.

Someone quickly pointed out in the comments that compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs can now do dimming… if you find the proper ones.

I've spent awhile looking and the bulbs aren't widely available by any stretch of the imagination. Many seem to suffer buzzing and/or flickering problems. They have both spiral and floodlight versions available, but comments for both (at walmart.com, amazon.com, etc.) indicate the same problems.

So, it appears I'm going to be holding off on replacing the many dimmable lights in the house with low-energy bulbs. I hope the technology advances soon. I believe replacing incandescent bulbs with CFs is a pretty easy way to save money and energy.

I currently have a Logitech MX-1000 mouse. It's a wireless laser mouse with, by my count, five buttons and a scroll wheel that can be pushed left, right, down (clicked), or scrolled up and down. That's approximately seven or eight "buttons" plus scroll wheel functionality.

The problem with this mouse is the same as the one before it: the left mouse button won't stay "clicked." ((This mouse lasted only about eighteen months. That's incredibly disappointing.)) This is problematic when I'm dragging windows, selecting blocks of text, or choosing items from a popup menu.

I use USB Overdrive to control the mouse, so things like "built-in search" or whatever bull Logitech is throwing in now is rather pointless… and can be easily over-ridden. I've highly customized the button set of my MX-1000. For example, the side up/down buttons delete and display the next message in Entourage and Cyndicate. The scroll wheel pushes side to side to move me from Space to Space (since I began using Spaces in Leopard, anyway).

Logitech's current lineup is rather disappointing: they have nothing like the MX-700 or MX-1000. Kensington's mouse lineup appears to have gone to crap, so they're no help.

What am I to do? What's a good mouse and where can I get it?

ShareThis 2.0 is now available.

I did a trial run, but the current version is a big step backwards in my book. It ignores several of the top-ranked items in the "optimizing website performance" video I watched a few days ago ((Doesn't minify JavaScript, increases DNS lookups and HTTP transfers, puts JavaScript high on the page, and others.)) and it's far less customizable than 1.4 - simply unacceptable for an upgrade.

1.4 will keep working just fine… not that anyone here uses it anyway. Perhaps I'll just remove it entirely.

P.S. Obviously this has no impact on our use of "ShareThis" within Cyndicate.

Recently - and I'm rather ticked I missed out on it - both Wal-Mart and Best Buy offered a Toshiba (the HD-A2 I believe) HD-DVD player for $99. It came with a few free movies, too.

I'd have bought one to replace my one-year-old upconverting DVD player. After all, the Toshiba did up-converting, had HDMI and optical output, and could play HD-DVD discs.

I've read recently that, though Blu-Ray enjoys about a 2:1 lead in discs (they have four major studios signed up, while HD-DVD has two), not counting PS3s, HD-DVD has a lead in the number of players on the market - largely due to the 90,000 or so sold over two days a week ago at the $99 price.

The cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market still costs about $499, and the cheapest HD-DVD player about $199 to $249. All that in mind, I ask the following question(s):

P.S. I believe a lot of people are simply sitting back and waiting, kind of like me, to see which format "wins" before we begin buying things. But at $99, I'd have done it just to get the occasional NetFlix movie in HD-DVD format.