Coveting

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Okay, so I just checked out screenshots and Quicktime movies of xScope (hat tip: Stopdesign), and I’m really wishing I had a Mac right about now.

Apple Macbook (white)

Other reasons I want a Mac include (but are certainly not limited to): Coda, Quicksilver, and VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop—no need to toss any of my Windows software! Add to this the simply stunning hardware and UI (visually and intuitively) not to mention the fact that Apple is widely known for their general designer-friendlyness (be they of the web, graphic, or video kind), and I’m really salivating.

Sony Vaio (wenge)

Except, I’m torn. I also love Ubuntu. I love the idea of free (as in freedom) software and am in particular agreement with Mark Pilgrim about proprietary file formats, and Mac is honestly no different from PC in this regard. Plus, I recently found the perfect machine to run Ubuntu. The price is right, the specs are more than enough, and the color and texture make me think Ubuntu would be right at home. From a hardware standpoint, I could see myself enjoying this computer as much as I would enjoy a Macbook.

I’ve been coveting laptops for a couple years now, and it may be another year before I finally get me one, but I’m dreading having to make the final decision between Apple and Ubuntu. What should I do? End mark

Solitaire

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I’ve been a fan of Solitaire card games ever since I was a kid. Klondike is my old favorite, of course, but FreeCell quickly became my game of choice after I learned to play it about five years ago.

I’ve had on my Treo for some time now a collection of 50 Solitaire games called Smallware Solebon, but only recently stumbled across two of them, Eight Off and Beleaguered Castle, that have really struck my fancy. Both games are variants of FreeCell (or perhaps FreeCell is a variant of one of them?1), but each has its own twist that makes it fun to play.

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  1. I just learned from Wikipedia that Eight Off may be the earliest form of the game, from which variants like Baker’s Game and FreeCell are descended. [↩]

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

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I’ve mentioned before on this blog that every year my church, Southeast Baptist, has a combined evening service with our sister church, New Pilgrim Baptist, the Sunday before Martin Luther King Day. The two churches take turns hosting the service, with whichever Pastor is visiting providing the sermon. In addition to special music and preaching, they always have someone prepare a 10-15 minute tribute to Reverend King. This year’s tribute made mention of King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which was interesting to me, since the Desiring God Blog also quoted a section from that letter earlier this week.

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Weepies eBay auction

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One of my favorite music groups, The Weepies (who I’ve blogged about before), is auctioning a ’63 Fender Vibroverb Reissue amplifier1 they used to record their Say I Am You album and on the road during the subsequent North American concert tour. The cool thing is the proceeds from the auction will go to Free Arts for Abused Children, a charity group that uses the arts to provide healing for abused and at risk kids.

And if this isn’t cool enough, they threw in a little bonus and announced they’ve recorded a new album! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Say I Am You and Happiness, and can’t wait to hear something new from these fantastic musicians. They haven’t divulged the album’s release date, yet. As far as I’m concerned it can’t come soon enough. End mark

  1. The amplifier wasn’t really made in 1963, hence the word “reissue” in the model name. It was really made somewhere between 1990 and 1995 and is a replica of the classic ’63 model. It’s still a cool amp, though. [↩]

Back

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I’m back from my little internet break. I was talking to a friend just the other day who had no idea I was even gone because he reads the site in his feed reader. I had briefly considered putting up an actual post back in September for that very reason but never got around to it, so I apologize for that.

In case you never saw it, on about September 14 I had placed a notice at the top of the page that said:

I’m going cold turkey from the Internet (other than for work, school, and FellowSites). I’ll be back on November 1. Cheers!

Sorry I didn’t say more about my break, but I really needed to just quit everything and didn’t have time to explain. The scientific community is still up in the air about whether Internet Addiction is actually a classifiable disorder, but if anyone has it, I believe I do. It got so bad a couple months ago that I needed some intervention.

So I did what I had to do. As I said in my site notice, I still used the internet for work, school, and FellowSites. Everything else, though, including my feed reader and all my social networks, I really did quit cold turkey. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an occasional visit to Wikipedia or Answers.com, but for the most part I stayed away from everything else and didn’t touch my feed reader once during the six weeks I was “offline”.

So, here we are in the first week of November, and, as promised, I’ve cautiously returned to the interwebs. I’ve finally approved the handful of MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn friend requests I received during the break (thanks everyone for your patience) and caught up on reading all my close friends’ and family members’ blogs. As soon as I can figure out why Trillian is acting funny I’ll be signing back on to the major instant messaging networks. I’ve set up my feed reader again, but kept it pretty lean this go around. I don’t intend for things to get as bad as they were ever again.

When I was thinking about taking the break, a friend remarked that it can take six weeks to form a new habit. I think I succeeded in developing some new behavior patterns and intend to continue practicing them. In other words, I think my break was successful.

One thing I did miss quite a bit during my break was blogging and sharing things with all of you. I read a few good books and had a few noteworthy experiences during the break, so you can definitely look forward to more updates here in the coming days and weeks. End mark

Assembly line

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This production line, built entirely from Legos, builds simple Lego cars without any intervention from the user other than selecting colors at the beginning of the process. This heavily utilizes the new Lego Mindstorm Robots, of course, which come with development software that makes them programmable. Sheesh, kids these days.

My setup: YubNub

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YubNub logo

I’ve blogged before (here and there) about keyword searches in Firefox. Keyword searches are great because they allow you to perform searches right from your address bar. Simply type your keyword (e.g. I use g for Google, a for Answers.com, wp for Wikipedia, &c.) followed by search terms and you’ll be magically whisked off to your search results. You can set up your own keyword for any site by right-clicking in any search bar and choosing “Add a keyword for this search” from the context menu. By setting up my own keyword searches, I’ve completely eliminated the need for the little search box to the right of my address bar, and, in fact, have removed it from my browser altogether.

Recently I discovered a service that takes this feature to the next level. YubNub, as the service is called, bills itself as a “(social) command line for the web,” and boy does it deliver. You can try the service out right away by going to the YubNub website, but it really becomes useful if you set it up directly in your address bar. I’ve got my Firefox address bar functioning as a YubNub command line, and I’ll mention later a few ways (and what I think is the best way) to do that. But first let me tell you more about the service.

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Tumbletown Tales

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The wife and I were channel surfing the other day and stumbled across the strangest show we’ve ever seen. It’s actually not a whole show, per se, but rather a short segment of a children’s program called TVOKids developed for TVOntario Canadian public television. The segment, called Tumbleweed Tales, is meant to teach kids simple math concepts, but the funny thing is that it’s performed entirely by small rodents (with character dialog performed by the hosts of TVOKids).

It’s probably best I stop explaining and just let you watch. Let me know if you find it as entertaining as we did.

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