The Box

It's here! I took photos of the unboxing and uploaded them to Flickr. So there is some Rock Band porn for you, if that's how you swing. I'm not quite sure what I think yet. The guitar is easily my favorite one yet (although I haven't tried the GH3 controller yet) - it is flatter than the GH2 guitar so I find it slides less. It took some effort for me to adapt from GH1 to GH2, but this felt very comfortable right from the start. Drumming is really difficult, the pedal throws me for a real loop. And yes, if you're observant you might have noticed these pictures are from a new camera - I received my new Canon Digital Rebel XTi yesterday. I'll post more about that soon, but so far I love it!

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Tags: RockBand, Camera, RebelXTi

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When the robot revolution happens Still Alive will be the robotic Internationale. Yet another thing Jonathan Coulton will have to answer for one day.

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Tags: JonathanCoulton, Portal, StillAlive, Robots

Has everyone seen Kindle already? It's an interesting device, but I really think it needs .PDF support to be viable. Still, it's the first e-book reader that has triggered consumer lust for me. I'll be really curious to see the reviews on this puppy. In random news, I'm trying to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout and this is my first text ever composed with Dvorak. This is probably the oddest feeling I've ever had at a computer. I'm not using hunt and peck, I'm touch typing but I'm typing very slowly. So far the worst part is punctuation and keyboard shortcuts. It will be interesting to see how long I can take it before I have to stop and revert to QWERTY. I feel like I'm thinking in molasses, it's fascinating to realize how linked the physical act of typing and the mental act of composing text have become for me. I have to say though, I'm already starting to speed up and not use the cheat sheet as much. It's really wild.

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Tags: Kindle, Dvorak

Pre-order before product release on Jan. 8, 2008 and pay only $39.95 (release price will be $79.95). Special upgrade pricing is available for OmniOutliner Pro owners.

The Omni Group - OmniFocus I've handed out my share of the Kool-Aid about Getting Things Done on this blog before, and I won't go into it now. If you use GTD then you know what I'm talking about. If you don't use it, then you probably won't care about this software. I've alluded a couple of times to using "Kinkless GTD" for tracking my stuff a few times, but since August I've been using OmniFocus. Briefly, kGTD was a set of AppleScripts that turned OmniOutliner Pro into a GTD application. kGTD got so popular that Omni decided to write an actual full application and basically lure over all the kGTD users. OmniFocus has been in "fairly open" beta program for a while, but I wasn't really sure how bloggable the topic was. Anyway, it's in public beta now, and if you pre-order you get 50% off. If you're on the fence, grab a copy and check it out. If you are using Kinkless currently I can quite confidently tell you that you should definitely try switching over. It's fantastic if you're already used to Kinkless. Highly recommended.

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Tags: GettingThingsDone, OmniFocus, KinklessGTD

I have this Excel sheet that I use to track the weight of our cats ever since a few years ago the vet said we needed to get them both to slim down. Yes, it's geeky, but I am a geek. We had a need to track numeric data, I had a tool on my system for tracking numeric data. I suppose I could have done a poor job of tracking the data with slips of paper or something, but using Excel was the natural thing to do. A while back I dumped the whole thing in Numbers, because hey - I have a fancy-schmancy new spreadsheet, and the truth is that I hates me some Excel with a passion. Also - Office 2004 and Photoshop Essentials are the only PowerPC binaries I have left, so running Numbers is better! It worked OK, but I did something weird so the chart and the data weren't connected up properly. This morning I was entering a couple of months of data and took the time to redo everything. Which is great, and there are a lot of nice things about Numbers . . . but the chart is just wonky. Back when we started weighing them (in late 2005) Heisenberg actually managed to crack 20 pounds at 20.20. Schrödinger got down to 10.60 one day back in 2006. Numbers insists that all data points be in the chart, so my maximum line can be no lower than 20.20 and my minimum can be no higher than 10.60. Fair enough, but just to make things look nice and round I set the minimum to 10 and the maximum to 21. Very nice. But! I can only have 10 steps in my chart, so each step has to 1.1 pound. If I could have 11 steps then each gridline would be a pound, but I guess that just leads to madness. Or something. So that level red line is 16 pounds even, but the gridlines around it are 15.5 and 16.6 pounds. (And yes, I should probably update the "target lines". We decided quite a while ago that we were comfortably with anything around 11-12 pounds for Schrödinger and 16-17 pounds for Heisenberg. We actually started giving them a bit more food at that point and they got a lot less frantic about feeding time. They jag around a lot on the scale, but I think that's mostly that the scale is for human weights and isn't really accurate to tenths of a pound.)

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Tags: Numbers08, cats