lifebsideben

I was at Target the other night and went down the candy isle. Why? Because I’m a masochist. And there on the shelf is the box of Whoppers. You know, the milk-carton-sized one. Full of malted milk ball yumminess. I told myself, “don’t buy it, you’ll just sit and eat the whole thing in front of the TV!”, but before my self had finished the sentence, the carton was in my cart. It must be fate.

So, after a couple days of eating a few here, a few there (and not in front of the TV, even!) I did get serious eating them the other night. Yes, in front of the TV if you must know. At one point probably 2/3 through the box, I turned to my wife and said “hey hon, do you want some of these? I know you’re not a huge malted milk ball fan, but thought I’d offer…?” to which she slowly adjusted her glaze in my direction and replied “are you just asking me to eat a couple of those so that when you finish the box you will be able to think at least you didn’t eat the entire thing all by yourself?” Ouch. Its painful because it’s true. She just knows me WAAAAYYYY too well.

Next time I’ll ask her as soon as I crack the box open.

Tags: food

It’s been a while since I hacked up any DHTML (checking the cvs logs, a year or so since I implemented the ‘orgPop’ feature with xmlhttprequest.) Every once in a while I get the hankerin’ to mess about with client-side stuff, and the past week seems to have be the latest spurt of activity. First it was a Greasemonkey script to more-easily expose info that the work apaches are configured to inject into served pages, now it’s tinkering with prototypes of small bits of functionality for an app my team’s working on. I think I also got a bit inspired by the rollover-news-summary feature on the new Beta of news.yahoo.com, which was a nifty bit of last-minute (as in I think it was 30 mins before the beta went live) engineering by that team (nice!)

So far I’ve hacked up (with little snippets of js code from around the ‘net),

• a dynamic html table that you can add rows to based on selections in a select box (i.e., pick a new user->adds a row for that user, with columns for their attributes)
• a pair of html lists (<ul>s) in which you can click on the items, moving them between the two lists
• a textarea paired with an input box, where text entered in the input box can be autocompleted by any word in the textarea (it’s pretty slick, very gmail-email-address-autocomplete-like)

I’m pretty happy with the results, especially because I haven’t really done anything special to test for IE/Moz, and everything seems to basically work on both. I don’t know if any of these will actually make it into our project, but I hope so. The list-thingy (the second one above), however, isn’t that stellar from a user-interface point of view. I think I’ll end up arguing for paired select boxes with similar behaviors, like Matt Kruse’s Options Transfer example.

One link… since almost all my programming books/references are in storage 2000 miles away, this excerpt from JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (4th ed.) has been awfully useful. I have the 2nd edition in storage, might be time to pick up the newer one.

Tags: DHTML, javascript

I usually leave my PCs on 24/7, so I can ssh in if I need to, and let my various cronjobs to their thing, and because I’m lazy, and to do my part in keeping the US reliant on foreign energy sources. Yesterday however I decided to give ’sleep’ mode a shot on the Mac mini. Works great. Except for one thing… if you’ve got a wireless keyboard and mouse, apparently the signal doesn’t get through to wake it back up! Well, I’m guessing it’s a artifact of the wireless nature of my K&M, or perhaps it’s another part of the vast Microsoft anti-Mac conspiracy (”if we can’t get them to use our OS, at least they’ll use our keyboards and oddly shaped pointing devices! Muahahaha!”)

On the plus side, it’s not that big a deal. Tapping the power button (but it’s all the way on the baaaack of the compuuuter) also wakes from sleep. Wish I could say it was as easy for me to wake up in the a.m…

Tags: apple

GreaseMonkey rocks. But the blog for it is Blogger-ified, and doesn’t seem to have a RSS feed. Huh? You no have RSS feed, you no get my traffic. I’d like to stay up to date on the developments, but bookmarking and revisiting is so 1997. Am I missing something? Is there an elusive RSS feed hidden in the page? Feh.

I finally hit the 10,000 mark of photos in iPhoto. It’s taking about 15 seconds to load now, which I think is fairly reasonable. And what’s even better, the 5.0.2 upgrade Apple released a few days ago actually fixed a problem I had intermittently with importing photos from my Canon digital camera. (Well, it’s possible the OS X 10.3.9 upgrade actually contained the fix, as part of the Image Capture application, but whatever.)

Now if only it was speedier when moving between photos. And I’m really looking forward to the Spotlight integration in Tiger, so I can do fulltext searching against image comments, etc. That’ll rock.

While I’m on the subject of digital photos, I want to plug one of my favorite apps, JAlbum. It’s Java freeware, and creates kick-butt static HTML albums for uploading to any webspace. Super flexible, almost too good to be free. I donated to the author, so ya know it’s good. Although, I find myself doing that a few times lately, which is something strange for me considering my uber-pirate past. I guess now, my time really is worth enough that anything cool enough, or time-saving enough, is worthwhile me tossing a few bucks to the author. Not a bad trend.

Tags: apple, iPhoto, jAlbum, photography

I’m trying to figure out where to post entries when I do happen to do so, which is a pretty rare event anyhow. Here, or at 360°? WordPress pretty much kicks 360’s ass at the moment when it comes to editing tools, so I suppose I’ll keep posting the majority here. But, 360 is all Yahoorific, and more at my fingertips while working. I guess I shouldn’t blog from work much anyhow

Well, in the meantime, just a few interesting links… Mac serial number decoder–find out when your Mac was made.
As a guy at work would say, this is totally ringing the bell on the nerdometer. Some guy made Mac OS X Engineer Trading Cards. Yeah… but I have to admit his Ajax-style commenting system rocks. Pretty sweet effect, if a tad useless. Well, I like the submit-without-refresh bit, but the live preview bit is not too useful IMO.
One more: dissecting WordPress themes, seems handy.

Tags: apple, blogging, DHTML, wordpress, Yahoo

It always happens–right around April 10th each year, I realize I’m probably not going to hire an accountant to do my taxes. So it’s off to TurboTax for the Web. I’ve always been oveall very impressed with this application, I’ve used it for a few years now. This year, things were pretty simple, so it was straightforward… except for finding my new son’s Social Security number. Now, where did that card go? We looked all over the place, through the files over and over again, in the piles of mail, etc. No luck. It’s gone. OK, no sweat, turns out we can go to the SS office in San Mateo to get the number, and a new card. Enter the beaurocracy… fun fun fun. Two hours later, we actually had the number–after convincing them that the paperwork we brought was “good enough”, as we didn’t have the official birth certificate yet. Fine.

Well, during this same time, my parents were in town visiting, so I was pretty distracted from finishing up the taxes. They finally left April 15th, and when I got home from work it was time to get serious about finishing up. OK, get the paper with the kid’s social on it and… uh… where’d it go?!??! Yikes. We gave the parents some paperwork that was with that, before they left… did we accidentially give them that too? As we called them to find out, I prepared the Extension to File in turbotax… ugh… anyhow, they don’t have it. Grrr. OK, it HAS to be here somewhere! Maybe in the car? Yep! What’s it doing on the floor of the back seat? No idea. Well, at least we found it. Then the only thing left is to decide if I’m going to actually report that pittance (well, but still Real Money to the Feds, I’m sure) I made off AdSense last year. OK, fine, it didn’t affect the refund that much, might as well report it. I’m probably the only unincorporated small website owner who actually reported it, but at least my audit will be clean!

Hmm, what’s the deducation I should shoot for next year… buy a house (not likely with prices still rising in the Bay Area), or another kid (not likely if the wife has anything to say about it…) Hmm…

Tags: taxes, turbotax