Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

The awesome: I deposited my first check via an app on my iPhone today. I love my credit union. This is awesome as the closest branch is approximately 300 miles away. Since I moved to Pennsylvania, I’ve been depositing expense checks and other miscellany in the joint account for the house but I want to move away from that bank (fees, hassle) eventually. (“Eventually” is a promotion from “as quickly as possible” because they gave out tree ornaments in December that you can plant in the Spring. Yes, I’m a sucker.) I’m hoping to get all our accounts at the same financial institution so we can do easy transfers instead of writing checks to ourselves every month.

The irritating: I also had an unplanned upgrade to Mac OS Lion (10.7.2) this week. My system decided it wanted maintenance and I haven’t seen my system disks since we moved sooooo… luckily I had a copy of Lion hanging around. The Internet told me how to build a bootable disk, and, when the repair failed, I installed Lion fresh over Snowleopard. I was promptly reminded why I was procrastinating the upgrade when Photoshop (CS1), Quicken 2007 and Mouseworks (Kensington trackball software) all ceased to function properly. I found a poor substitute for Mouseworks (Trackball Works – fewer features but I could reverse my scroll direction at least). Intuit promises a rewrite of Quicken 2007 for Lion in the Spring (not holding my breath) and I’ll find another image editing program to replace good ol’ Photoshop as I use very little of its vast functionality.

The amusing: My old MacBook Pro (running Tiger, 10.5) valiantly built the boot disk as requested and tried to remind me of its loyalty and love. I keep pricing MacBook Airs, you see. I think it knows. But the MacBook is a 15″ laptop, heavy and unwieldy rather than sleek and sexy like the Air. Most of the portable functionality has already been taken over by the iPad. (Oh, iPad, you are my own true love.) However I do sometimes want true multi-tasking, a real keyboard and proper OS in my portable device. I’m big on procrastination though, so I’ll be waiting to see if Apple announces an iPad 3 this Spring. In the meantime, I’ll be moving Quicken and Photoshop to the MacBook Pro!

The horticultural, which is utterly unrelated to technology but I’m going to make it fit anyway: My little key lime tree bloomed. My tiny olive tree is doing something. The paper whites were pretty even if it was disappointing that only 2 of the bulbs produced flowers… but hey, they were $2.50 at Home Despot…

When last we heard from our intrepid thumb-monkey, Hurricane Irene was on her way…

Irene dumped a lot of rain on us. We were very, very lucky in that we only lost power overnight Saturday. Cable/internet was out until Tuesday though, which is more frustrating when everyone in the house works from home. Homes less than a mile from us were still without power at the end of the week and lots of the side roads were closed while utility and clean-up crews dealt with downed poles, lines and trees. The latest inundation of rain this week has not been helping and we’ve had some intermittent power outages. The ground has surpassed the super-saturation point and the little creeks are now rather enthusiastic rivers. I’m glad my little Clubman is a heavy car because there have been some rather large puddles in our way of late! Still, very, very lucky.

For Labor Day weekend, we hopped up to the Poconos. Last-minute travel on a holiday weekend means last-minute room availability. We stayed at a resort with an indoor water park, which was more fun than I expected it to be given I’m not allowed to go on water slides right now. There was this awesome Rube Goldberg machine apparatus with 2 water slides attached. You could climb all over, squirt water from, etc. Every 5 minutes or so, the enormous bucket up top would fill to a tipping point and dump a ton of water onto everyone below. Just awesome. There was also some impressive shopping done at the outlets. And general hanging out. The bed was terrible, unfortunately, so I probably came home more tired than I should have. Despite that, it was a lovely way to spend the weekend. From the web research to find an inn or resort with rooms to the actual experience, I’m left with the impression that most resorts in the Poconos were last redecorated in the late 80s.

Work has been busy – I feel like I’m staring down the inevitable feeling of “never going to ever catch up again.” There have been too many days of barely keeping up – being sick after Pennsic, internet outages forcing me to work from Starbux, etc – so I’m considering declaring it a wash and starting over with a clear conscience. Perhaps as soon as I get one more thing caught up…

We did pick over the bones of our local Borders the other night. The employees still seemed really pleasant given their impending unemployment. Everything was 70-90% off with an additional 15% taken off at the end if you bought more than 6 items. We didn’t have any trouble hitting that goal. I found a couple books for gifts, some entertaining silliness and a few books on topics I’m vaguely interested in but couldn’t justify without the deep discount. The Fop found more (he picked through the SciFi/Fantasy section, which I skipped) and we ended up leaving with a big box of books that we paid, overall, 23-24% of full retail for. Not bad. Of course, the savings is less impressive when you consider that most of the books are available from Amazon or the like for a deep discount. Still, some quick comparisons show us paying about half what we would have if we’d bought the books on Amazon. Now I just need to find more time to read.

Oh and…

Dear Apple,
My iPhone 3g is now 3 years old. I love it dearly but it’s really slowing down and starting to fail. Please hurry up and announce whatever it is you’re coming out with next so I can pre-order it.

Dear AT&T,
It’s been 2 weeks since Hurricane Irene. Please fix your stupid cell towers. Trust me, the crappy coverage I get at my house is even crappier when one or more of your nearby towers is malfunctioning. I’m a patient customer and all, but you are now having an impact on my stress levels.

This weekend was not as productive as I’d hoped… in part because I’m not as energetic as I think I am and we needed to work on the basement in the old house. I did get some pressing errands done. Laundry is on-going. I dumped a bunch of coffee in my keyboard, and while most of the keyboard works… I’ll be picking up a new one tomorrow because the top row of number keys all the way across to the “-” key is not working. The numbers I can mostly substitute with the number pad, but underscore, the at sign, percentages, all those good characters? Not as quick a compensation. Not to mention parentheses and exclamation points both of which I’d like to use here… I clearly started this post BEFORE the keys decided to go on strike. And I’m addicted to tabbed browsing and moving among tabs by hitting command+number, which has made for a very strange day of waiting for tabs to switch, getting irritated that all my browsers are so slow and then realizing it’s just that my number keys are borked. Le sigh.

Sadly, it was good coffee wasted too.

books, hurricane, iphone, random, retail therapy, technology, travel, weather

Bonus music today! Random Acts of Culture! The Opera Company of Philadelphia and many area choirs got together to sing in Macy’s. The organ featured in the event is the Wannamaker Organ, a National Historical Landmark and an impressive 101 year old instrument with 28,500 pipes. I love events like this and I’m reminded that I miss singing.

Tasha is snoring as she sleeps in the sunbeam on my desk. Even though she’s no longer technically a kitten (and never was, according to Monster Cat), I still think of her snoring as “little kitten snores” and, of course, adorable. The other two tails… er.. cats are sacked out on the chair.

Yesterday, I survived the grocery store! I went over early afternoon thinking that it would be less chaotic. I’m sure it was less chaotic than it will be today but the store was still rather packed. Lines were short at checkout at least! But I have everything I need to make pies and such for the holiday.

I have a rather serious book problem. Putting a book down is difficult, even if it’s not a terribly good book. I found a new feature to using an iPad as an eReader last night: the battery can run out and kick you out of your book thus making you go to sleep by 3 a.m. I think, perhaps, I should never start reading on my iPad unless there’s less than 20% of the battery power left. Sure, a real book doesn’t run out of power and cut you off in the middle of a page… but I think I might need the harsh cut-off to stop reading sometimes.

I’m not sure why I resist the holiday season up until Thanksgiving every year. I try to deny the inevitable and then, when I finally accept the holidays are upon me, it feels like there’s so little time left between “now” and the end of the year. I’m starting to consider what I’ll be baking for holiday gifts and feeling like I’m already behind. Some of that feeling is legitimate since I need to take at least 2 quick trips down to the office in VA before Xmas.

Lastly, if you are offended by the TSA’s latest, ineffective and intrusive security measure, please consider signing the ACLU’s privacy rights petition. There are better, more effective security methods out there. Let’s train TSA personnel to interview people (such as they do in Israel), let’s pay them a little more, and let’s stop taking off our shoes. I guess I’m lucky we haven’t had a “bra bomber” yet, but I’m thoroughly uninterested in being groped by a stranger or scanned by potentially unsafe technology. No, I won’t be flying this year.

books, cats, ereader, holidays, ipad, random, travel

Or “why I bought the Mac Pro tower instead of the iMac.” (Or “Carla is procrastinating her QA testing.”)

My computer might hate me if…

… I have 2 spreadsheet applications open at once.
… I have 2 full-featured word processors open and 2 light-weight word processors open simulatneously.
… I have 2 browsers open with several active web clients not to mention 25+ windows open.
… I have 2 additional file transfer applications open (FTP and Flickr) plus an IM app connected to at least 3 services.
… iPhoto and iTunes are both running. As well as Quicken.

… or all of the above.

And yet it doesn’t hate me at all. It loves me. And I love it. Yay computer!

I only have one dedicated mail client open. That counts for something right?

I do tend to forget to close things and use a lot of windows and apps at once. Though the only apps I’m really not using this morning are iPhoto, Quicken and the Flickr app.

apple, computers, multitasking

My first iPhone headset died a while back after more than a year of faithful service. I tested it with another iPhone and it was Very Dead. I bought another Apple headset but this one lasted only a few months before the mic stopped working. I could listen all I wanted but no talking. Odd. I’m not exactly gentle with my headsets but it was still surprising it didn’t last long. I began to worry that the headset port was going, but I ordered a different brand of headset anyway just in case. The new headset didn’t work with my iPhone either.

I did a little searching about just in case there was a firmware update I shouldn’t have installed or some other trick I should try to get the port to work. If I hadn’t found this page, I would have looked for quotes on repairing the port.

Instead, I grabbed my faithful metal paperclip, unbent it a bit and dug a rather startling amount of dust and pocket fluff out of my headset port. I shut off the iPhone first, of course. Then, as if by magic, the mics on my two latest headsets work! Hurray! (As an added bonus, I now have a spare, functional headset.)

So, if your microphone on your iPhone has stopped working, try cleaning the pocket fluff out of the port. The best tool for this is probably a small, metal (uncoated) paperclip. Be gentle and make sure you turn your phone off before you start poking around in there! That is all.

P.S. Yes, I’m having fun with fonts lately.

fix, fluff, iphone, mic

Because almost everything lately is about kittens, right? I think they look most like little wild cats when they’re drinking. They have this watchful look about them and crouch like little lions or tigers. There are 4 more drinking photos at the end of the kitten set on Flickr.

My annoyance with iPhoto ’09 continues. Last week it wouldn’t let me see the photo while I was trying to crop it and whether or not the crop worked was fairly arbitrary. This morning it decided it was going to crash each time I tried to view a photo. Restarting the application, quitting out nicely then restarting again did nothing to help the problem. I did what any IT professional would do in my place. I shut up and rebooted. It seems to have resolved the problem for now. I wonder what annoying little issue will come up next. There are definitely advantages to the new iPhoto – the most exciting part for me is how quickly iPhoto 09 and the new computer download photos off a memory card – but I’m finding the little glitches less than pleasant.

apple, bengals, iphoto, kittens, photographs, software

Ever have one of those, “I never should have upgraded” moments? I’m beginning to feel that way about iPhoto ’09. I’ll trouble-shoot when I have more brain but currently I’m getting a lot of images that aren’t rendering when I click the “edit” button. This makes rather difficult to crop them. But here are the necklaces I created yesterday, complete with bad cropping. They’re mostly glass and/or amber with bits of copper or silver, jet and lapis lazuli here and there. I also need to figure out a better way to photograph them.

I’m going to take my beads with me to the event tomorrow and play more. Goodness knows what will come of that, but they’ll probably keep me out of trouble… Except that Alysten brought Pixie Stix. It could be a very fun shop.
crafts, iphoto, sca, viking, viking treasure necklace

The kittens are growing quickly but there’s still quite a size difference. Tasha is also the smaller of the two kittens so she looks extra-dainty next to Monster Cat. The girls are getting more bold as well. They slept on the bed with us for a while last night. Okay, they slept on the bed with Tennyson last night and we just happened to be there too. Details. Tasha did nap on my desk by herself for part of the afternoon, so at least my piles of paper rate in the kitten world.

The Known World Pointing Things event (Rapier and Costuming classes) is next weekend! I have coordinated the merchants, wrangled most of the final details with the hotel, and built the mostly-final draft of the event booklet. I have lists and things appear to be under control, at least in my tiny corner of the event, which is, in fact, quite tiny.

If you are coming to KWAR/KWCS, there will be an A&S Exibit!

A&S Exhibit: Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the 2nd Floor Terrace. You are welcome to stay by your work or drop and run. This will be a costuming- and rapier-focused exhibit. Please come display your garb, armor, weapons, acccessories, etc. It is suggested that you have either 3×5 index cards or preprinted sheets for your documentation, as there will be a limited amount of cards available. (Rain location: outside Rosemont)

Okay, back to the geeking…
I love Pages. My 8 year old copy of MS Word just wasn’t cutting it for booklet layout so I went out and bought iWork (which I’d been planning to do eventually anyway). It’s like magic. I used an older version of Pages a few years ago but didn’t really take to it. I’m happy to announce that the application is easy and intuitive to use. I was able to layout the booklet quickly and easily. It was straight-forward to make changes to the formatting. I was able to place text and images the way I thought I should. Just a giddy experience of tools working really, really well.

Yes, I’m a bit of a giddy geek about this.

This weekend included kittens (cuteness), Boondock Saints (sequel coming soon!), Pandorum (interesting concept, forgettable movie), too little sleep (yawnness) and pies (yum!). Not bad at all.

bengals, iwork, kittens, kwar, kwcs, monster cat, movies, pages, sca, tennyson

Shameless self-promotion: I have an article up at Internet Evolution about simple tools that can be used to build teams across vast geographical divides.

Lesson learned for the week: Migrating data from one computer to another over wireless is rather foolish as it will take forever. I knew it would take forever, I knew I should just set up a spare ethernet hub… but, instead, I spent a day getting to know my laptop again. However, Apple’s Migration Assistant is an awesome thing. The new Mac Pro is laid out exactly like the old PowerMac G5 now! This is both good and bad… Good because I have almost everything on the new machine and that’s lovely. Bad because, well, now my new machine is as cluttered and busy as my old machine. The new computer would have devolved to that point sooner or later anyway, so I guess I’m efficient. Right? The new machine is zippy and happy.

Hand-woven, natural fibers: Could I do an update without mentioning the kittens? Okay, probably I could, but not this one. The girls clearly enjoy hand-woven fabrics. Their original perch and nap zone was atop a handwoven wool blanket. Now they’re snuggled in behind my sewing machine on a pile of scarves, the top most of which is super-fine merino. Good thing I have a steady source of hand-woven goods to keep the kittens happy, right Mom? At least there’s no doubt that they have excellent taste.

AUTUMN! Tis the season to wear sweaters! Fa-la-la-la-la! The-Fall-is-here! Don we now our warm apparel! Fa-la-la, fa-la-la, FALL IS HERE! Ahem. I might be a little excited about the cooler weather and impending darker months. Just a little. It’s about time. We did have a fairly mild summer, so I didn’t have to complain as loudly or as frequently about heat and humidity. I’ve made applesauce once already and have apples and pears downstairs for more cooking. YUM!

autumn, internet evolution, kittens, lessons learned, mac, migration, random, teams, weather

We picked up two little girls today. They were born July 5th and they are bengals, of course. Bengals are a very active breed so a pair of kittens was a good plan. Monster Cat may be a super-social and fairly active cat for being 7 years old, but a single bengal kitten with no other cat to harass would have driven him rather nutty.

So here the girls. Their names are still in flux. They are chilling in the guest room while Monster Cat stares intently at the door from across the hall in my office. Apparently we’ve brought some strange little creatures into the house that make big ol’ Mr. Paw nervous. Hopefully everyone will be hanging out together by the end of the week.

The photo here was processed with ShakeItPhoto, which I’ve decided is a pretty darned awesome app.

bengals, kittens, monster cat, photographs, shakeitphoto