Blog Notes 11/28/2005

Posted on November 28, 2005

>> We got a dusting of snow this evening, combined with a touch of ice. I found out tonight that the way to the apartment is pretty much all uphill. Hills + Cougar x Snow = No Bueno. Meanwhile DB is probably living it up with 80 degree weather, and bikini babes on each arm. I guess I should be thankful that I don’t live in the middle of the state, where they received a big-assed blizzard.

>> Friday night I went to Best Buy to see if RAM sticks for my laptop were on sale. A few weeks ago when I checked they had them for around $75 apiece. Friday night, the same stick, a Kingston PC27000 512 mb stick, was $199. That’s nearly three times as much as what it was selling for. I was blown away. I went back tonight, (looking for something else) and saw, again the same Kingston stick, for fifty dollars. I snagged it up for the iBook. Makes you wonder how many people got screwed on Friday. When I got home I installed it. Everything is definitely nice and snappy, now that I’m running at 640 mb. Now I just gotta figure out what to do with the 256 mb stick I pulled out.

>> As seen in the Miniblog (over on the right, scroll down a little, below the Moblog. I love the nifty things I can do with K2 in Wordpress), The I Love My Mac song is a song dedicated to how much this girl loves her Mac. Of course, it was made in Garage Band. Granted, the song kinda sucks, as does everything else she’s made. It all suffers from MIDI quality music, and karaoke quality vocals. But still, she loves her Mac.

>> Fox is cancelling Arrested Development. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s the best show on tv right now. It was almost cancelled after the first season, despite winning 5 Emmy awards, and at the end of the second season, it was unsure until mid-summer whether or not it would be returning for a third season. It did, albeit moved to Monday night. Apparently the move didn’t garner it much ratings. Perhaps because the move was stupid. The kind of people who watch the show are the same kind that watch The Simpsons and Family Guy. Instead, at 8:30 we get The War at Home, a show which many people switch away from for half an hour after the Simpsons and until Family Guy comes on. I would not be surprised if they moved it to Monday night with the intention to kill the show, so they can use the poor ratings as an excuse. Who knows though, maybe it will be saved again. The remaining unaired episodes that have been produced will begin showing up in December.

• Official Fox Site
• Balboa Observer-Picayune An Arrested Development Fan Site
• Amazon has the season 1 and season 2 DVDs for 32 bucks.
• News on the cancellation
• Overcompensating on the cancellation

>> The other day at work, I won a pie-eating contest. I had to eat a regulation sized slice of pumpkin pie, including crust (I hate the crust) in less than the previous champion’s time of 54 seconds. I did it in 30 seconds exact. I rock. Kyle came in second place at 48 seconds, and Katie in third with her 54.

>> There’s some more links in The Family block on the right. I’ve set up the podcasting site anew, as well as the forums, a whole new gallery (for my non-moblog pictures), a wiki that I’m not sure what I’m going to do with yet, and a calender using a nifty tool that imports from my iCal settings. Now you can see what I’m doing when I’m not around.

It’s Black Friday

Posted on November 25, 2005

Black Friday (so named because retailers are hoping that on the day after Thanksgiving, the big push to begin Christmas shopping will send them from the red and into the black) is today. Named the biggest shopping day of the year, mostly because they tell people that it is so that they feel obliged to join in, I’ve never cared all that much to partake, mostly because to me the benefit of “Sweet Home Alabama” on DVD for $4.59 or a $60.00 13″ TV doesn’t really outweigh the cost of queuing up outside of a ShopKo at four in the morning in below freezing temperatures and facing the dark side of consumer humanity, greedy and selfish enough to draw up thoughts of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. The basic idea behind this is that if the retailers lower prices on key items that are annual gifts, such as TVs, DVD players, cameras, movies and games, and so forth, to a point sometimes at or below cost, in the hopes that the herded cattle will be buying everything else at normal “sale” prices, creating a long tail, to use one of the popular buzz words created on the intarwebs. A rising tide lifts all boats, as it were.

But anyway, Shelby woke me up at 3:15 this morning, so I could go with her to ShopKo and stand in line and freeze and face the acrimony of shrewish housewives and gawkish gamers all looking for their dream deal. Being as I essentially live across the street from a mall, I got to drive past Circuit City at four in the morning. The parking lot was quite literally full, and there was a line nearly a quarter mile long of people hoveled outside. Nerds have neither jobs nor girlfriends to tie them down; therefore they have the freedom to set up tents and sleeping bags in a long queue. I imagine a long line of McDonald’s wrappers and empty Mountain Dew bottles left behind after today. Fortunately ShopKo was not quite as bad, only twenty or thirty people there. However, by the time the doors opened up at five, there were nearly 200 waiting outside. And 45 minutes in the thirty degree pre-dawn weather pretty much sucks. (Words fail me to describe that, so I’ll leave it so.) I stood behind a couple of nice Vietnamese fellows, and to my rear two women who had arrived seperately but knew each other. One was in her forties, and the Christainly housemom type, the other was around 30, and kinda cute. I chatted with them for a bit and they seemed nice enough, at least until someone tried to cut in line, at which point a flood of bile and f-bombs spewed forth from the elder’s mouth.

Finally five am comes, and the doors are unlocked and everyone rushes to the door. Quite literally a big “push” forward as two hundred people move in unison to move through a three-foot wide portal. It doesn’t work so well. Families are seperated quite quickly as people grab their trolley and literally run through the store looking for the cheap stuff. Arguments break out as people fight over who was there first for the 15 dollar toaster oven or the 25 dollar DVD player. I opted to stroll casually, occasionally stopping to switch songs on my iPod. I didn’t really find anything I wanted, too. I was really hoping to find a copy of We ♥ Katamari, for the PS2, but they didn’t have any. And the only Futurama DVD they had was fifty bucks. Those normally retail from $32 to $40. So I passed on that. Shelby ended up getting some bedsheets and a food processor or something, I didn’t really look. This is when the third act comes into play. After lining up outside the door for 45 minutes, rushing around the store in a mad dash for 20 minutes, finally you end up waiting at the checkout registers for another half hour. And trust me, in my case I found out, the people behind you really hate you if you don’t end up buying anything. Dirty glances abound.

All in all, I would say that the trip was far from worth it for me, though I wish I had snapped pictures. I also wish I had brought a Super Soaker for spraying down nerds lined up outside of Circuit City, but that’s kind of away from the point. I probably won’t be doing this again next year, unless of course my credit limit is raised by then.

It’s Friday Again

Posted on November 25, 2005

Which means it’s time again for the Friday Random Five. Who doesn’t love music posts?

• Kinky - My God is so Quiet | A good funky start to the list
• The Decemberists - Shanty for the Arethusa | A very dark and stormy song from one of my favourite bands. This is definitely from their old-timey naval phase of musicking.
• Antonio Pinto & Ed Côrtes - Funk da Virada | No iTunes link on this one, for some reason they have the remix album but not the original City of God soundtrack. But another funky Samba-tinged tune, great for driving with the top down.
• Lovage - Lifeboat | A mid-tempo sexy song from the indie-metal/jazz-rock/alt.hip hop supergroup. Jennifer Charles is so f’ing hot.
• Stevie Wonder - I Wish | Stevie is the master of good jams. And this song is no exception, as a tribute to back in the day.

There ya have it. As usual, the list was made using the party shuffle feature in Apple’s iTunes, and all links to songs open up in iTunes, so you’ll need that to check the songs out.

New Address!

Posted on November 24, 2005

We’re moving again, so redirect yourself to http://jwiltshire.org. I’m still on the same hosting services (thanks to the kind and sage DB of the world-famous White Roof Radio), but I wanted something that suited me. And what suits me better than my own freakin’ name? So head on over to http://jwiltshire.org, dammit.

Six Apps that I Couldn’t Live Without

Posted on November 23, 2005

These are six great programs, either freeware or cheap shareware, that I swear I couldn’t go without. All but one of them are Mac only, but I don’t care. I know my demographic.

• Transmit is an ftp program for the Mac, and in fact, is the ftp program for the Mac as far as I’m concerned. I’ve tried the free/open source programs out there, like RBrowser Lite and Cyberduck, and neither one offered me the functionality nor the look that Transmit has. Granted, it is a little pricey at $29.95, but it is well worth the expense. It’s a program that has been essential to the production of my sites. Panic Software
• Textpander is a handy little app that sits in my menubar and waits until I call it forth. The idea behind Textpander is simple. I have big chunks of text i need to type out every now and then (my address, bits of html code, etc.) that I don’t want to have to type out every time. So with Textpander, I can save it with a codeword, and when I want that chunk of text to come forth, I type the codeword, Textpander picks that up, and spits out the big chunk that I wanted. Makes things go by a lot quicker. Peter Maurer Software
• NetNewsWire is the best RSS reader ever. I’ve tried a lot of different ones for Mac, and a few for Windows (back in the day, yo) but none of the stacked up to the simplicity of NNW. I have around 130 sites that I subscribe to at any given moment, and so keeping them clean and organized is a chore. But NNW does all that for me, letting me organize them into folders and smart lists, as well as subscribing to search engines, del.icio.us tags, and even track changes to a local file on my hard drive. Capital idea! Ranchero Software
• Wordpress is the software on which this site is built. It’s open source, meaning anybody can make changes to the structure, add plugins, and do any wonder of things to it. I highly recommend it to anybody who is looking to blog. And best of all, it’s free! Don’t have webspace to run it? They’ve just opened up the gates for wordpress.com, meaning anyone can get in on the goods. If you want to blog, try it out. Wordpress
• Quicksilver does it all. It works as a simple launcher. I just hit cmd+spacebar and a little window appears. I can then type in the name of a file or an app that I need, and it finds it as I type, and then launches. But it does more. It acts as a calculator. It can send a bit of text to a new email and sent it off for me, or even attach files. It can launch a Unix command in a new Terminal shell for me. It can control iTunes, send messages via iChat, launch a webpage in Safari, or find a phone number in Address Book. And trust me, it does a lot more. Blacktree, Inc.
• ImageWell is the last app up. It is a basic image editor that crops, resizes, adds a watermark or a border, and uploads via ftp to a remote website. It’s handy because, you know, I don’t want to always go through the process of opening Photoshop just to crop and shrink a picture. And the ftp feature is a killer addon. If there’s a picture on one of my blogs, odds are I uploaded it using Imagewell. Xtralean

Yabba Dabba Doo

Posted on November 20, 2005

My favorite comparison between OSX and Windows XP yet: It’s not that Windows is bad. It’s just a lot less stable, a lot uglier, and a lot slower. I came to the conclusion that using a Windows computer, is what The Flinsones did. And a Mac is what The Jetsons have. It’s years ahead of the Windows OS.

From Josue, who has just joined the Mac fold. Welcome.

Why Chili’s Restaurants Suck

Posted on November 20, 2005

Short version: I had one of the worst restaurant experiences there.

Long version, commence! First off, I know, it’s Chili’s, so it’s not like I should expect Spago or something. But the girlfriend and I had never been, and when we were trying to figure out what to do for dinner, a commercial came on so I decided what the hey, I’ll give it a go. We show up, and naturally I get the rock star parking spot right up front, ‘cuz I’m a rock star and all. So I’m thinking good start. Go in, get a seat, and wait a few minutes for the waitress to show up. I ask if they carry Amstel Light, because the cocktail menu is labeled into sections like “Yumm” and “Mmm” and such, and I don’t know which one beer falls under. Score one for Chili’s menu designers. The waitress doesn’t know, so she’ll go find out for me. She returns to tell me that they do, but they don’t have any, so I order a Bass instead. This seems to confuse her, but she manages to find out that it really is a beer and brings me one. She then goes to get my girlfriend’s drink, a glass of chocolate milk that ends up being slightly warm. But I digress.

We order our appetizer, fried cheese, aka mozzarella sticks. The girlfriend orders a sirloin cooked medium, I order a ribeye cooked medium rare. Sweet deal. At this point we haven’t gotten waters, so I ask the waitress, and she brings them. Some other guy brings us our fried cheese. I note that the marinara sauce is better than Applebee’s, which always tastes watered down to me. I’m a pretty fastidious guy (how’s that for a fancy five dollar word?) and I like a lot of napkins; we don’t have any so I got up and went to the wait station to get some myself.

Our food arrives, again delivered by some dude, not our waitress. This is one of my pet peeves. The girlfriend gets a sirloin, medium rare. I get a sirloin, cooked medium rare. But I’m not fussy, so I dig in anyways. It is then that I notice the butter they put on the steak. This nasty lemon-butter-ass concoction that almost ruined the whole steak for me. Fortunately I was able to push it off the side before too much damage was done. But seriously, it was nasty. The french fries were pretty good, I even ate them without ketchup, which to me is a sign of a good french fry. The mash potato would be best described as “crufty”. It’s got a hardened outer shell, and some dried up burnt bacon bits on top. Yea, it sucked too. We decided not to get dessert.

Bad food, worse service, and that crappy chain restaurant atmosphere (although it did not look as though an antiques shop threw up in there, which I will give them points for) basically adds up to me never going there again. Seriously, it was worse than TGI Fridays, and I hate TGI Fridays.

News Hottie of the Week

Posted on November 19, 2005

Up this week, Barbara Martinez of the Wall Street Journal. Lately I’ve been finding CNN’s news coverage to be taking a turn for the sensationalistic, and to be quite banal, so I’ve been watching more and more CNBC. Hence the post about Maria Bartiromo a few weeks ago. CNBC was also how I found this hottie, who is a staff reporter for the Journal. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, she got a job as a copy editor before she even graduated cum laude from NYU with a degree in journalism. She has founded and worked for a number of programs and funds to help minority and low-income high school students who take an interest in journalism. She and a few of her fellow reporters visit her old high school a few times a month to help journalism students put together a school newspaper.

Single of the Week

Posted on November 18, 2005

Stealing an idea from Paul over at guapacha.com, I’m going to post up a weekly single from iTunes, a song that I rather like, and want to share. So here you go. The first single of the week is actually by a cat I went to high school with, who after going through a few bands that split up, is now touring as Show is The Rainbow. Experimental would be a good way to describe it, as would post-ironic glitch-punk hip hop. Yeah, I like that, I think I’m gonna keep that. Anyway, here ya go.

Show Is the Rainbow - Keepers of the Sand

Friday Random 5

Posted on November 18, 2005

In an effort to get more content on here, and get back to regular posting, I’ve decided to, every Friday, post up five random songs from iTunes, whatever comes up in shuffle. The only exceptions will be books/spoken word tracks, and those sort of things. So let’s give it a go. All links open up in iTunes.

• Juanes - La Paga
• The Urge - Frying Pan
• RZA - The Grunge
• Descendents - When I Get Old
• Cousteau - The Last Good Day of the Year

Well there you have it. Those are all great songs (the last two being particular favourites of mine) so check ‘em out. Good day.

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