NSLog();

Question: Imagine you'd just beat a very, very competitive player named Rebecca on The Apprentice and won the job. Then Donald asks you "should I also hire Rebecca?" What would your answer be?

My Answer: If I had 30 seconds to talk, I might have said "I'd love to have Rebecca as one of my employees." It may have been a good way of getting out without actually answering the question while still establishing myself as the clear and sole winner. If I had been on the spot, I'd have probably said "yes, she'd be an asset to your organization." Saying "no, it's not 'The Apprentii'" would make me sound like an ass (not to mention being incorrect - it's "apprentices" - so much for his education…).

Side conversation: like Judi, I disagreed with the whole bit about "Elisabeth Glaser was the client." They weren't, and Yahoo made it abundantly clear that they didn't want any actual fundraising - seems to me they just wanted to hold a party and thought that by paying lip service to a charity they'd feel better about themselves the next day.

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

Ollieman has ported some of his NetNewsWire themes over to PulpFiction (and another reader called Vienna). They look great, and I've begun using the "Citizen Kubrick Mini" theme as my main theme since he notified me that he'd ported the themes earlier this evening. Ollie, however, takes a little shot at PulpFiction in his post, saying:

Vienna is a easiest to theme, NetNewsWire is the most complete (no surprise there) but somewhat archaic, and PulpFiction is a mess. Seriously PulpFiction sucks to theme. Why the lack of packages? Why to I have to use that bizarre "pftheme:" protocol thing? Seriously.

Ollie's post has since been modified to be a bit less volatile.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 794); »

If Kansas City and the Steelers both win out, Kansas City holds the tiebreaker and would get the #6 spot. The first five will go to Indy, Denver, Cincinnati, New England, and Jacksonville, probably in that order. More here.

Last night, Carey and I received the first bid on the pool room (layout). I'm going to briefly discuss it here so I can document my thoughts. I've haven't adjusted the bid price as I don't imagine any of the other contractors who have yet to put in their bids will see this entry. I may, however, remove the dollar figures later if I'm given reason to do so or suspect that I should do so.

Anyway, the bid price is $16,560. Some line items include addition of the wet bar ($1,900), owner supply and installation of carpeting (-$1,509), and owner supply and install of wood trim (-$937). In other words, anywhere from $13,723 to $18,460, depending on whether we want the bar and whether we'll buy and install our own carpeting and/or wood trim.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 967); »

I've created in OmniGraffle a mockup of the pool room. I've rounded things to the nearest foot, but otherwise the diagram should be reasonably accurate. I used OmniGraffle's gridding system and doubled the number of feet and divided by the grid size (8) to get a scale of 1 foot = 2/8 inch or 1 foot to 1/4". But that scale is useless on computers, given the differences in resolution.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 314); »

Question: How much do you charge per hour for whatever it is you charge for?

My Answer: I have a lot of readers who, at one time or another, have done freelance work. My base rate is about $150/hour, but I'm particularly careful to do an hour's worth of work in that time frame, even if it takes me 80 minutes. I've also done some simple work for $25/hour. So, the true answer is a grey sliding scale. In the end, I probably average under $72/hour, which is fine because I do work from home.

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

Hey look, you can buy $20 and get 10 free iTunes (or buy $50 and get 25 free).

It's not quite "buy two get one free" but it works out to that for $20 and $50 purchases. And you can always send a gift certificate to yourself (I sent one to Carey - we buy all of our music using my account anyway…).

My account was credited immediately, for those who are nervous about when they'll be credited.

Gee, someone really liked King Kong.

If you're a Flash developer, I have a few questions and perhaps a small proposition for you. Please IM me.

A friend of mine has 220 GB of data (music) on a 250 GB disk. He'd like to defragment the disk but isn't sure what options are available and doesn't have the space to do a "drag, erase, copy back" defragmentation. I also seem to recall Mac OS X 10.4 automatically defragmenting files under 20 MB - perhaps turning that feature off can speed up file writes. You see, he's noticing a 6-second (or more) delay when he changes a song's ID3 tags in iTunes.

What tools do you recommend and/or use for defragmenting files in Mac OS X? How might you solve this problem beyond defragmenting?

Question: I've let Carey guess at what I bought her for Christmas for a week or two now. She's not gotten close yet. Do you let others guess? What do you do if they get it right?

My Answer: I only let Carey guess because I don't think she'll ever get it. If she does, she can open the present right then. She won't. I've only ever let people guess in the past when I'm sure they won't be able to guess.

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

I've registered a new domain name: billiardsdrills.com. My goal is to gather some billiards drills, tips, tricks, etc. and post them online for all to see. I envision something similar to The Sand Trap, but with less opinion and news. The goal is mainly so that I have a place to gather a bunch of drills, but I'm sure others will find some value in it as well.

Now I just have to work up a simple design. Probably something almost identical to The Sand Trap will do for now.

P.S. If you're a pool/billiards player that wants to help contribute, I'm willing to share any profits (ad income) with you. Just IM me.

Perhaps, it seems - and it kinda makes sense. Such an item would save me $150 (the cost of an AirPort Express) for my game room. Then again, without a CD player, perhaps it wouldn't. An ideal iPod Boombox would have:

• the option for external speakers.
• Airport Express built in for streaming from a computer.
• a built-in dock connector and a USB 2 port for an iPod (screen or Shuffle)..
• a CD player with configurable (bitrate, AAC/MP3, etc.) import capabilities to add music directly to an iPod or perhaps even stream to a host computer, as well as standard CD playback.

Yep, that about does it for me.

Question: What are your favorite two-person board and/or card games?

My Answer: Carey and I are looking for some suggestions. We own Trivial Pursuit and… uhhh… a deck of cards. And Trivial Pursuit.

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

Robin Williams on golf. One of the funniest things I've heard and straight out of his Broadway show, which you can no doubt find on DVD at Amazon.com or other such places.