Busier

Somehow I haven't had as much free time lately, and it's not going to get better any time soon. I'm just starting to work on the music for marching band this fall, which will probably consume any of my available time for the next month and a half.

I've got a number of ideas for postings that I want to get done at some point, but it just doesn't seem like it's going to happen in the near future. Here's a list of some recent stuff, maybe I'll get to expand on the topics eventually:

• DVDs - Comedian, Bubba Ho-tep


• Duck of Doom and other fun things from the Munchkin card game


• The drum corps show at Fremont last Sunday, and the upcoming shows around here

Back to work

We're back from our trip to Iowa, and we had a good time. We got to see thunderstorms, which would have made the trip worthwhile by itself, but there were plenty of other things as well. We had a good time with all of the people we saw up in Ames, Des Moines, and other areas; Lisa got to see the old house and we ate lots of my mom's good cooking.

On the flights out and back I read up on AppleScript - something I've been meaning to do for years. A lot of the stuff is probably overkill for the scripts I want to do, but MAN - that language is... um, different. The whole issue of local versus global variables (explicit and implicit), properties, handlers, ... it is a very different beast than what I'm used to. I'm tempted to say that it's confusing and doesn't make any sense, but I'm sure I said the same thing about Cocoa back when I started using it... :)

You wouldn't think that the two hour time shift would be that big of a deal, but we are still recovering from it. I'm back at work in some classes for the next few days, so you may not see me online too much. Also, I think I might have injured myself playing ultimate, because a couple of my ribs hurt when I sneeze. FYI.

It's like a whole new machine

I am very happy that I cleaned out my work machine and reinstalled stuff this past weekend. My iPod has had trouble syncing for the past few months, and now it's working again. Hooray - new songs! And as a boost for my work productivity, I can now type:

po [NSFileManager defaultManager]

...and actually get a result. I no longer have to add a local variable (well, actually: stop, add the variable, recompile, relaunch the debugger - all of which sometimes takes 10 minutes) every time I need to debug a singleton object - now it just works. Excellent! This will save me soooo much time...

Back to IA for the weekend

Heads up for anyone back in Iowa - Lisa and I will be dropping in for the weekend (to the state, not necessarily to your house). Forcasts predict storms, and we're both hoping to see lightning - something that appears VERY rarely out here.

If you've forgotten what I look like, you can find me in the background here. No, I did not know the picture was going to be taken at that moment.

Greetings from the internet!

I find it kind of amusing that Bloglines just did their site redesign just as I am trying to cut back on my RSS feeds. They've got quite a few changes - the new graphics don't make much a difference for me, but I suppose everything needs rounded tabs and fancy rollovers these days. They have a new blog section, which appears let you make something similar to Scoble's linkblog, but I haven't spent much time with it. Along those lines theres better UI for doing your blogroll (which I may get to someday), storing clippings, and other things I haven't found. I appreciate that they now seem to wrap text better for titles and articles, and that the service seems to be working a little faster. Feeds now show the number of subscribers (that is, subscribers via bloglines), so I can compare Scoble's number (2259) with mine (1, me). I gotta write about more interesting stuff...

I'm down to 129 feeds now, and still trying to do some trimming. It's been difficult with all of the post-WWDC... um... posts, since it's been a good way to find interesting people, such as James Duncan Davidson. Also, I randomly found a "blog" for Alton Brown.

A little side project of mine has caused me to do some learning about AppleScript support in Cocoa, and I have learned - it is hard. Well, it is if you are doing something other than the standard things spelled out in the NSDocument-style examples. It makes me realize how nice it is when I actually have something I can debug in gdb, as opposed to wondering "why didn't that work?" out loud. The other day I found some example code from Buzz via CocoaDev (which is run by Steven Frank). I found it amusing since I saw both of these people last week, and as of a month ago I had never met Buzz, and didn't know abotu the CocoaDev site. Everything is connected it seems...

Time to breathe

Well, the crazy week known as WWDC is now over, and I find myself having "free time" for the first time in a while. I'm here at work trying to decide if I should: a. Play Halo all day, b. redo the system on my work machine, or c. get enough energy to do something else.

The week was strange all around. I was expecting to be up at the conference for at least three of the days, but due to circumstances beyond my control, I was only up there for one. I still tried to make it up for some of the nightlife, so I was on Caltrain back and forth a fair amount.

WWDC always gets me reinvigorated for the coding portion of my life, and even without going to sessions I was still able to get a little bit of that this year. Seeing all the cool new stuff from my friends at CE, ES, and Panic was pretty exciting, as well as seeing Unison get two design awards (Winner for "Best User Experience" and runner up for "Best Mac OS X Product" - info and pictures here). I've got some programming classes coming up at work soon, so hopefully I will be able to get to do the geeking out that I haven't done yet this year.

I also managed to wean myself off of blogs for a good portion of the week, which is making me go back and re-evaluate my list. I think I hit a high point of about 150 feeds - I think I'll get that back down to 100 or so in the next few weeks. While it was interesting to read about all kinds of Longhorn programming ideas and other such stuff for a while, it's just not giving me a good return on my time investment. Wow, that sounded dorky. Let me try again... it's getting boring, and I feel like I'm wasting time. Thanks to Ethan for the wakeup call - "why don't you just stop?" :) To counter that though - here's a great kottke entry that I found today.

Ok, it's decided. Time to redo my work machine. Thanks for listening.

WWDC recovery

After a long night of hanging out with everybody and their mom at the bar Tuesday night, then having to get up at 7 to catch Caltrain for work the next day, my body convinced me that I needed to sleep for about 12 hours last night. I'm much better now.

Since the beer bash "finishes" before 10 tonight, I shouldn't have the same problem again. Hopefully.