NSLog();

See, now that's funny. If you believe in a god of some form or another, you probably realize now he or she (or it) has a sense of humor, too.

Question: When was the last time you went to the dentist? When they're cleaning your teeth, are your eyes open or closed?

My Answer: Today. Prior to that, waaaaaaay too long ago to mention. I keep my eyes open, though sometimes I close them and almost drift off to sleep or play a round of golf in my mind. I don't mind the dentist, but I wouldn't get my teeth cleaned for fun either.

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

What the fuck kind of stupid name is MacBook Pro?

I followed the directions here but, for some reason, my Google map doesn't show Lake View Country Club like the official Google Map does.

I am not sure why, either. The example maps (first image) show parks and other green places.

P.S. If I try to show two Google maps, only the second one loads.

After reading this, I'm still not entirely sure what Apple's done to violate the patents (let alone whether such patents are valid).

I never hide behind a pseudonym, so I have no personal problems with this, but this law has absolutely no practical purpose and thousands of potential problems.

Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

My freakin' Senator, good ol' Arlen frickin' Specter (who I still think was instrumental in the Kennedy assassination cover-up), snuck this one into a must-pass bill for the DoJ.

Question: Where will y'all get your Macworld coverage tomorrow?

My Answer: I'm going to try this site and an IRC channel or two. I'll also probably have an AIM group chat going on… I think Adium can do that now right? 🙂

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

There are, from what I can tell, a few different ways the old "I'm With Stupid" shirt can be revived. I've only ever seen one "in the wild." Can you guess which one?

1. Arrow pointing up.
2. A guy's shirt, arrow pointing down.
3. A maternity shirt, arrow pointing at belly.

I've left out a t-shirt made for Siamese twins. Too much of a niche market. 🙂

Huh? From ErieBlogs.com comes this:

I had the oil changed in my car over the weekend. As the guy was explaining the services they performed, checking the wipers, etc, he said "Normally we check the tire inflation but noticed that you had green valve caps. They're filled with nitrogen and since nitrogen doesn't leak out like air does, we didn't check them." Think I said "REALLY!" five times. Guess I wasn't paying attention when I bought my tires at Dunn Tire. My gas milage has increased about 7 percent. Thought it was just the new tires. Must be the combo of the tires and the fact that they're filled with nitrogen. Nitrogen filled tires are supposed to get 3-5 percent better fuel mileage.

Regular old air is ~78% nitrogen, and a quick Google search yielded very little fact. Supposedly ol' N oxidizes the inside of your tires less, leading to less wear. Then again, airlines fill their tires with nitrogen, but that may have more to do with a fire in the fold-up wheel compartment (and the trouble having a lot of fresh oxygen would cause).

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 328); »

The Bengals suddenly morphed into the Bungles once again. Their division crown was won through the second rung (better division record) as the 11-5 Steelers came back from a first-half deficit (something they've yet to do this year) to win convincingly, 31-17.

Ben Roethlisberger, he of the 63-or-so QB rating in two playoff games last year, led all QBs this weekend:

QB                    Team  Comp  Att   Yds   TD   INT   Rating
Ben Roethlisberger    PIT   14    19    208    3    0    Better
Tom Brady             NE    15    27    201    3    0    Worse

If the Steelers can continue to play as they did in the second half today, and if Bill Cowher can stop himself from committing his typical post-season crap, this team will give Indy a run.

And hey, maybe they won't be allowed to "enhance" the crowd noise this time around.

P.S. Take that, Bootsy Collins.

P.P.S. Troy Polamalu, one of the most "cerebral" players Bill Cowher has ever seen, made two of the dumbest moves I've ever seen in playoff football.

P.P.P.S. That torch? Please pass it back. A month was generous enough, no?

From this article comes a list of 10 things Owen Linzmayer hates about Mac OS X. My summary:

1. Dock Items Bounce Indefinitely: So turn it off.
2. Programs Force Themselves to the Forefront: Very, very rarely.
3. Trashed Items Can't Be Opened: This happens to me too, but if the dang thing is in the trash why do you want to open it? Some people use the trash as (dangerous) storage, so that warning helps them realize they're in danger.
4. Software Update Off-Limits to Third-Parties: I'd like to see it happen too, but it'd open a whole can of worms (pun intended) that would not be welcome.
5. Dashboard Widgets are Modal: That's the point.
6. Painful Pinwheel Pauses: Windows lags when I open four or five browser (IE) windows. I routinely have hundreds of windows (and tens of apps) running. Yeah, I see the rainbow sometimes too, but orders of magnitude less than on a PC.
7. Permission Roadblocks: Very rarely does this happen. Single users are an admin by default and, when appropriate, Mac OS X prompts you for an admin username and password.
8. Exposing Package Contents is Confusing: Ctrl-click. Real freakin' confusing.
9. Dumb Deleting: Uh, because they can hit the "stop" button? Just click somewhere else and forget about the dialog, Owen!
10. Sidebar Items Can't Be Renamed: If this makes a top-ten list of things someone hates about an OS, the OS is doing pretty damn well.

In other words, Owen was not really able to come up with much. Which, like I say in the last point, speaks pretty highly of Mac OS X.

Lately, I've had the need to lay out a lot of stuff in OmniGraffle lately. You know what would be nice? A "Conversion Scale." In other words, I'd draw a block and say "for the purpose of this document, this rectangle is 10 feet wide. Then I could enter sizes for things (chairs, tables, etc.) in feet and inches and OmniGraffle could scale them to the appropriate pixel size.

If I had to specify a manual ratio (1 square = ½ foot), that too could work, but the prior seems a bit more intuitive.

The only way to do this in OmniGraffle currently is to determine your own scale and keep it as simple as possible, like "1 pixel = 1 inch." This leaves a lot to be desired if the ideal scale can't be accommodated due to the size of your project area.

Some people don't read articles very closely. Hint: it was a joke. Then again, some of the people commenting on the article don't even think it's a joke.

This is funny.

Now of course I need to type a lot more so that text doesn't wrap funny on this entry.

Or I could just separate every sentence as a separate line.

Then I can talk about nothing and still use up a lot of vertical space.

See? I did it.

I've considered moving away from TiVo for a long time now largely because, supposedly, DirecTV isn't going to work terribly closely with them after this year (2K6) and because HD support is expensive and/or lacking with the TiVo/DirecTV combo. The alternatives, however, leave a lot to be desired. Most, for example, can't record two channels while letting me play back something previously recorded. Some can't even record two separate channels at the same time!

Now the TiVo folks have announced that they've got a series 3 TiVo in the works for release later this year, and it looks great. I just wonder if it will support DirecTV as my series 2 TiVo does. In fact, it could do it one better just by letting me network the damn thing.

I guess DirecTV could be supported if DirecTV access cards functioned like a CableCard. Right? Really, what I am most likely to do is to get a Series 3 TiVo with Adelphia cable. I signed up for DirecTV when I lived in Florida so that I could get NFL Sunday Ticket. Now that I live in Erie, I see most of the Steelers games (though, because we're closer to Buffalo, I guess Erie stations are sometimes required to broadcast Bills games instead!!!).