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Question: How many loans to you have right now?

My Answer: Two. School and car. Thassit. Soon will be adding a mortgage, of course, but that's a ways off. Y'know, one to ten weeks or so. 🙂

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

It seems that since upgrading to 10.3.9 and Safari 1.3, the keyboard shortcuts cmd-1 through cmd-9 no longer work when using the number pad. They continue to work with the "top row" number keys.

Has anyone else verified this?

Question: Do you lease or buy your cars?

My Answer: I buy, but those lease offers: $209/month, $2,195 down look awfully attractive. I know that you basically never stop paying and that there are certain restrictions, but I once read a book by a financial guy who said "if you only keep your cars for five years or so, leasing makes plenty of sense and offers a bit of piece of mind. Plus, there's often no penalty for getting a new car every two to three years." My family's always bought, and I probably will continue to do so, but leasing is something I'm going to explore in a few years.

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

Question: How long do you keep a car?

My Answer: At least five to six, typically more like eight. Of course, the first car I ever owned, I kept for about a year. It was black, and that didn't go over too well in south Florida.

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

So, someone made an offer on that house we were considering. I really like the house and want to put in an offer as well. Carey's still very much on the fence about it. Thing of it is: we have an hour to decide.

If you look at it one way, we have nothing to lose. We can put in a lower offer than we think would win and, if we do win, get a great house for a great price. And if we don't win, oh well.

The whole process is very nerve-racking, but I'm maintaining a pretty even keel about it all. We're in pretty good shape and will continue to be whether we get this house or another one in a month or two. Interest rates are slowly ticking up, so there is incentive to jump now rather than later.

Carey and I will be talking in about 30 minutes. If we want to put in a bid, we'll be meeting our buying agent back at the office later tonight to put together a bid. If we pass, well, I think we're going to go to some open houses on Sunday.

Question: Do you like the name Bonjour for Apple's former Rendezvous?

My Answer: Sure. It will be interesting, however, to see how badly people mispronounce it. 🙂

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

In no particular order:

• Rent history has little or no bearing on a mortgage. You could pay $1500/month in rent and apply for a mortgage that costs $1000/month and it won't matter one bit.
• Paying rent does not positively affect your credit rating. Making $1500/month payments for five years won't matter. But if you slip up and they have to collect a few bucks (typically after you leave and a security deposit doesn't cover the repairs), it can cause problems.
• Marks (late payments) stay on your credit report for seven years. Have your credit report checked before going in and clear up any incorrect marks.
• If you can't rectify it with the company, you can file a credit grievance with the credit bureau.
• To anyone who is self-employed and looking to buy a house within two (tax) years: do not deduct anything. Don't deduct your rent as an expense, don't deduct office equipment. Just scrimp and pay regular taxes on everything on which you can afford to pay taxes. Mortgage brokers look at net income and don't care if you wrote off $500/month ($6,000/year) for your home office. Kinda sucks, but it's true.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 656); »

The Sand Trap has a few top-level categories that stand alone. It also has a "Tours" category with PGA, LPGA, Nationwide, and a few other sub-categories. Same is true of the equipment main category and its sub-categories Clubs, Balls, Apparel (etc).

I'd like to delete the "Tours" category, which has no articles assigned to it, and promote all of its sub-categories to top-level categories. When I try to delete the "Tours" category, I am told:

Are you sure you want to delete the 1 category? When you delete a category, all entries assigned to that category will be unassigned from that category.

OK, that seems fine… but what happens to the sub-categories?

I wonder if I can renew .Mac for the special "limited time" price of $69.95? If I can, I wonder how I would do so. Has anyone done this? I can't seem to do it through .Mac, and proceeding partway through the checkout at the online store indicates they'll send me a box (which has a code to "activate" .Mac).

So are renewals not possible? That… kinda sucks.

Question: As a follow-up on yesterday's post, today's question is this: how will you prepare for Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4)?

My Answer: I'll do my nightly (and complete) backup. Then I'll probably just install it right over 10.3.8. When problems arise in a few months, maybe then I'll do a clean install. But right now, I've got too many third-party libraries and frameworks and things installed to mess with doing a completely clean installation.

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

Question: Are you ready for Tiger?

My Answer: You bet!

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

I wanted to modify the Atom feed with some HTML, but that breaks validation. Here's a sample:

<content type="text/html" mode="escaped"
    xml:lang="en" xml:base="<MTBlogURL encode_xml="1">">
<p><MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml="1"></p>
<p><a href="http://nslog.com/" title="Visit NSLog();">Click</a></p>

I thought it should work. It defines the type, after all, as text/html. Instead, feedvalidator tells me "Undefined content element: p". Hmmmm.

The MovableType default template is:

<content type="text/html" mode="escaped"
    xml:lang="en" xml:base="<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>">
<$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$>
<$MTEntryMore encode_xml="1"$>

Any ideas? It's probably something silly, and when someone gives the right answer I'll smack my forehead. Video available to the person who gets causes such a reaction. 🙂

This one's for me, of course: embedding images inside the source of a HTML page. Might be an interesting way to send HTML email without attachments, too.

Somewhere, somehow, I missed the whole "CF-Lite" thing…

CF-Lite, the Darwin version of Core Foundation, is a subset of CF that does not include some functionality available on Mac OS X. However, it does contain the data structures used for managing common application objects - such as strings and numbers of various formats - which are of particular interest for cross-platform projects.

Pretty interesting! I may just have to play around with that…

Question: This one's making the rounds, and it's as valid a question as any: are you a hider, a closer, a minimizer, or an Exposér?

My Answer: A hider. I rarely minimize windows - except for Finder windows - and the apps in my dock are the ones that are always running anyway. Everything else I quit when I'm done. I may launch Photoshop five different times per day, but I don't keep it in the dock.

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