Last night, geeks congregated at my place to eat meat.

Laura made the world’s best salsa. Finally, after much coercing, Daniel, Dori, Chris, James, and Robert showed up.

The result was to be expected: James repeatedly shot himself in the toe, Robert tried to play with James’ gun, and there was a general argument over whether IPX/SPX sucks more than TCP/IP.

The only casualty was an unfortunate [and very ugly] insect.

Does your top-of-the-line Pentium II 233Mhz machine beg for the the high-class ghetto look?

Upgrade its case to Lupo.com’s Boxmaster manufactured cardboard case!

Sorry, -nese only. English translation, anyone? Bueller?

A common irritation for me, while moving files from one folder to another, is having to stop the move in order to open another Finder window. Springloaded folders help a bit, but not much, and only for immediate transfers. They don’t help at all for moving files to a folder that hasn’t been created yet –“woops, I forgot to make that folder!”

That said, XShelf is freaking awesome. Go get it now.

Today, I experienced the Interview from Hell.

I applied for a job via AJC yesterday, and an hour later an HR rep for the company called me. She said the interview would take 30 minutes, and to be there at 9 AM.

When I got there at about 8:45, they herded me and 60 other people into a very small room, and gave us an application to fill out, and a huge test.

Tonight Laura and I were at Ruby Tuesday’s, and I saw this sign on the wall.
It was one of those old ads that some designer bought for fifty cents at a flea-market and sold to the restaurant chain for $500.

It was for “Mule-Hide”.

I immediately thought of some type of cream for a mule.

You know, to hide it.

“I say, Jim, that mule of yours is pretty darn conspicuous! You need some MULE-HIDE!!”

If you’re one of the unlucky few who’ve had problems with your iPod battery, you can buy a replacement iPod battery from iPodBattery.com.

Laura had some weird problems with her iPod. For some reason iTunes wouldn’t update the play count of songs that she’d listened to after she installed the newest iPod software. I wiped and reinstalled the software, and now it works fine.

I find it interesting [and highly suspect] that the RIAA is suing a college kid for billions of dollars — money he will never be able to repay — when there are bigger, meatier targets available.

For years, NetIQ has had a product called MP3Check. MP3Check does just what Dan Pheng’s “wake” application did: it indexes a LAN and lists all the available MP3s.

So why isn’t the RIAA suing NetIQ for billions?

One of the drawbacks of having a transparent Apple Pro keyboard is that when a bug somehow crawls into the shell of the keyboard, you can see it, twitching. The bug, not the keyboard.

After a few minutes of banging and futile attempts at debugging my keyboard [HA!], I’m left with a very dead and very visible bug, right there, in my keyboard.

I could disassemble the keyboard and remove the insect, but in some small way I find it grimly satisfying, as if my keyboard is some horrible machine that feeds upon the souls of dead insects.

In OSX, certain apps, including Safari, have access to the ‘Summarize‘ system Service.

Summarize provides a fairly accurate way to create short summaries of blocks of text.

A test sample, from Matt Rossi’s site:

Indeed, modern evolutionary theory is very respectful of the power of death. After all, in that theory it is death that prunes and directs the otherwise boundlessly chaotic, mutable explosive flow of life. Death is the mechanism of selection, death the means by which certain mutations are deemed fit to survive and be passed on to future descendants. The tension between the urge to procreate and the possibility of dying before passing one’s genetic information forward to be combined and developed is what, according to Darwin and his disciples, helped create that massively diverse biosphere in the first place. Taken still further, there are schools of thought that regard evolution as punctuated by bursts of sudden adaptation which may well be explainable as the influence of sudden drastic shifts in environment placing additional selective pressure on life…in essence, the death rate goes up because a rock falls from space or continental drift changes the climate, and as the deaths pile up the remaining life forms are pared down to a few hardy forms, which then explode into new forms as soon as the playing field is stable enough to be exploited. Whether you view life as a closed cycle that can only bear so much before necessary collapse or a fractal with the potential to expand indefinitely, it’s clear that death provides a necessary service in simultaneously producing fodder for future expansion and allowing room for new development by carving stagnation away.”

I’ve just moved the site to MoveableType.

Lots of things are broken.