Check out the new “unofficial” beta release of Adium, complete with a Brushed Metal theme.
After tabbed message windows, the next best thing about Adium is that it supports overriding background colors and fonts. Since I prefer a nasty green-on-black terminal-style message window, people using official AIM clients tend to squeal in pain when I message them.
Another wisdom tooth is gone from my head. I’m very disturbed to be losing chunks of my skull, but it had to go, as it had grown in slightly crooked and was stressing my other teeth. The whole procedure took about ten minutes, and afterwards I felt a lot better than I did a few weeks back, when the tooth started bothering me.
If you’re in the Atlanta area and are looking for a good dentist, Dr. Ken Berger is very good.
For those of you shopping for a new home: if you are considering purchasing a “Home Buyer’s Warranty” on the appliances in your new home, stop now.
Home Buyer’s Warranties are a scam.
The contracts come with so many fine-print loopholes, 2-10 will almost never have to pay a dime when it comes to fixing anything. In my case, the deductible cost about the same as repair visit would normally cost. The repairman took one look at my oven and suggested I replace it, due to the inner lining being rusted out. 2-10 refused to pay replacement costs, because they don’t cover damage “due to rust, within the first 30 days of closing.”
And we’re finally, mostly, moved in.
Rather than spending eight hours and risking permanent back injury, Laura and I hired movers. They got the job done in about two hours, and were well worth the expense.
The house is still filled with boxes and neither of us knows where things are, but I’m sure we’ll work that out soon.
This morning we woke up to 50F temperatures, colder inside the house than outside. After much obscenity, I realized that yes, I really was lighting the pilot light correctly, and no, the pilot light simply wasn’t going to stay lit. A call to a repairman confirmed that the ‘thermocoupler’ had failed. A few hours and $80 later, we had heat again.
Starbucks is the devil, and here’s proof!
Yea, verily, and I will bow down and suckle Her brown nectar from Her quivering black teat.
Japanese scientist has a working prototype of Ghost in the Shell-style “transparent” clothing. It uses a video camera and LCD fabric to display a rough image of the scene directly behind the wearer.
And the floors are finally done.
I think that refinishing floors is one of the key motivators for people to get higher-paying jobs. After refinishing my own floors, I can tell you that, next time, I want to be able to pay someone else to refinish them for me.
I am now the proud owner of my first house.
And I am so tired.
In the last 24 hours, Laura and I have ripped up carpet, ripped up carpet tacks, removed tacks, sanded, stained, and we’re still not done with the floors.
Beth drove all the way from Boaz, AL, to help us, because she’s special, and also because I was holding her old computer for ransom. Hopefully we’ll be mostly finished by tomorrow night.
I’ve found some interesting new apps for OSX:
Fugu: After months of looking for a nice, free Secure FTP client [or one that doesn’t nag the hell out of you while you’re trying it out], Laura linked me to this nice freeware front-end to the SFTP and SCP command-line apps included in OSX.
Celestia: This is a Mac OSX port of Celestia, which is a free real-time planetarium that renders objects in gorgeous 3D. With it, “you can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across.”
Just in case, here’s a list of default passwords.