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

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

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

I just did a bunch of app updates in iTunes and was presented with the confirmation dialog box so that I could reassure Apple that I’m an adult. I wonder if I was confirming I was 17 or over for the BlackJack app update or the complete works of William Shakespeare app…

From Yahoo’s Odd News File:
“French commuters ran head-on into a local political stand-off after feuding towns redirected road markings to leave two busy one-way streets facing off against each other.” I think this is a brilliant ploy – everyone work from home and save the planet! (And let their clever political machinations fall flat.)

Astrolabe for iPhone:
Yes, you can now get a fully functional astrolabe app for your iPhone. Need to navigate at sea using only the stars? There’s an app for that. Need to do complex astrology computations quickly? There’s an app for that.

Knitty Bag:
There’s also an app for keeping track of which knitting needles (and crochet hooks) in what sizes you have. (It also includes a handy glossary of knitting abbreviations.) While I don’t need an astrolabe, I think I might need this app.

Perfectly Clear:
I’m curious to try this app out though the $2.99 price tag makes me a little hesitant. The purpose of this app is to clear up and brighten up photos taken by your iPhone right on your iPhone. This is a great idea! However, the photos from my iPhone don’t actually come out as dark as the example shots shown on their website. Perhaps they’re just using dark examples for emphasis. Has anyone else tried this app?

Postman:
I bought Postman before Pennsic and had a great deal of fun using it to send digital postcards to people. It lets you share via e-mail or a variety of photo sharing and social networking sites. I found it incredibly easy to use and a deal at 99¢. I do wish it saved the postcards by default when you sent them (you have to actually tell it to save a copy to your iPhone’s photo roll). There’s one example of a Postman postcard I made to the left and another here. You can add text to the photo part of the postcard as well… not to mention play with a bunch of themes.

ShakeItPhoto:
My next fun iPhone app will probably be ShakeItPhoto – the digital Polaroid simulator. Nisaa has been taking some fabulous shots with it (see her flickr set). I am looking forward to playing with it – totally 99¢ worth of fun!

apps, astrolabe, french politics, iphone, knitty bag, miscellaneous, perfectly clear, postman, shakeitphoto

Happy First Day of AUTUMN! Welcome Fall! YAY! (I got 6 million mosquito bites while taking that photo.)

Endangered Words ALERT! Dictionary compilers are discriminating against obscure words! The TimesOnline has a list of words due to be culled from the next edition of the Collins dictionary and I’m sure there are other dictionary editors feeling the crunch. What I find counterintuitive is that editors are inclined to remove the most obscure words – these are the very words for which we find ourselves going to the dictionary!

Apple has recalled the iPhone 3G UltraCompact adapter. According to the recall notice, the prongs may break off in an outlet.

According to the Consumerist, there are 10 critical skills to have now that the economy has tanked. #10 is Food Preservation, which was on my list next anyway. I like #8 as well (Learn a Second Language). #4 is Cooperation, another key skill we all should have learned in kindergarten but seem to have forgotten sometime during the dot-com boom. It’s a very practical list – check it out.

dPS has an awesome tutorial up explaining how to make digital photos look like Lomo photography. I need to find time to follow the instructions.

My congestion is finally starting to let go. My voice is still a bit off. I feel like I have most of my brain cells back. After a week of congestion, sniffles, sneezing and general unhappiness with my head and sinuses, I’m rather happy to be feeling so well.

apple, economy, english, iphone, language, photography, random, recall, technology, writing

We visited the Apple store last night. I bought the latest Apple Keyboard. It’s going to take some getting used to. The keys are smaller but spaced the same as a standard keyboard. This gives the keyboard a sleek look as each key is framed with shiny aluminum – the frame is not quite flush with the top of the key but it’s close enough that typing is definitely a different experience. It also means there’s less room for sloppy typing, in my case at least. I’m also noticing that my fingernails are a little long as they glance off keys. I like the action of the keys and it’s a quiet keyboard as well so I’ll definitely adjust. It’s nice to have my volume and iTunes commands back on my keyboard. As an added bonus the “help” key has been replaced with a “function” key so I can accidentally hit it all I want without invoking the stupid little “helpful” creatures.

I got an iPhone earlier this month too. It’s fun though rather anticlimactic since they’ve been around over a year now. I did not wait in line for it, which was of course a requirement. I didn’t wait in a line last year to buy Will’s, I wasn’t interested in queuing up for my own. I like the little apps. I particularly like that it serves as both cell phone and iPod on short trips at least. We’ll see if the battery can manage longer trips. The screen is lovely, the headset that came standard in the box is good enough for me, and it’s a pretty cool toy. 3G was definitely worth waiting for. Edge is doable, but 3G is tangibly faster and very usable. I am a patch behind because the next update requires iTunes 8.0 and I’m not quite willing to do that yet. I need to rearrange some files first. My primary hard drive is nearly out of space. Again. Big video files are not helping my cause apparently.

apple, iPhone, keyboards, technology, toys

UserFriendly provides today’s comic-to-share of the day. So very true. There’s such an addictive quality to Blackberries that sometimes it’s hard to let go.

Which is why I don’t have a Blackberry.

I did get a new phone last week though! I have a new Samsung a737 with orange racing stripes! (The racing stripes make it faster! Okay, the 3G network support makes it faster, not that I use it.) I blew through the last of my roll-over minutes in January and February making a new plan with more minutes necessary. Since this landed me with a new 2 year contract anyway, I took advantage of the opportunity to get a new, mostly-free phone. My old phone was starting to behave badly after almost 2 years of vaguely faithful service, so it was probably time anyway.

I like my new phone. It’s orange. It’s also a slider phone and locks itself (well its keys) appropriately. I think it’s slightly bigger than my old LG flip phone, but not so much that I’ll actually notice. It still fits in my little cell case so I’m happy.

Yes, my criteria for cell phones are very basic. I don’t care if it does six million cool things. I want it to work as a phone and fit in my pocket. The orange racing stripes are a great bonus though.

Eventually, I will get an iPhone. Probably when it has 3G support. (Because I don’t need my phone to surf the web but when I do surf the web from my overpowered phone, I’ll want it to be fast!) There’s no discount on the iPhone when you renew a contract, so I can keep waiting.

In other news, it was almost 70 degrees out today. With the sun hitting my windows and the door closed, it hit 78 degrees in my office this afternoon. Fun stuff for early March. I’m not going to get winter this winter, am I?

smartphones, iphone, user friendly, weather, heat, cell phones

Too many interesting links this week… time to corral them into a neat list! They’re really really random this week. I blame the heat.

Weather Happiness: It’s a beautiful day today… meaning that when I went outside to take these photos this morning it wasn’t 95° F already nor was the sun glaring down with its angry rays. This made me really quite happy. Other things that make me happy include my cat, my car’s starter getting replaced under warranty, and the fact that the guest room not only looks like a room again but will probably get a coat of paint today.

In all seriousness, I’m happy for the gray, dark morning and brighter gray afternoon. I got enough sun and heat yesterday!

Gardening and the Evil Vine of Doom: Yesterday after work I spent about 40 minutes clearing the Evil Vine of Doom. The EVoD is a trumpet vine that got out of control and tried to eat the garage. And by eat the garage I mean completely consume it with its ever-spreading greenery. The vine was covering most of the side and half the roof when we tried to remove it 2 years ago. I cut it down to the ground first. Then the roots got pulled and dug up.

Alas, this didn’t work. This vine has running roots… and those roots run along the side of the garage and into the corner behind the rhododendron. It comes back each time I pull it up. Hence its moniker as the EVoD.

So I’m letting the trumpet vine eat the corner of the fence but I’m trying to keep it from devouring the garage again. I planted my rose bush approximately where the vine had started so when the vine tries to come back, it hangs out with the rose bush. Unsurprisingly, I procrastinate weeding, especially when it’s hot, so the rosebush and the trumpet vine were rather intertwined. My wielding yielded a garbage can full of EVoD and a lovely view of my rosebush.

I also took a bunch of indoor gardening photos which I’ll post separately because… well… I can.

Philly Mayor in line for an iPhone: On a random note… slyppi just sent me this great link to Philadelphia Mayor John Street sitting in line for the iPhone. On one hand, go him for doing it himself. On the other hand, if he’s not filing for the vacation day, I hope he gets caught. Yes, the mayor of the 6th largest city(formerly 5th and boy are they sad to have been bumped by Phoenix!)… right, let’s start over. The mayor of the 6th largest city in the U.S. is spending his Friday sitting in the rain for an iPhone.

Oh wait! In an update on Philly.com: Street’s place in line is being held by an unidentified male aide. Street sounds a bit defensive though, don’t you think?

Before he left at 11:30 this morning – he was third in line of about 15 people waiting – he defended himself and declared:

“I’m taking care of my business. By 4 a.m., I sent my first e-mail to my chief of staff. I was doing my job while the city was sleeping. I have my Blackberry with me.”

[...]

“How can you sit here with 200 murders in the city already?” [22-year-old Larry West of Mount Airy] asked.

Street announced that “I’m doing my job.”

Perhaps it’s just the sleep-deprivation making him cranky – Street got in line at 3:30 this morning. But seriously, what was he thinking?

Edit: Hanging out on the sidewalk at 3:30 a.m. is an excellent way to get shot in Philadelphia, regardless of location. There were better ways Street could have done this that would have made him look good rather than make people question him. This would have been a great opportunity for positive PR!

evod, gardening, gardens, iphone, john street, murder, philadelphia, philadelphia mayor, photographs, photography, roses, trumpet vine, yellow