Entries from December 2006 ↓

I think this might give me an image.

As the kids say, “TextMate for the win”.

Not sure why they say that.

This is really pretty much just a test of posting stuff directly from TextMate. I’ll have to check to make sure that

• comments are on
• pings are off
• the category is okay

Other than that, we should be cool.

It will be a dream to leave the wysi-kinda-sorta-wyg editor in WordPress. It’s not the only part of that app that needs serious help, but if you’re in it every day you start to crack a little bit. (Oh, my line-breaks are a little off? Let me just log back in and fix that. Oh, fixing that broke something else? Heh, silly me. Let me just log back in, and… so wait, that’s not a list any more? Why’d it do that?)

Images can apparently be uploaded from TextMate, too. I’m not testing that out here.

Did you ever know a person in school that was into the same kind of stuff you were into, but because that person was such an insufferable know-it-all, the stuff you had in common actually drove you apart? It’s like that with me and lifehacker.com. I should be a huge fan of the content (which is about cool useful tech stuff, as long as it’s about getting something else done, not just tech for tech’s sake), but there’s something about the tone over there that just drives me insane.

And so it goes for their year-end apps list. I would link to it, but so much of it is so good (the selections, I mean, not necessarily the writing), that I have to note some of it here.

1. Parallels. LH writes “THIS is the reason any on-the-fence switchers with cash for spendy Apple hardware and an affinity for that one Windows app will make the jump to a shiny new Mac.” She misspelled “available consumer credit”, but other than that, she’s got me pegged. I wouldn’t have even considered a Mac until Parallels came out. I don’t even use it that much (I run it on my XP box, actually, so that a very badly behaving networking app only takes down its virtual machine, instead of my whole system), but the fact that it’s there lets me explore Apple’s offerings with a safety net.
2. Google Reader. LH writes “My longtime love affair with Bloglines ended this year with a switch to Google’s new feed reader, and I’ve never looked back.” I look back kind of a lot, but I did ditch Bloglines for Google Reader. I don’t think you’d go wrong with either app: Bloglines offers single-use email addresses, has more “per-feed” options, but Google Reader seems to be up more often and has some more tools for tagging, sharing, etc.
3. Windows Vista. Ho boy. See what I’m saying?
4. Google Calendar. I am not a power calendar user. While I’m capturing more good stuff in my GTD system, and making better decisions about it all, I’m not honestly that busy. I find ways to fill the time, but very little has to be done at a certain time in my life. (At work, it’s a little different.) The point is that I can’t get myself involved in the calendar vs. calendar wars on the internet right now. Comments say that 30boxes integrates better with Flickr. Seriously? It’s a poorer calendar app if it doesn’t share photos? If you say so.
5. Hamachi. A free VPN solution that apparently works very nicely. I have been obsessing about VPN / SSH / tunneling for about a month now (I’m using WiFi at Caribou, and learning more about how you can leak plain text during a GMail / surfing session), so I’ll have to look into this. (But SSHing into a home server is working just fine for now.)
6. Campfire. If someone can sit down and explain Backpack, Basecamp, Tadalist, and Campfire to me, I’ll make them some brownies. The appeal of this stuff eludes me like owning a ferret. I am hoping there’s nothing very cool I’m missing out on, because “group chat in a browser with your coworkers” sounds like as much fun as catching your finger in a car door.
7. OpenDNS. I use this, but I am no longer sure why. It, uh, goes faster? It catches phishers (reactively, not proactively), but seriously. Maybe I was having nameserver problems with my ISP. Either way, it’s not a bad layer to throw between you and the real-deal internet.
8. Foxmarks. I can’t say either way. Bookmark syncing is a pretty hairy programming problem, but I think you’re better off throwing links into del.icio.us and hoping for the best. I just don’t sync anymore.

So yeah, overall - good list of apps that came out this year, and a couple I have to give a chance to.

Or so says Cratchit (who actually said I’m not much of a blogger “these days”, which allows us both to reflect on the glory days of blogging everything we bought, every cheese sandwich we ate, and every annoying person who ever stood in front of us in a line).

The truth of it all is that I am too much of a expectations-defying curmudgeon to really be in self-publishing. Tons of hits for cute kid stories? But I’m so much MORE than that. I am complicated. Can’t write anything else about kids until everyone else realizes how COMPLICATED I am. I will prove it, and then post more kid stories.

Okay, so here’s one: Becky wore a two-piece swimsuit for the first time the other day, and was jumping up and down from excitement, because she’d never worn a “zucchini” before. Zekini? Bikini, anyway, was what she was searching for. Christie gets very emotional about fixing these little English problems, because once they’re corrected, the kids never make that mistake again, and sometimes it seems like that’s all we ever get to keep of them. Stupid growing up.

And remember when I used to write stuff like this?

I played with the Wii on Saturday night. It is excellent and I am totally waiting for them to be actually available without waiting in line, because that’s about all it will take for me to get one. That could be because it’s the only next-gen system that’s not so hard-headed about HDTV (I don’t have one, and I’m not about to get one for video games), or maybe because they have actually done something interesting with the controller (making the whole experience a little more like being in an arcade). Whatever it is, it isn’t the internet-scribbling blog-cows who have been saying that “finally someone made a console that’s FUN, because this is about grown-ups having FUN and nothing else since the Atari has been about FUN”. If you haven’t had fun playing video games since 1985, then you’re irreparably DOING IT WRONG and should seriously consider going back to whatever else it was you were doing, if people still do that in 2006.

Yeah, those were the days.

Otherwise? My MacBook Pro is holding up pretty nicely. I need to register one of these text editors, but I’m not sure which one. Las Vegas was a blast: I hurt my feet walking around so much, but I did win the one tournament I entered, so it was financially successful. Beyond that, poker is good: barring a December collapse, I plan on paying taxes on $5000 in 2006 poker income. (That is gonna hurt.) And I’m not exactly sure what we’re doing for Christmas, despite the fact that I just sent an email out saying that the one thing we are not doing is staying up late Christmas Eve. (Which is a lot of fun, but for the next 12 years, my kids need to sleep, and sleep well, when I am not going to be at work the next day. True.)