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Question: What's the longest you've ever gone without having Internet access in the past five years?

My Answer: Eight days - the past eight. Ugh.

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

For now, at least, I have an Internet connection at home. Only 2800 emails to wade through (though no doubt about 2000 are spam). I'll resume posting things here soon.

I'm back to my apartment. I have power (three of the five buildings in my apartment complex do not). I have running water (and it is safe to drink). However, I do not have an Internet connection. I am at a friend's house now posting this… My apartment complex was not badly hit - some trees fell to the ground, but that's about it.

I apologize for the comment spam that has no doubt crept into my blog's feed.

I'm heading over to Clearwater, FL. There's this big spirally thing headed this way. Wish me luck…

I said I wouldn't blog about political stuff, but this is just ridiculous enough to make me want to point it out. I still remember that it was Dubya who helped Microsoft get off pretty damn easy in its antitrust trial.

Kerry is nothing like Apple. If he were, he'd announce cool new policies, tell us they'd be available within three weeks, and then make us wait for eight or nine months. Instead, Kerry simply fails to announce any policy (or, apparently, show up to vote on other people's).

Oops, I slipped. 🙂

I've signed up to be an iTunes Affiliate. Heck, if for no other reason than I can save myself a nickel for each song I buy, right? You can sign yourself up at http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/.

Currently, I'm waiting to be approved. The signup process is rather lame and through another company named LinkShare, which, if you look, has what appears to be thousands of other affiliate programs.

I would greatly prefer a system that does this:

1. Ties into your .Mac account (or your Apple ID, the same one you use to buy stuff in the store).
2. Had the option to simply build a credit with the Apple online store.
3. Was completely handled by Apple, transparently.

The confirmation email had broken URLs that don't relate at all to iTunes. They work after 30 mins or so and they're just links and banners that refer people to join LinkShare.

It's a very kludgy process. Kludgy != elegant, which is what we typically expect of Apple. I have no idea how I'm going to link to specific songs, but the idea I had was to link my "currently playing iTune" (right sidebar) and my iTunes list to the store. They do so currently, so, I may as well try to make a nickel now and then. Or, as I've said, save a nickel. 🙂

We'll see how it goes. So far, I'm not impressed.

It seems that I can't get ahead. I've successfully weaned myself from Coke - cold turkey - but consoled myself with ginger ale and Sprite/7-Up. They lose the caffeine but still have "high fructose corn syrup." I've tried green tea and don't care for it much, but I have enjoyed these Arizona drinks. Guess what the #2 ingredient is? High fructose corn syrup!

What am I to drink? I know that "water" is always the correct answer, but I need something with a little more kick than water + lime or lemon flavor. I'm going to go back and re-read the comments left on the Coke article I linked to above.

Even as a developer, we sometimes forget some of the cool features in our own applications. Today I had to remind myself that cmd-D toggles the linked content and the feed content. Ah, what a great feature! 🙂

Three cheers for cmd-D, even if I'm the only one that uses it (I suspect I'm not). I'm now off to find some of the other features I've long since forgotten about…

Question: What is your bedtime?

My Answer: It used to be 2 or 3am, but now I talk to Carey at about ten and go to bed at about midnight. I wake up at 6 or so and then read for an hour before coming out. Flint is usually awake at seven, or I'd read a little longer. 🙂

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

PulpFiction (and PulpFiction) lite have advanced another minor version. They're now both at 1.0.2. You can grab them here. The changelog is rather significant. The highlights include:

• Added French and German localizations.
• Subscriptions diplayed in alphabetical order in the menus.
• Subscriptions can be added with no windows open.
• Preview pane and web browser respond to cmd-= to increase font size.
• Added support for 301 codes.
• Fixed the bug that caused the incorrect number of unread article.
• Fixed the status bar's unread count for folders that contain subfolders.
• Fixed a bug that caused articles to appear in the wrong folder at fetch.
• Improved the rate at which new articles are added to the article list at fetch.
• Set forward delete and backward delete to act in opposite directions in the article list.
• Set subscriptions to check when first added.
• Added in EFF Donation Drive donors.

This was primarily a bug fix and localization release. The full changelog is available in the extended entry, for those who care to look at it, or at the FSS site.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 646); »

Grab one here. The one Bare Bones has "chosen" to use with BBEdit 8.0 is just plain rank. Uggggh. :: shudder ::

Question: What do you think of the new iMac G5?

My Answer: I don't like how they look. I don't like vertically-mounted CDs. I think they look rather ridiculous.

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

Question: What is your favorite text editor?

My Answer: Does the previous post answer this? BBEdit. Oh, and on the command line, I use the entirely-too-simple pico. vi or emacs? That's what BBEdit is for! 🙂

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

BBEdit 8 is now available. I'll amend this post later with thoughts. The multi-document-in-one-window idea looks good, though.

What's new?

Text Factories look good - but I'll have to get into them. I work on so many different kinds of files that I don't frequently find use for the glossary and some other things, but perhaps I'll be able to work Text Factories into my workflow.

Unicode support is finally there for real, unlike we saw in 7.x

Preview Server support looks interesting, and if it's pulled off properly, is quite lovely. I'm probably still more likely to use this AppleScript when working on my site(s).

CSS Tools get a big yawwwwn, but the Built-in HTML Tidy Tool and the HTML Syntax Checker look like very welcome additions. The enhanced unix integration is also welcomed.

The Documents Drawer is, in the end, something I'm probably just going to dismiss. Adium does it right with tabs, and there's a Windows app I'm thinking of that uses tabs all along the bottom (the name escapes me - EditPlus? EditPro? Something like that?) quite effectively as well. A really tall drawer takes up too much of my screen real estate with unused white pixels - just as OmniWeb's stupid drawer does. This is a big bust to me. I've been waiting for something like that Windows app for awhile now.

Oh, and the icon is rather hideous, too. I liked the old one more and have reverted to it.

Beyond that, well, it's the same good ol' text editor it always has been. I probably use about 5% of its features, so, don't listen to me on the topic. 🙂

I've got a remote control helicopter for sale. It's the same one I wrote about here:

Raptor 30 v2 (49 Ball Bearings) Kit
  w/ OS.32 SX-H Motor and Muffler       $399.99
ProPod Training Gear                      59.99
Sportsman Flight Set                     299.99
Crash Kit                                 59.99
Futaba 9C PCM Radio w/servos             519.99
Futaba 401 Gyro Kit  w/servo             189.99
KSG Balance Kit                           42.99
"Ray's Authoritative Helicopter Manaul    24.99
$80 Goodie Bag                            -----
-----------------------------------------------
Total (will arrive end of next week)   $1597.92

All of the equipment is either new-in-box or was taken out of the box to begin assembly (the helicopter is partially assembled). I was working on this helicopter as part of a Discovery channel television show that, if you'll pardon the pun, never took off.

$1000* or best offer. Contact me via email (click my name in the right sidebar) or AIM (look for the AIM button in the sidebar) if you'd like to know more or make an offer. I'm ready to ship immediately. *$1000 is a steal and will pay for 1/2 of the moving van back to PA.