NSLog();

The LAN party went off without a hitch: we played a whole helluva lot of Quake 3 and a few games of 4x4 Evolution at the end. Good stuff. I held my own in each of the games, which I suppose is saying something given that I never play on my own.

We wrapped it up at about 4am, and I napped a few hours before waking up. Put the tower/router/display back in their places and began connecting things. I was amazed at how simple it was to hook everything (about twelve USB devices, and seven or eight Firewire devices) back up - especially the wonder that is a "single cable for USB, power, and video," the Apple Display Connector (ADC).

One problem: the machine wouldn't boot up. Wouldn't even turn on. Solution: remind myself that the power cable is, indeed, necessary. Problem solved. Switched locations, ran last night's cron jobs manually, and here I am: a bit tired, though not nearly as dead as the many times I was fragged last night.

Going to Rob's house for a LAN party tonight. Woo woo and woo. Should be pretty fun. Games on the list include 4x4 Evolution, Quake 3 (plus some serious mods), and, uhhh, okay so maybe that's all. Maybe some Jedi Knight II? We'd play Unreal Tournament, but gee, when's it come out for the Mac? Grrrr.

The biggest question on my mind right now? Which mouse do I take? I guess it's gonna have to be the Kensington wired mouse. The Logitech will just be too much of a pain in the butt to set up. My PowerBook is going to be the server. W00t (or whatever they say).

I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow. But I've really gotta get some work done then too. Uh huh, like that'll happen…

Following this conversation, I've added a comments feed. This is not the same as adding comments to my existing feeds, of course. You can subscribe to my "comments" feed at this URL: http://nslog.com/comments.rss. Putting it in a separate feed prevents my articles from showing up as "new" again in certain RSS aggregators.

Of course, adding a feed meant I had to add a button for it. The "RSS Comments" button is with the others, bottom left. While I was at it, I added a GeoURL link, and since that left me with a little hole in my otherwise nicely organized "button area," I filled it with a link to my favorite person's site. Hope she doesn't mind… If the red one is missing when you come back later, assume that I got in big trouble! 😉

Update: I've posted my current comments feed template.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 507); »

Question: If you could take back any gift you've given but now wish you hadn't, what would it be?

My Answer: Anything and everything ever given to Danielle. I've given bigger gifts than people have deserved in the past, but I don't regret those. Danielle, I regret ever even giving her the time of day.

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

Question: If you had a bust of yourself sculpted, where would you place it?

My Answer: In the trash. In a closet. In the basement (if I had one). Maybe I'd hollow it out and plant flowers in it in the yard. Those smelly flowers rabbits don't like, so they are scared away from my lettuce.

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

I really, really like Objective-C's [square brackets] method of markup (whatever you wanna call it). Some of the people in this OSNews article are bitching and whining, but odds are, in my experience, they've simply never done much work with Objective-C.

Which, I ask you, would you rather deal with:

someObject.createConnection(mySocket, 12163, 28800, myClient, NULL);

or

[someObject createConnectionToSocket:mySocket onPortNumber:12163
    atSpeed:28800 withClient:myClient andExtraHeaders:nil];

I know I've got a lot of Mac users reading this site, and so they may be partial to Objective-C, but can anyone honestly give me a good reason for liking the first over the latter? "Fear of the unknown or strange looking" does not count.

I previously put two of my sites on this blog's virtual auction block, but only received offers (and plenty of them) from people whom I did not trust to maintain the content of the sites in an adequate fashion. Thus, I've not sold the sites yet.

New plan: give each of the sites away to individuals who will do what they can to keep and preserve them, with the catch that they give me 25% of all profits (from ads or whatever) until $2500 is paid (discounts if you want both). The sites are still AppleScript Central and Sound Set Central. They're still very very popular, and they're still the same sites that have netted over $50,000 in ad sales in the past three years, $18,000 of which was last year (Feb 2002 - Mar 2003).¹

Contact me via email or AIM (iacas) if you're interested.

¹ Edited to add that "last year" information.

Just quoting this Billboard.com article about Apple's "rumored" music service.

"Label sources tell Bulletin that the service is an a la carte download store -- not unlike that of rival Liquid Audio -- that is built into Apple's iTunes player. No subscription is required for the service, and tracks are expected to retail for an average of 99 cents. Once purchased, tracks are transferred to the consumer's iTunes music library and are automatically synched to the user's iPod portable player.

Content can also be burned to CD. Credit-card information is stored on file in the store's shopping-cart system so the consumer does not have to re-enter the information for each purchase. The offering is expected to be made available initially only to users of Apple computers.

Some people have said that a buck a track is a lot. After all, fifteen songs = $15 and that's the cost of a CD, but you don't get the actual physical media, you don't get the liner notes, you don't get the album art, etc. I'll wait to give my opinion, if I ever do, until "rumor" becomes a bit more than rumor.

Chris backhandedly asks how you pronounce GIF in a recent entry. I'm inclined to say that most of the time, I say it with a hard G. After all, it stands for Graphics Interchange Format, not Jraphics. Plus it's not peanut butter.

However, when I say it in a sentence with the word "JPEG" I almost always say it with a "j" sound: "jifs and jpegs." How about you?

Thanks John. Guess I can knock that one off my "Top 10 Safari Issues" list soon.

I just got done reading about my screen so this OneWord is a bit weird. I'm also thinking of screening potential candidates for a job, something I just went through, and Daria screened calls while I wrote about Survivor from her house due to Interland's issues. Screen doors, you see a lot of those in Florida, and entirely screened in porches. "Florida porches" they are called, I think, or patios actually, I'm not sure. Screening calls, pests, and ICMP packets, that's my life.

This 60-second entry was brought to you by today's word from OneWord™.

Ahh, salvation! Thanks to a MacInTouch¹ post, I can disable the touch-sensitive buttons on the front of my Cinema display. I don't know how many times I've accidentally put my computer to sleep by brushing the power button. If you hold down command and shift when you open the "Displays" system preferences item, a third tab is enabled.

¹ I only began reading MacInTouch again recently when they got an RSS feed. Good for them.

Interland was having routing issues for awhile this morning.

[7:49am iacas@Gaia:~] % ping nslog.com
PING nslog.com (64.226.43.134): 56 data bytes
^C
--- nslog.com ping statistics ---
712459 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

Oddly enough, my neighbor (Daria), using the same ISP and the same connection (but a 24.* IP, while mine at some point in time was bumped to a 68.* IP) could see my server just fine.

And so we begin another episode of Survivor, one day late because someone forgot to let me know when she got back from dance so that we could do our normal "party" thing, even though Gabe is still up in NYC. Let's just jump right into it, shall we?

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 1920); »

So I had this great idea to write about how engagement rings were sexist and all, and I whipped up a draft (albeit a pretty bad one) of an article. Then I met Jamie at work and mentioned it to her, and this got her wheels going, and she beat me to it. So then I mentioned to Daria my thoughts on Jamie's post, and my own, and Daria went home and commented on Jamie's entry!

But hey, far be it from me to let those two ninnies¹ steal my thunder. What thunder you ask? I haven't a clue, but if you find it, let me know. Without further ado, and certainly without talking to anyone else about it, I now present to you my take on engagement rings.

Note: Somewhat major edits made today, April 25, to more clearly explain my point of view.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 1281); »