Swiffies for...

Having been a long-time enjoyer (sic) of The McLaughlin Group, one of my few must-watch shows, I must say I've been gifted with the presence of Dr. Monica Crowley to the panel. Easy to look at and very well spoken. I'm on Cloud Monica. (the GOOD Monica)

What a journey.

A double-edged swiffie for Woot and the LeakFrog.

I was sitting in my bedroom upstairs and heard a beeping from downstairs.

The float bulb on my sump pump got stuck and the sump well started overflowing. Without the LeakFrog it would have gone unnoticed until tomorrow morning at which point it would have meant a flooded basement.

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Cloudscout
A double-edged swiffie for Woot and the LeakFrog.
I was sitting in my bedroom upstairs and heard a beeping from downstairs.
The float bulb on my sump pump got stuck and the sump well started overflowing. Without the LeakFrog it would have gone unnoticed until tomorrow morning at which point it would have meant a flooded basement.

I like having a basement, very handy. But I hate knowing that it is highly susceptible to "ruin". I want to hire welders from the Electric Boat Division to create a pressure vessle for the whole basement -- whenever the rain starts falling I would seal the hatches and pressurize the whole area. Ideally a klaxon would sound and the intercom would have the boswain shout out "rain rain rain" in the cadence of "dive dive dive"...

you work for the government, right?

What a journey.

Mayorga

I needed that.

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Mokers
Apple.

For the iPhone return process. The touch screen started going wonky (it wouldn't register input in some applications on the bottom portion of the screen). Left my apartment at 8. Was at the Apple store about 15 minutes later. Made an appointment at the genius bar for 8:30. Was out of the Grove 20 minutes after that.

More Swiffies for the same. My iPhone had been getting increasingly worse; it reached the point Friday where it wouldn't restart and wouldn't reset--it just got stuck on the Apple screen. Restoring the software through iTunes didn't help. I made an appointment for noon yesterday at the Indianapolis Apple Store; by 12:15 I was on my way with a new phone. No hassles, no questions (after confirming that the phone wouldn't complete startup), just "Sorry for your trouble. Here's your new phone."

Of course I'd have preferred that the first phone didn't go bad. But still, that's great customer service.

Ditto on the mail-in iPhone repair program.

I'm about a week into my use of CrossOver and boy has it made life a lot easier for me. It seems pathetic that I'm only using it for Internet Explorer but that's the only thing I really need it for. For my purposes, it works great and is faster/more convenient than Parallels or VMWare.

I can leave my Outlook Web Access session open for my work email and get the little alert windows and everything when new messages arrive.

I am generally not a fan of "themes" but I have to admit I am getting huge kick out of gmail's hardcore "terminal green screen" theme right down to the pseudo tty art to make up the Gmail logo:




Anybody got advice on how hard it would be to make my own css so that every page I view uses a black background, monospace font and green (or amber or gold) fonts, with only place holder for inline images that I could mouse over??? I really am feeling geeky /retro/bored...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/26/2008 01:35PM by stan adams.

body, p {
    background: #000 !important;
    font-color: #00ff00 !important;
   font-family:monospace !important;
}

That's a basic version. you may find you need to add other tags to the list to the ones that don't inherit from the body. The '!important' part means that it will override any other rule regardless of where it falls in the cascade.

Indiana University. Whoa.



I sure am glad I didn't buy Photoshop Elements 6 last week. In case you're wondering, CS4 is a freaking huge download.

I sense a create disturbance in the torrents Force, it is as if tens of thousands of trackers centered on Bloomington are crying out "pirate me"...

I get a lot of sw from the iu ms agreement. Best deal going.

I've been using 1Password for a week or so and highly recommend it. Give it a shot. Syncs with iPhone AND Palm and such.

Oh man. I was excited because Humanities at UCLA is going to get licenses for Acrobat Pro...

I know this is cursing around here, but I'm going to sing the praises for a Windows application...

A huge swiffy for µTorrent's developer. I don't think I've ever come across a more competently written application. The whole program being 263 kbytes (1 executable) it does everything one would need in a bittorrent client, all options presented in a very clean interface.

Then I tried the web interface. Since it's such a huge add on, it's a separate download, 218 kbytes. Almost all functionality of the normal application implemented via the webclient. IE6 not supported of course.

They now have a Mac client as well. http://mac.utorrent.com/

oh, guess this is intel-only.

ddt

I concur. Very competent app. Now trying to actually use torrent these days... Whole other can of worms.

Swiffies for C.F. Martin & Co.

My stepmother had a 1970 D-18. Over the years, it had been treated rather badly, and then, after she developed arthritis in her hands and then broke her shoulder (which, even after healing, made it hard for her to extend her arm over the guitar's body), suffered from years of near-total neglect, including storage in a hot and dry room. When she showed it to me a year ago, it was a mess: finish nearly gone; cracks in the top; pickguard warped, curled, and pulling away from the top; and in desperate need of a neck reset (Martins of that era do not have trussrods, but this needed more than a trussrod tweak anyway). She said she was going to send it off to Martin--as the original owner, she was still covered by the guitar's lifetime warranty--but I was dubious. This went beyond a well-loved old instrument in need of a little help; it clearly had been badly neglected, and Martin disclaims coverage of damage caused by neglect. She waited several months, then figured she'd send it to Martin anyway--nothing ventured, nothing gained.

When I was in New York back in mid-December, she showed me the result. Most importantly, the guitar was playable again--they did the neck reset under warranty. But more than that: the guitar had been completely redone. The wood had been carefully rehumidified and was no longer warped; the bridge looked like it had been reset, the cracks were repaired; the pickguard had been replaced; the finish had been--well, I can't believe they did a full refinish, but it had been smoothed out. The guitar is gorgeous. Not like-new--it still has its share of dings accumulated over the years. But what they did was just remarkable. And while it wasn't all covered by warranty, the total cost was under $300.

The best news, from my perspective: on that same trip when she showed me the pre-repair Martin a year ago, she expressed frustration that she couldn't play anymore because of the weakness and stiffness in her hands and the discomfort in her shoulder. I suggested that she look at a travel-size guitar, with a small and thin body (so easier to reach around) and a short scale (so less string tension). We went shopping together, and she happily went home with a Taylor Baby. She's been playing it for a year now and has resumed taking lessons. And she's given me the Martin.

My workplace just furnished me with a GeForce GTX285. Purely for research purposes, of course ;-)