Week before last, the AC went out.

For those of you not living in Atlanta: this is a crisis of Biblical proportions. Even in April.

I called around, on a Sunday, and A Guy to come out and look at it. He mumbled something about leaks, and about the age of the AC unit, filled it with coolant, charged me $180 and left.

Three days later, the AC was again blowing tepid air.

Wow.

.kkreiger is amazing.

It’s a very nice-looking FPS, and the whole game is less than 100Kb.

No really, the whole game takes up less space than this webpage, and it’s really cool.

Here‘s a Tom’s Hardware article about it.

Yes! Apple just released iTunes 4.5, which includes a lot of new features, the most important [to me] being the ability to make Smart Playlists that include other Smart Playlists.

What I’ve been doing lately is creating two playlists: “Top 4GB of songs, rated 3 or higher, not played in 2 weeks, sorted by rating”, and “Danger!!”, which is 2GB of completely random stuff [and in a library of 18000 songs or more, it’s really dangerous].

I very much recommend that you take some time and read An Island To Oneself, by Tom Neale.

Neale lived alone on a tiny Pacific island during the 1950s and 60s, by his own choice.

Thanks to Marc, I found an old friend, Matt Herston, and his band, Franchise.

They’ve got a few songs posted as MP3s, so go have a listen. The site’s hosted by Geocities, so please conserve bandwidth by posting mirror or Bittorrent links in the comments.

In case you haven’t heard: Rasterbator is really frickin cool.

Basically, it takes a regular-sized image and inflates it to a giant rasterized pdf mural, made of big dots, spanned across a huge number of regular-sized printed pages.

What a perfectly inappropriate use for company-owned office supplies.

My third-day impressions about the MINI:

I’ll preface by saying that my trade-in was a 2000 Ford Escort ZX2
automatic.

A lot of people have complained that the MINI is too loud for long trips, that the ride is too rough, especially on run-flats, and so on. I haven’t noticed any of that, probably because my senses were dulled by four years of Ford Escort. possibly not, though, because Laura noted how quiet it was inside the car with the windows up. Bumps that were very jarring in the Escort are still noticeable in the MINI, but only on an ‘informational’ level — it doesn’t feel like serious structural damage is taking place when I drive over a small pothole.

Here’s how to generate and use self-signed certs for use with AIM.

You know, so you can exchange secure, encrypted instant messages with your mom about your sister without risking government spook agencies eavesdropping.

Joseph left voicemail a few days ago: “Circuit City has nice 19″ CRTs for $60 after rebate. Go get one.”

I’ve been wanting to have 2 monitors for a while, since dealing with 2 computers via a USB KVM switch is a hassle, but I’d been stalling for various reasons, including not wanting to disassemble parts of my desk. Still, a $200 monitor for $60 was too good a deal to pass up, so Laura and I sped to Circuit City.