NSLog();

On July 21, I'll be heading back to Erie for a few days. Originally scheduled to return on the 27th, Expedia (grrrr) screwed up the booking. I'll now return on the 29th at, ugh, 6am or so. The purpose of my trip back? Five letters: C-A-R-E-Y.

Yes, things are going swimmingly! I'm in love, Carey is in love (with me, I think…), and we're trying to plan out some of the things we're going to do while I'm up there. We may head up to Niagara Falls, we may go to the Cleveland Zoo or to a Pittsburgh Pirates game (I've never been to the "new" stadium).

It's amazing, this whole "in love" thing. I'd forgotten what it felt like, having last fallen in love eight years ago, and it's refreshing, revitalizing, and re… uhh… really great. I liked Carey a lot back in high school, but I love her now. We've named our kids, we've picked out our homes (window shopping on realty sites), we've talked about how to raise them, how to stay together, how to have fun.

I feel like sighing now, so, ahhhhhhhhhh…

Steve Rubel wonders why there aren't more Apple bloggers. It's a fairly deep question, and one with which I am uniquely familiar having been almost fired for penning this post at 8:04am when the official announcement didn't come until 11am or so. Never mind that the store had been announced in Billboard, the LA Times, Wired, and other magazines and newspapers a week in advance.

For example, as several commenters have pointed out, it's a curious thing that David Hyatt can not only blog, but he can blog about unreleased, unannounced products, features, bug fixes, etc. He didn't blog about Safari's RSS capabilities, but he's talked quite openly about things he's fixed in Safari or WebCore/Kit. He's blogged about the underpinnings in unreleased (but announced) software (Dashboard), and he's done it all without unnecessarily endangering Apple's ability to innovate.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 514); »

Today I had to rebuild (or repair) my Entourage 2004 database for the fifth time after warnings came up while I performed a search. Each time I rebuild/repair my database, the categories (and thus colored labels) I've assigned to my folders disappear. Some random emails appeared or re-appeared after the rebuild as well, some as far back as July 8.

Furthermore, rebuilding the database markes every recipient as new, which greatly screws with Sync Entourage-Address Book. The script is awesome, but clearly Entourage puts itself at a major disadvantage when it can't even manage itself properly.

I have three POP accounts, all of which delete the mail on the server. I have only about eight or nine rules, and I use a SpamSieve rule after the first three (which no spam will ever match). I delete most of my mail and have about 1,500 emails maximum. In other words, I'm really not stressing the app too much.

Entourage 2004 may well be the flakiest email application I've ever used.

Question: Should the winning league of the All-Star game get home field advantage for the World Series?

My Answer: I say yeah, give those boys a little more to play for.

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

1. Create a smart album in iPhoto 4.0.1
2. Make the criteria "Title contains abcxyz123" (or some other such nonsense, including a valid title)
3. Observe that iPhoto lists every damn photo in the "smart" album.

Seems to work fine for some people, though.

Completely having failed to find any inspirational shooting range websites (or bowling alley sites, which I figured would be similar in content and presentation), I've struck out on my own and created a pair of mockups for the Palm Beach Shooting Center. A plain text Web site would be better than their existing one, so, I can't do any worse, but I encourage feedback and criticism:

Mockup 1 and Mockup 2

The .psd, should you wish to submit feedback or ideas by mucking around and sending the file back to me, is available at this location (3.3 MB, and if you're reading this page at some point after July 20, 2004, it most likely will have been deleted).

I'm shooting (pun intended) to get this mockup done by Friday. No work will be used without permission (and, depending on the terms, some form of payment or acknowledgement). Comments will be used free of charge. 🙂

I was going to say something clever about this, but I think the image below says it all for me.

Soon as I see Quality News, I'll pay for it. Until then…

Question: If polls showed Bush and Kerry dead even, and terrorists threatened to disrupt the elections, who do you think would win?

My Answer: I think that Republicans tend to have a bit more of a "stick it to them" attitude and would thus not be as easily scared away from the polling stations. Of course, I have no polling information. I do find it rather interesting that Florida was called for Gore and voters were told that the polls had closed an hour before the election was done (8pm, not 7pm), but how people can estimate that such happenings cost Bush 6,000 or more votes is beyond me.

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

Josh says that my TrackBacks aren't working. I recently updated the blog to MT 3.0.1D, and if TrackBacks aren't working, well that's just disappointing.

I'm also using MT-Blacklist, so, perhaps the issue is a compounding one. Please attempt to TrackBack this article (feel free to TrackBack asking or ruminating about MT-Blacklist if you'd like) so that I may test this out.

Thanks.

Update: A new version of MT-Blacklist has resolved the issues (I think).

Question: How many bookmarks do you have?

My Answer: I've got about twenty in my bookmarks bar in Safari (naming them "1" and "3" and "R4" and "Int" and so on saves a lot of space). I almost never look at my actual bookmarks… so I effectively have only twenty.

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

Chris' entry at decaffeinated.org led me to create this, my own blogging output infographic:

Can you guess which entry accounted for that large spike in early June, 2004? 😛 I've got 1895 entries totalling 345,307 words so far. The template used to generate this for importing into Excel is quite simple:

<pre><MTEntries lastn="10000">
<MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%d">	,<MTWordCount>
</MTEntries></pre>

There you have it. Works great in MovableType 3.01D, anyway.

Justin points us here. Funny stuff. 🙂

Who gives a flying fuck? Seriously!?!

The democrats have nice teeth. Y'know, except when it comes to fighting a war, during which they seem to have none.

Must be dentures.

I'm so sick of politics being "this." Where is a chart depicting the top 100 issues affecting Americans these days, and a sentence or two explaining each candidate's stance on them? Kerry and Edwards have yet to take any stance whatsoever, and the few they've taken they change nearly every day.

This election is quickly becoming two things: 1) a joke and 2) voting for the evil we know rather than the evil we don't know.

I'll be voting for Bush come November, it seems.

Snippets from Florida's "Justifiable Use of Force" laws:

776.06 Deadly force.--
(1) The term "deadly force" means force that is likely to cause death or great bodily harm and includes, but is not limited to:
(a) The firing of a firearm in the direction of the person to be arrested, even though no intent exists to kill or inflict great bodily harm; and
(b) The firing of a firearm at a vehicle in which the person to be arrested is riding.

For whatever it's worth, we now know what "deadly force" is. Another subsection deals with LEOs (law-enforcement officers) and wouldn't apply to civilians. Next we move into the two main ways in which a civilian may use deadly force: to protect themselves or others (emphasis is mine):

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Question: How far off were you?

My Answer: Apple sold its 100,000,000th iTune to Kevin Britten of Hays, Kansas at approximately 1:30am EST on July 12th, making Paul Mayne the winner (I believe). I was personally off by about four days. At 10:15 when Carey called me tonight, the counter read 99,854,889. Aaron Linville finished in second, and I won't disqualify Paul for guessing twice: I'm just counting his first and only guess within the allowable dates.

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