Yojimbo, which has become my Mac OS X choice for the management of my todo list and transient information on my work machine, was updated to 1.5 today. (Anyone know of an application like this for Windows?) I haven’t spent much time with the update yet, but the biggest update in terms of day to day use seems to be the addition of images as first class assets in the Yojimbo database. It’s really an excellent application for the management of transient information like notes, web archives of articles you want to read or passwords and serial numbers. (Those last are really not transient information, but it’s usefule to have them in an application that you have open all the time.)
In related news, I have been testing out Together, an application which is somewhat similar to Yojimbo, for the last few days. It's got a different approach to the storage of the items, and I honestly like it's UI a bit more than Yojimbo's currently. I imported all the items in my Yojimbo database in about five minutes, and I was off using it. Since it doesn't support .Mac syncing like Yojimbo, I set up some Chronosync scripts to copy the application, it's preferences, and the directories where it stores it's data to my 160Gb iPod, and to sync this stuff back on my laptop and Mac Pro. It's a somewhat tough call as far as which of these two apps I will end up sticking with long term, especially with Yojimbo being updated. Together has a few annoyances, and there's no user community like the mailing list that Bare Bones has for Yojimbo. Of course, I am still using Devonthink Pro to keep anything I might want access to long term.
I was afk for the better part of the last week as my younger brother Paul got married over the weekend. It was our second family wedding in six months, so we are old pros at it now. I also now have two awesome sisters-in-law. I posted some photos in a Flickr Set, and you can expect more there as time allows. I will try and have that closed out before Christmas, since my Uncle gave me such a hard time about not “sending him a CD” of the pictures from the last wedding. Most of the pictures up there now have been modified with Lightroom somehow, as I try to learn to process my work with that tool.
Anyway, I'm back in Atlanta, and will probably be posting a bit between now and Christmas. Speaking of posting, MarsEdit is the deal on MacSanta today. It's the application I use to write posts on my desktop and post them to this site. I recommend it, and Red Sweater Software seems like a good steward of the application since they acquired it earlier this year.
Only some of my friends will understand why I am posting this. Turns out that Sweet Caroline was Caroline Kennedy. I believe that this will be the first, and last Neil Diamond post ever on bump. Hat Tip to Papi.
Burial's new album, Untrue, came out on November 5th. (Amazon | iTMS) It's really interesting combinations of a few different styles. (The Wikipedia article refers to it as dubstep. I don't really know what that is.) It's pretty dark stuff, music for abandoned cities, but at times it approaches clubiness. I couldn't stop listening to it last week.
Eliot Lipp might be the greatest electronic musician you have never heard of before. I referred to his newest album as the "soundtrack of my fall 2007". I'm still listening to it. It's very beat driven, and mostly stripped down, great for putting your headphones on and getting some stuff done, or just for hanging out reading. If you want to check him out, I recommend starting with his The Days EP from 2006. (iTMS) Listen carefully. My favorite song is definitely "Koreatown Minimall" on that EP.
Obviously, still listening to the Saul WIlliams and Sigur Ros with a regular mix of other stuff thrown in. I wouldn't have easily guessed that I mostly listened to electronic music last week. Seems like I am going in the other direction this week, more rock.
I had all sorts of issues with my Mac Pro yesterday. It's one of the first generation Intel towers, and over the last couple of months, I have been seeing the video card get very hot. After installing Leopard, the card has actually been overheating to the point where I see artifacting on the screen. If I run Spaces for any extended amount of time, the machine locks right up. It's got an ATI Radeon X1900 XT card in it, and it seems these cards are prone to overheating. Using iSlayer's awesome iStat menus (pictured above), I watched the Northbridge temperature in the machine go North of 170 degrees F.
My first inclination on this overheating, since it's something I had only started to see over the last couple of months, was that the video card cooling system might be clogged with dirt. I took the machine apart last week to put some RAM in, and cleaned the card, which was, in fact dirty. However, this did not make the problem go away. Yesterday, I stayed home from work, so I was using the tower all day. Sure enough, last night it started overheating. I searched on Google a bit, and it seemed that most of what I found were references to MacBook Pro's overheating. Thankfully, one of the solutions employed to fix that issue on the laptop also solved my issue. There's an excellent piece of software named smcFanControl. It lets you manually control the fans in your machine. The stock fan settings in my Mac Pro seemed to be around 500 rpm. That was clearly not enough to cool my machine, which also has 3 SATA internal drives in it. I bumped (no pun) the fan rpm's for two of the fans up to 750 rpm. The cooling issue seems to be completely solved. I highly recommend both iStat menus and smcFanControl to other Mac Pro owners.
Also yesterday, I noticed a strange constant read pattern from the drive bays. Some of my apps were lagging. I would type something into an iChat window, but the text wouldn't appear for several seconds. I spent some time with the Activity Monitor, and couldn't find an obvious culprit. So I rebooted my machine from the Leopard disk and ran Disk Utility. As is sometimes the case, it found a ton of errors that it coud not repair. My theory became that all the crashing from the overheating problem was slowly damaging my hard drive file system. Not the physical drive, but the directory information on it. In the past I have used Disk Warrior to fix this issue. Currently, Disk Warrior is not compatible with Leopard in that it has issues if you run it while booted from a Leopard disk. Laziness paid off in that I have not upgraded the external utility disk I use for such tasks. I booted from that disk (Jeter) ran Disk Warrior, and fixed all of the issues. I recommend keeping an external disk with Tiger on it for such ocassions until the verious troubleshooting vendors update their software, and I highly recommend Disk Warrior.
We pushed a new build of Super Deluxe today. Nothing too exciting, just pushing more videos at people.
What's in a Project Name? One of my favorite moments at work is getting to name the releases. It's my one chance to make my SVP say things like "Hammerhead". Some good naming ideas in this post.
I am going to try to upload my top artists each week, and maybe write a thing or two about that week's listening starting this week. As you can see, I listened to a lot of Sigur Ros this week. Mainly because Hvarf - Heim was released and listening to it reminded me how much I like Sigur Ros, and so I ended up listening to some of the older stuff too. Also last week, the J Dilla album, Jay Loves Japan (iTMS link) became available via the ITMS, and I bought that, and listened to it a couple of times. It's quite good. I'm not crazy about the new Jay-Z, and I really did give it a chance.
We pushed a major update to Super Deluxe this week. Lots of new stuff, including the ability to favorite videos, and browse the most viewed and highest rated videos. I love and hate release weeks. You are so busy and you get all goofy from the stress. I'm pretty worn down today though, and am definitely looking to make the earliest exit possible.
NPR : José González in Concert This is fantastic. I have been a huge fan of his for about two years now, and this show is a good showcase of why. He was also excellent on Conan on Friday night.
Starting tomorrow, Starbucks is giving away music. Looking at the list of expected artists, I don't see much that interests me.
I gave the Amazon MP3 store a try last week. It's great to see some competition for Apple in this area. They have been able to run rampant for long enough, and competition is always a good thing.
Went to see Rilo Kiley at the Variety Playhouse on Saturday night. They put on a great show, as expected, however, George Harrison wants his guitar riff back. I'll pretty much go see anything that Jenny Lewis is involved with from here on out.
Well, here I am two weeks in. Still smoke free. Still very much wanting to smoke. I can say, with some level of certainty that Chantix is working out very well for me. It’s made life easier than the patch has in the past, and I don’t feel medicated either. Quitting is never going to be easy, no matter what method you use, but the level of discomfort with this method is the least I have had. As far as side effects go, the only thing I notice is some nausea in the morning after I take the first dose of the day. I suspect that I would not have this if I ate before taking the pill.
I'm hoping that the urges will lessen as the third week begins. There is no doubt that it's going to take me a while before I feel comfortable. I won't be able to drink beer for at least a couple of months, which sucks because it's football season, and the baseball playoffs are about to start.
Today, I try again, for the fourth time, to quit smoking. I could talk for a while about the circumstances of my other attempts failing, but in the end I can only blame myself for those failures. In one case, I stopped smoking for an entire year and relapsed, so I know that I can do the stopping thing with some level of confidence. This time, I am using Chantix, a pretty new drug from Phizer. It blocks the receptors that nicotine stimulates to create dopamine, and in turn produces some replacement dopamine of it’s own. I have been taking it for eight days now, and with this method of quitting, you smoke for the first week. Meanwhile the Chantix is making the nicotine absorbtion go down more every day. So in a sense, you are dealing with the physical side of the addiction while you are still smoking. After taking it for a week, you stop smoking, and today is that day for me. Yesterday, my smokes tasted awful and offered none of the satisfaction they used to, which means the Chantix is working.
As I have tried quitting before, I have some experience with the patch and Zyban to compare this to. Chantix seems to make dealing with the physical part of the addiction a non-issue. The first day without smokes is always tough, and today has been no exception, but in a sense it's easy because, despite the discomfort, you are very focused on the fact that you are quitting, at least I am. I am using some visualization to help myself too, something that I must have picked up somewhere, but don't remember reading about. I also feel like I am set up better to quit now than I have ever been. Alcohol should be a non-issue, and I live with a lovely non-smoking, stable woman who has promised to be supportive.
My reasons for quitting are myriad. In the end, I want to live. I care some about the three dollars and fifty cents a day I was spending on cigarettes, but I'm far more interested in tasting my food. It's scary getting ready to quit and stepping off that ledge like I did last night, but the payoff, while not immediate in some cases, is totally worth it. In summary, I am not looking forward to the challenges of the next six weeks of mental wrestling, but I am prepared to deal with them and I will. You can't stop me, you can only hope to contain me.
Since I use my iPod as an external disk drive quite often, I was very excited by the new iPod Classic, which came in a 160Gb size. I ordered one last week and it arrived today. Oddly it arrived in some kind of diagnostic mode, which I played with and took a bunch of pictures of this morning. There's a Flickr set of said pictures here.
Tip: Don't Design Site Navigation like ads. I've personally seen this more than once. What looks pretty is not always what users will click on. It's hard to convince non-Web people of this fact.
Goodbye, cruel Word As time goes on, it seems like more and more people are looking for alternatives to Microsoft Bloatfice.
You can get there by going to http://iphone.superdeluxe.com on your iPhone. Currently, you can watch a selection of Super Deluxe videos on your iPhone.
I've referred to the fact that I am the Guildmaster(GM) of a World of Warcraft Raiding guild before. You learn a lot about yourself and other people being the leader of a group of 70 people, and I thought I would write a couple of posts about my experiences. World of Warcraft is unlike any game before it in some ways, although it takes a lot of its lineage from the other MMO's that came before it.
First some basic information about our guild. It's roughly two years old. I was not the original GM, but I was one of the founding members. I was the Raid Leader for the first six months of the guild's existence. I will talk a little more about that role later, but I had the role of GM sort of thrust upon me when the membership was unhappy with the original GM. I didn't really want to be GM, and I think in some ways that has made me a much better GM. We have had, at most, about a hundred members.
We raid four days a week on a regular schedule. Most of our members are adults, and I have had everything from State Department diplomats to lawyers and doctors to college students and warehouse workers in the guild. I would guess that the average age of our guild would be something like 28. Raiding, for those who don't know anything about games like WoW, is when a large group of players get together to tackle game encounters that require everyone in the twenty five man group (it used to be 40) to effectively play their role well. The encounters range from very simple ones which last 5-10 minutes, to very complicated ones that last up to 30 minutes. The learning curve of a particular encounter can be anywhere from a couple of hours to a few weeks. When your guild has mastered an encounter, they move on to the next one in the learning ladder, and the previous one is said to be "on farm status".
Our guild ranked around 500 in the world and 200 in the US in terms of progression. That's not terrible by any means, but it's not nearly as hardcore as some folks. In the past, we cleared Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ40, and almost had cleared Naxx when Burning Crusade came out. Currently, we are working on Kael'thas Sunstrider, the last boss in Tempest Keep, who is sort of a gateway boss to the second half of raiding in Burning Crusade. It's a brutal encounter, with 5 phases that require learning. We've been working on it for three or four weeks now, and should finally get it done in the next day or two. On our particular server, we are the third most progressed guild, and one of the oldest raiding guilds.
So, with that background, here's some observations. First, being a GM can be a very lonely job. You have to be the voice of reason, the source of discipline, and ultimately keep order where 50-70 personalities are involved. You have to try and gauge morale while continuously trying encounters and failing over and over until you succeed. Interestingly enough, this aspect of being a GM is very similar to my day job of managing people. Once you cross that line into being a boss, your relationships with your guildmates will change. You now hold the ultimate power where all things guild are concerned. It requires, above all else, patience. People want raid invites, and things from the guild bank, and they will leap up and down to do things for you if you ask. It's tough to remain impartial, and to keep things as fair as you can.
When you are a GM of a raiding guild, you are always hiring. In order to keep pace with the other guilds on your server, you have to keep killing bosses. If you don't have enough people of one class that is required for an encounter, it can stunt your progression, and people are constantly coming and going. People decide they want to play with an old friend and leave your guild, or get a "better offer" from a more progressed guild. Recruiting is a full time job, and as a result, I have two officers whose only job is recruitment, which is critical because I don't play every night. We have a set process for evaluating candidates, and I would say we actually take about 5% of the people who apply when we have openings. Of course, once you hire someone new, you have to then train them in the various encounters you already have on farm status. It's a never ending treadmill that you just have to get used to as a GM.
Reliable infrastructure is important. It's critical that you have a guild forum, a dkp accounting system and a voice chat server for the guild, and that these three things are reliable. The forum gives the membership a place to discuss things out of game, a housing for your rules and regulations, and a place to post your "strategies" on how bosses get killed. It also gives your potential applicants a place to post their applications for your evaluation. A fair dkp system is the lifeblood of any guild. It's purpose is to make sure that "loot" is distributed in a manner that is in line with each person's contribution to the guild. This can be a real pain in the arse, as you have to then enter four raids worth of attendance and loot every week. However, it's incredibly important that this get done. Finally, without voice chat, you won't get very far. It's critical to succeeding at the complex encounters. It's also critical to fostering the social relationships that make the game worth playing.
I'll do a part two to this soon. If there are particular things you are curious about, post in the comments, and I will trey to address them.
We discovered last night that FoodNetwork HD has been added to our Comcast lineup. We are very happy about this. I would link to the Comcast channel lineup, but their Web site is pathetic.
I bought an Apple iPhone Bluetooth Headset over the weekend. Here's an excellent review. My quick take is that this is the easiest to deal with headset ever, and I highly recommend it.
I created a tumblr log. It's a mash up of my flickr feed, twitter updates, delicious links, and last.fm feed. I'm going to play with using this as my link blog. I wonder if MarsEdit posts to tumblr blogs. Will have to look into that.
John from Cincinnati was cancelled. It was interesting, but clearly wasn't something that would have the broad appeal of other HBO shows. I watched the first few episodes and then lost interest.
Yankees Hall Of Famer Phil Rizzuto Died. As a child, I must have watched a thousand games with him broadcasting and giving shouts out to his peeps in Florida. Just the mention of his name conjurs up memories of sitting in my grandparents living room watching the Yanks with my grandfather. Holy Cow.
