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Question: What technology gadget do you think you'll buy next? Which would you like to buy next?

My Answer: I'll probably pick up an AppleTV. We really need a new laptop, but I don't see that being in the cards any time soon.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Ever since I got my Mac Pro last year, the eject keys have been "slower" to react than they were on my G5. I'm using the same keyboard. I have the dual optical drive Mac Pro, but I don't think that makes much of a difference.

By "slower" I mean that instead of tapping the eject key and having a drive open, I have to hold it for about 3/4 second. For the longest time I thought the old ctrl-eject trick (to bring up the restart/sleep/cancel/shut down dialog) didn't work on this particular Mac, but it too simply requires me to hold down the eject key for nearly a second.

This dialog keeps appearing today. I've yet to choose "Keep Both," but it matters not whether I choose "This Mac" or "iDisk" - the dialog reappears a few minutes later.

I must admit that free is about the only price I'd play to go to Erie Golf Club, but ever since I heard they're not prosecuting trespassers (hey, it's still technically public property so far as I know), I've been there a time or two to play and use the course as a little driving range and short game practice area. They're still cutting the grass enough that you know where the fairways, tees, and greens are. There just aren't any flags, ball markers, or rakes.

I have to wonder if they couldn't have just put an elderly guy there to collect $5 donations to "play all day" from interested parties. Or put up a lock box that accepted donations. I'd kick in a few bucks.

Carey bought some Jones soda recently, the new "cane sugar" variety, and it simply reminded me of one of my favorite Jones drinks: the "Bada Bing" drink. It was cherry flavored with loganberry and milk, and it was really good. It appears that flavor is no longer available, and that makes me sad. A moment of silence for Bada Bing.

On Thursday we're scheduled to be without power from 9am to 3pm. WTF am I supposed to do during that time? If anything, it's a great excuse to go play golf, but I really do have a fair amount of work to do, too.

The power outages that I wrote about before have really been far fewer and shorter this year, thankfully, though we seem to get a few more dips in power level than before. Hopefully the changes they make tomorrow will really provide a good level of service and reliable electricity.

Carey needs a phone that will accept a SIM card (for Cellular One). We don't want to extend our contract. She needs a simple phone with an address book - she really never uses the camera or other features (Bluetooth, MP3 ringtones, etc.). The other two phones we have were, uhhh, "mistreated" by the same individual currently in need of a new phone, while my two-year-old RAZR looks virtually new. 🙂

Does anyone have any suggestions? We'd like to keep it to under $100.

I just finished watching Man of the Year, and despite a promising start, the movie gets unusually serious. What was a funny movie, a mockery of modern-day politics, turns into a boring movie as soon as "Dobbs" is elected President. Lame.

My NetFlix movie queue is getting short. Can anyone recommend some good movies I'm unlikely to have already seen?

Whispering Woods will have a website sooner or later, but I wanted to post their green fees and cart rental fees so interested golfers could get some information now.

Seniors are 62 and over. Prices are for 18/9 holes.

Weekday Adult: $55 / $30
Weekday Senior: $45 / $25

Weekend/Holiday Adult: $60 / $35
Weekend/Holiday Senior: $50 / $30

Cart Rental: $14 / $7

Carts are mandatory in June/July/August before 4pm and 3pm the rest of the year.

Indeed, ripping at about 20 frames per second from two discs is nice indeed.

The HandBrake icon seen is from the latest beta, 0.8.5b1. It could still use some UI help, but it does its job well, so I can't complain that much.

Idiot.

Update: This rivals a story Carey just told me. A woman and her child were at the zoo and the kid asked the mom why the penguins had bands around their arms. The mom's response: "So they don't fly away."

I think you can guess what this post contains…

The outdoor shots were taken with the 85/1.8 lens, ISO 100, and aperture varying between f/2.8 and f/5.6. The indoor shots were taken with my 24-70/2.8L. I left the aperture at f/2.8 most of the time and the ISO ranged between 400 and 800.

I need to get in the habit of taking my WhiBal everywhere. I had to play around with the color temperature a little more than would have been necessary.

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Coda is out, and I can already tell you that it won't take me anywhere near the 14 days offered in the trial to know that I won't be purchasing it. Though I'm sure it has the usual sparkle and usability of a Panic app, the "one-window web development" idea is simply not my style.

I like lots of windows, though occasionally I'll use BBEdit's pseudo-tabs, and I like applications specifically built for their tasks." Jack of all trades, master of none" springs to mind here. Essentially, Panic is asking you to forego your favorite text editor, forego your favorite FTP process, forego your CSS editor, and forego your Terminal in favor of less feature-packed applications that have the potential benefit of being inside of one window. And as I said, "one window" isn't a plus to me - it's a decided negative.

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If you save this script as a droplet, it will open files in BBEdit with text wrapping turned off (regardless of your default preferences).

on open the_files
    tell application "BBEdit"
        open the_files with properties {soft wrap text:false}
    end tell
end open

Opening files with soft wrapping off enables BBEdit to open large files (say, 75 MB .sql dumps) much more quickly. If you want to add a dialog prompt you could also save the script in a way that you could activate it with a keyboard shortcut from within BBEdit.

Thanks to John Gruber for the tip. He'd given it to me a long time ago, and again recently when I realized I couldn't find it. So now it's blogged so I cannot forget.