Rand Wacker

So I’ve been getting up too damn early lately and working the late night shift in the cold dark. Unfortunately my office isn’t directly heated, so it gets a little cold. I can bundle up most of my body just fine, but my hands get pretty damn cold (shocking surprise for Alexis when I do get back in bed).

Someone should make a heated keyboard, and maybe a warm mouse. Something that would radiate a little warmth to keep the digits pink would be really useful. I guess I could just work directly on my PowerBook, as it vents heat directly through the keyboard, plus that would have the benefit of warming my lap at the same time!

I need a new IM aggregator for my OSX box. I was happy with Fire for quite a while, but then I broke out and stared using iChat for my AIM sessions because it’s interface is so well integrated in to OSX. Then, recently, Fire’s Yahoo support stopped working. So, now I’m using iChat for AIM, Yahoo Messenger for Yahoo, and Fire for MSN, ACK!

Any recommendations?

LiberalOasis: Bush in 41.2 Seconds

As a visual piece of irony, whenever I’m talking about anything relating to the Cult of Apple I’ve CAPITALIZED LITTLE PHRASES. When I wanted to go to MacWorld so I could bask in THE GLOW OF STEVE I was disappointed that I probably wouldn’t be one of the few chosen that would get to hear THE WORD OF STEVE (keynote address), etc, etc. The basic premise is that I now understand all of my Mac-rabid friends over the years who chanted, “Apple is good! Steve is our saviour!” and while I agree with them mostly these days, I hope I can give myself a little reminder whenever I’m speaking out of dogma.

So yes, thank you Apple, thank you Steve. I’ve seen the light, I understand the power. But I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep A MIND OF MY OWN.

I was a little taken aback yesterday when I was bored in a meeting and pulled up Sherlock (fantastic OSX Web Services Information tool). I typed my name in to the Phonebook applet (power by Switchboard) and it immediately pulled up not only my phone number but also my address. Eeek! Now, I’m usually the first to say, “well, that information is available in many places, online access just makes it easier to find,” but I’m also the first to tell the phone company to withhold such information from the general public (and I thought I had). What I think happened is when we moved last year, they reset our preferences to hide our address in the phone book, and so it got published and pushed out there. Yeah, this does kind of suck, I’ll stop telling people to stop whining.

So, anyone know of a good way to scrub your information when it’s already escaped like this?

Finally! Someone put WiFi coverage in to SFO, and lucky me, it’s T-Mobile, my favorite a la carte wireless data provider (GSM/GPRS/WiFI). Looks like the entire airport is hot, but not quite extensive enough to reach in to the planes sitting at the gates.

So I’ve been running SnapperMail on my Palm Tungsten T (no keyboard) for the past couple days, and I’m addicted. I used to think that being able to use WebPro to look up addresses and directions from anywhere was useful, but being able to carry your email in your pocket is frickin’ fantastic! Just from a “using those dead moments” perspective, it’s great to keep up on the mindless banter my friends are always sending back and forth. Even though I don’t have a keyboard on the unit, Graffiti is just fine for writing quick notes (a compact thumboard that works with the T would be very cool though). Having SnapperMail automatically fetch mail every thirty minutes makes it all brainless and instant (although a multi-threaded app that could do the networking in the background would be most welcome).

I’m heading to Boston for a couple of days to attend some interesting Anti-spam workshops and conferences (MIT Spam Conference on Friday). Thought I’d mention it in case any of you lurkers are out that way…

I’m giving ecto a try, the evolution of the Kung-log blogging client for OSX. So far it looks pretty solid, but I’m a little worried about a tool that uses an entire preferences pane for transparency settings…I guess it’s THE VIEW OF STEVE.

BattleGround - The Trailer