disposable printers - plug and...?

When we got back from our vacation this weekend (which we will blog about soon...) we were faced with the thought of printing out our digital pictures. I, in my eternal cost-consciousness, bought some knock-off ink cartridges for our Canon S820 printer... and it's never looked worse. It printed incredible pictures when we first got it. So, in researching OEM ink for the Canon, I found it would cost us $60 to $80 to replace them.

A quick trip to fatwallet.com produced a deal on the HP Photosmart 7260 at Office Depot for $50 after rebate (maybe as low as $30 if the second rebate works,) ink included.

I got it home and pulled out all of the packing, installed the ink cartridges and drivers and then plugged it into the iBook. I used the HP driver software to print a test page and then fired up iPhoto to print a 4x6" borderless print.

Nothing. The print monitor program that came with the printer showed the job starting... and then stopping on its own before anything printed.

I plugged and unplugged, opened and closed, and rebooted, to no avail. I went to HP's "live support" area and found out that I would have to call their toll free number because they didn't offer Macintosh support online. The iBook was not going to print.

So I got our PC, installed the drivers, plugged in the printer, and it worked. No problems. Those elephants out there may remember that we have an HP PC, so that might explain part of it.

The solution on the iBook was to go to HP's site and download new drivers. The ones that shipped with the printer only supported 10.2.x. However, there's wasn't any clear indication that the drivers needed to be downloaded for 10.3.3.

You can draw your own moral from the story: either that Apple is terrible about breaking driver support from version to version, or HP is bad about supporting OS X. Or, that this is a waste of a blog entry and I should just get about the business of printing photos (since it works with both computers now.)

shingle hung!

Check out the beginnings of auntcindyrose.com, a "commissioned" website I've done outside of my normal everyday work. This client (whom I've known longer than I care to admit) needed a website up quickly (like 36 hours) so that she could sell her new CD to moms who bring their kids to see her at the Nashville Public Library. It's very much in flux... and needs to have things added like song samples, etc, but I made it in the timeframe she needed! DNS may still be propagating in some parts of the world... so you might have to wait until this afternoon for the link to work.

continuous outpouring, continued

I'm going to make it my goal to blog about this book once a week, so that I continue reading it. At a chapter every two weeks, it'll be on into the fall before I'm done, but it is giving me a chance to re-read and let things sink in.

The balance of chapter one is an in-depth stating of Best's concept of worship, built on three foundational concepts:

1. the concept of continuous outpouring as it describes the nature of God
2. the doctrine of imago Dei
3. the sojourn of Christ on earth

Some of his comments on the ramifications of imago Dei:

We were created continuously outpouring. Note that I did not say we were created to be continuous outpourers. Nor can I dare imply that we were created to worship. This would suggest that God is an incomplete person whose need for something outside himself (worship) completes his sense of himself. It might not even be safe to say that we were created for worship, because the inference can be drawn that worship is a capacity that can be separated out and eventually relegated to one of several categories of being. I believe it is strategically important, therefore to say that we were created continuously outpouring - we were created in that condition, in that instant, imago Dei. We did not graduate into being in the image of God; we were, by divine fiat, already in the image of God at the instant the Spirit breathed into our dust. Hence we were created continuously outpouring.¹

While the first section of chapter one dealt with the definition of what worship is, this part of the chapter shows it in the light of Christian theology. It addresses all three concepts in the kind of logical detail shown above, acknowledging the possible shortcomings of the definitions, as a preparation for the framework of the rest of the book.

The chapter ends with a summary of our current state: the fall did not mark the end of worship, but the beginning of idolatry: worshipping anything but God alone. But there is hope, because the Continuous Outpourer has come down among us.

We are not left comfortless. Christ has come.²

---

¹Harold M. Best, Continuous Outpouring. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003) 23.
²Best, 26.

culinary hacker

The June issue of Wired has a feature article on Alton Brown, my favorite TV food show person. I'm sure it will magically appear on their site microseconds after I post this, but for now, I can only find it in the print edition. He talks about cooking from a scientific perspective, breaking down and amplifying classic recipes with knowledge of the exact temperature that bread browns, understanding the thermodynamics behind quick thawing, and discovering that beating egg whites in a copper bowl makes the egg and copper molecules bond into copper-conalbumin, creating greater stability and more volume.

We've set our Tivo to record every episode of Good Eats at "basic" quality so that we can have a digitally demonstrated cookbook of sorts. With our expanded Tivo... sixty episodes only take up 10% of our hard drive space. (ha ha ha!) Lydia swooned when I made Alton's recipe for french toast last Saturday... subbing lactose-free milk for the cream. Anyone know where we can get lactose-free butter and half and half?

gas pains

If you are forced to use premium in your car by your manufacturer, this could be a great deal for you. If you use plain old unleaded, you still could save about $5 with this promotion.

Join in the discussion on Jason's blog about gas prices and what's "worth it" when it comes to saving money on gas.

five more weeks!

You can call us unclepatrickandauntlydia.com in just five weeks or less. We can't wait to meet our niece! Here's pictures of her room. If you open her closet door, you would see the dresses that Aunt Lydia has made and bought for her. ;-)

ye olde tivo

Be sure to set your tivo for tonight and tomorrow night for the final two installments of PBS' Colonial House. It's not called a "reality show," but rather an "experiment." A handful of people were picked from thousands of applicants to live for four months in a 1628 British colony on the coast of Maine. I tend to agree with the author of this review in that I would probably have trouble in anything earlier than say, 1995 House. (What, no high-speed internet?) Once you get past the shock very primitive living conditions, the social dynamics are quite interesting. These 21st century people are supposed to be living by the same laws that the Puritans obeyed, but not everyone is interested in going by the scarlet letter of the law.

As if we needed further proof that Waco is the center of the universe, the colony's governor is a Southern Baptist preacher from Waco. (His church is actually in the nearby metropolis of China Spring.) He says his family's purpose in doing the show was to demonstrate the faith of the early settlers and the sacrifices they made for religious freedom.

congratulations Albert!

I granted our second Gmail invitation to Albert Chang's fiancee. I don't even know this couple (chances are one of these links to him,) but I remember what a chore wedding planning was... and if this makes it any easier, then I can feel like I paid it forward a little bit with the Gmail offer! Jason pointed out that there are people willing to trade all kinds of things for a Gmail account, but I'm not going to play into their selfish desires. <halo>

Gmail?

I have one invitation to grant from Gmail. If you'd like to be a fellow beta tester, email me at patrickandlydia (at-sign) gmail.com. Be sure and tell me why you want a gmail account in your correspondance... if I get several requests I want to have some reason for choosing!

MS-Two?

With this sinus thing going on, I'll be doing a lot of web surfing. My first find for a good time filler is Computer Stupidities, a collection of tech support and sales experiences with people who don't quite get it.

One of my favorites:

While in art school, where we mostly worked with Amigas and Macs, a Spanish exchange student asked me if I ever worked with MS-2. I thought he meant OS/2 but he didn't know what that was. It took me some time to figure out that he meant MS-DOS. "Dos" in Spanish means "two."

nasal-gazing

It was bound to happen after our mega-kid-watching weekend: Lydia caught a cold on Monday, and today, I'm showing the symptoms. I was planning on staying home today to recuperate, but I have one thing at work that has to get done... and I have to wait on a manufacturer to deliver something to the warehouse before I can do it. So I'm sitting here, doped up on Sudafed, waiting for the phone to ring/email to beep so that I can push "go." Normally, I'd offload something like this to our trusty marketing coordinator, but she and her husband are off on holiday. I could just set up the routine to run in Oracle and head out, but if anything didn't go as planned, I could screw up 10,000 orders going to the warehouse. They aren't happy when that happens.

I'm not miserable though, because the drugs are working great. And, even when you have a runny nose, these taste great.

Once again... more tweaks.

The regular font is now Lucida Grande, inspired by Zeldman. I've also cleaned up the blog template code a bunch so that the page should load faster. And (also Zeldman-inspired,) I finally reverse-engineered the floating centered shadow thingy. And... the font for each subject is not only "Futura," but changes colors based on whether Lydia or I post.

"Computer...?"

News.com has a story today about a company that has created a credit card with an unusual security feature. If you want to charge something, you have to "unlock" the card by speaking into it first. It checks your "voiceprint" before it allows you to charge.

I don't know what to think about this!

how appropriate

When I stopped in this evening wondering what kind of dent a tall decaf iced nonfat no-whip mocha and a tall decaf soy no-whip mocha would make in my wallet, I had to take a picture of this.

brother blogger

John and Michelle have started a blog!

Well... John has anyway. I'm sure Michelle will chime in from time to time!

continuous outpouring

On the recommendation of a friend, I read an article in Christianity Today that was an excerpt from Harold Best's book Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts. I was so interested in the article that I wanted to read the whole story!

I'm only part way into Chapter 1, but I wanted to share Best's definition of worship:

Worship is the continuous outpouring of all that I am, all that I do and all that I ever can become in light of a chosen or choosing god.

The interesting part about this definition is that it's a secular definition of worship from a sacred perspective. Postulating that we are all created by God in His image, we are designed to worship, so whether we choose to worship God, or we choose to worship something else, we have no choice but to worship. Best also points out his deliberate choice of words in the phrase continuous outpouring. Everything we do, every choice we make, determines the direction of our worship. Sin redirects our worship to the god of our choosing, but our worship does not cease.

When you think about it, there are not a lot of things in our life that we can point to that "continuously outpour." Lights go on and off, cars start and stop, even buildings are built and torn down. The first analagous thought I had was Niagara Falls... driven by forces that are as old as time... but even that someday will dry up. For the Christian, our worship of God will never cease.

prices today...

Interesting MSNBC article

Item	Apr-04	Jan-84	% increase
Cucumbers (lb.)	$0.99	$0.52	90.4%
Bread (lb.)	$0.97	$0.54	79.6%
Apples (lb.)	$1.04	$0.58	79.3%
Bacon (lb.)	$3.20	$1.81	76.8%
Ice cream (1/2 qt.)	$3.82	$2.19	74.4%
Butter (lb.)	$3.35	$2.06	62.6%
Processed cheese (lb.)	$3.85	$2.49	54.6%
Unleaded regular gas (gal.)	$1.83	$1.22	50.0%
Margerine (lb.)	$1.13	$0.78	44.9%
Cookies (choc chip lb.)	$2.63	$1.87	40.6%
Steak (lb.)	$4.06	$2.93	38.6%
Potato chips (16 oz.)	$3.38	$2.49	35.7%
Chicken (lb.)	$1.12	$0.84	33.3%
Flour (lb.)	$0.28	$0.21	33.3%
Orange juice (16 oz.)	$1.86	$1.41	31.9%

Of course, gas prices topped $2 a gallon today for the first time ever, so this chart is a little out of date. I'm glad I never followed through on my cucumber-powered car though!

version 3.22

Today's blueness provided by [daily dose of imagery]. This is a cool site!

off demand

In the stacks of junk mail that we receive on a daily basis, a whole 11 x 17" was committed to an advertisement about Comcast's On Demand service. It said, "if you have Digital Cable, you've got 'On Demand!'" Well, we have Digital Cable, so we've got it.

I pressed the 147 buttons it takes to switch our home entertainment center off of Tivo and on to plain old cable and quickly found the On Demand menu in the digital cable menu. The On Demand section is divided into about six submenus, each of which has several different categories. The top level ones are "Movies" (a.k.a. Pay-per-view... the "not free" stuff,) "Cable Favorites," "News," and several others. I poked around several different categories... but that's about where it stopped. Whenever I tried to play a program, I got a "this program is not currently available... call 888-yada yada yada." I managed to start one thing (that I can't remember right now,) but that was it.
We won't be demanding much from on demand at this point. It might have been because of the ads that were sent out, but even so... the capacity for the city of Nashville seems to be severely lacking.

what would you do if you received an email like this?

We got this in our comcast.net email address today:

Dear (your email here)
During our regular update and verification of the accounts, we could not verify your current information. Either your information has changed or it is incomplete.

As a result, your access to bid or buy on eBay has been restricted.

According to our site policy you will have to confirm that you are the real owner of the eBay account by log in and verify your identity or else your account will be suspended without the right to register again with eBay.

Click on the link below in order to login and verify your information:

Verify Information

Thank you

eBay Customer Support

Looks official, doesn't it? When you click through, it opens the main www.ebay.com page in a window... and what looks like an ebay sign-in page in the second. If you enter your information on the second page, you get a one page "information verification" form that asks for things like your credit card number, your PIN number for the credit card, and social security number!

Suffice it to say... this isn't part of ebay. It's an information harvesting site being run by some kind of unscrupulous identity thief. But, this was about the most realistic ruse I've ever seen. You have to be ABSOLUTELY certain that you are on the right web page whenever you enter personal information. Look for the little lock symbol at the bottom of your browser so that you know it's a secure site, and then look at the address bar and make sure you're on the site you think you're on. If you're at all in doubt, DON'T enter your information. Call, write, or look for another site!

doesn't everyone name their mac?

Ever since the dawn of Mac-dom, the drives that are connected show up on the desktop in a nice little column. If you booted from a floppy, that floppy would show up on the right side of the screen with whatever the name of the floppy was underneath it. And, if you ejected the floppy while a file on it was in use and replaced it with another floppy, the Mac would nicely ask you to put the disk named "such and such" back in the drive... over... and over... and over... and over.

Once hard disks came into vogue (and out of the multi-thousand dollar price range,) they started showing up on Mac desktops. And, since the hard drive never left the computer, it was ubiquitously there, taking up it's valuable space forever, or until it gave up the ghost.

Seeing the icon there permanently, many Mac owners attributed identity to it... naming the icon, and therefore naming their Mac. This also tends to be a habit of network admins who like to name the various servers on their networks with names like frodo, bilbo, etc. or spock, kirk, etc.

So now that I have an iBook for good, I had to come up with something to name it, to give it identity, and one night last week, I bequeathed it's new identity... something that will characterize it for years to come, or until I decide on something different.

And no, I'm not going to explain it right now. :-D

no comment

Blogger has updated their system and now has a commenting system. After some template hacking, I've switched our blog over to their comment system. The upshot is that we lost all the old comments attached to previous posts (sorry) and due to the way they coded the comment system, the posting page ends up showing up in a new window. The good news is that I'm planning on sticking with this system from here on out, and I've enabled "anonymous posting" so that you don't have to register for a Blogger account (although it is free.)

I'm sure it will all go through several changes... but for now, post a comment and see how it works!

it's just automatic

Aside from having a gorgeous site and a really useful OS X utility, Automatic Labs has extremely well designed CSS. If you're a code-jockey, check out the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

here's your sign

Create your own church sign with the church sign generator. Now you can pretend that you're a pastor of a little country church and think up all kinds of witty sayings that make people stop, think and plow into the car in front of them when they take their eyes off the road.

I guess it's better than talking on your cell phone while you're driving.

ollie would be proud

We got our Fellowes P600C shredder yesterday. It's got their POWERSHRED technology, so it devours just about whatever you throw at it. We've burned our way through two cheapo shredders in the past three years, so hopefully this one will outlast and outplay. It's got good reviews at amazon.com, so we have high hopes.

hotspot - Atlanta Bread Company

Today, I had my lunch at the Atlanta Bread Company... in Nashville. (I didn't go to Atlanta for lunch.) This isn't really a new place for me, Lydia and I head there pretty often. This is, however, the first time I have surfed there. Through a deal from work, I get a great discount on their Half and Half combo. Any two of these three: half sandwich, half salad, or soup, plus a sourdough roll and a drink, for $3! Yeah, I'm gonna be going there a lot.

Today I had the half Caesar salad, which is as large as a full salad at most restaurants, and a half Turkey sandwich. The real deal here is the half salad. That could be a meal by itself. ABC is usually pretty busy at lunch, but I found a seat pretty easily. There are six or seven seats that have blank walls behind them, so private web browsing is a possibility. There is no outside seating.

The last time I tried this at ABC, I could connect to their wireless connection, no problem, but I never got an IP address. Their DHCP wasn't doing a thing. This time, I thought I was in the same boat, but after about three minutes of clicking the "Renew DHCP Lease" button, I got 192.168.0.106 and I was online. I got full signal strength on my AirPort meter and about 450Kbps according to C-Net's bandwidth meter. I had no problem once I got connected. The food is five star... expecially for value... but because of the initial issues, I have to go with four stars. If it improves on repeat visits, I'll up my rating!

we have a BLUE star!

We broke the 100 mark on eBay feedback!

hotspot - Alpine Bagel Co.

Now that I've got a 4.9 lb. airport-enabled machine with which to log on, I'm becoming more attuned to finding the free wireless hotspot. Nashville isn't exactly saturated with them (or paid ones, for that matter,) so whenever I locate one, I'll blog about it.

Today, I just wanted to get out of the office for lunch, so I went to Alpine Bagels over by Vanderbilt. I'm kind of surpised that I've lived here for seven years and never been in this restaurant, because I pass by it pretty frequently. Sort of a cross between a mall restaurant and a coffee shop, there's a pretty wide variety of options for lunch. I had the "Hoss Cartwright." The juxtaposition of bacon, cream cheese and sesame seeds was pretty incredibly good. Other items of note: they have Terra Chips for the same price as regular old Ruffles, and their coffee is Bongo Java... so you can get all of the flavor of Bongo Java or Fido without having to deal with the coffee house crowd!

Their wireless internet is provided by MacAuthority, our local Apple Reseller, so all I had to do was wake up the iBook and here I am. There aren't a lot of good private places to sit though... only two where prying eyes can't see what you're surfing, so I wouldn't plan on doing sensitive work or personal things here. The lunch crowd is very light, probably because people think of bagels as "morning food." Parking is a bit tough too in the garage behind, but it is free. Depending on the crowd at the surrounding restaurants, you may have to circle a bit. That's the only reason I'm giving it four out of five stars.


Update: after sitting inside for 30 minutes, I'm freeeeeezing. Luckily, they have outdoor seating too... and it's shady enough to see my iBook.

Apple patented by Microsoft

Really!

In other news, Jason jumps off a bridge before he actually reads the article.

$5 off $5 at the shack

Print this out and take it to Radio Shack for $5 off anything this week. If it's less than $5, it's free!

September 27, 2040

If I work until age 65, that's the day I can retire. You can calculate this and other interesting but sometimes depressing information at www.onlineconversion.com. For instance, as of today, I have been alive 10,447 days. If I were a dog, I would be 125 in human years. It is 548 Nautical miles from the Nashville airport to DFW airport.

bilingual

command, control, option, alt, windows, apple, shift

I'm a keyboard shortcut guy. When I'm done in windows, I'm gonna Alt-F4... when I wanna jump ahead a word, I Ctrl-right arrow, when I wanna see the desktop, I windows-D and when I switch between programs, I'm gonna Alt-Tab.

The problem is... some of these are the same on the Mac. Alt-Tab works great... unless you're trying to move among windows in the same program... in which case, it's Alt-~. The big thing is the Command / Alt / Control conundrum. On the Mac, most commands are Command-whatever... on the PC, it's Ctrl-whatever or Alt-whatever. The bottom line is: I don't think about most of these commands... they're just part of my muscle-memory touch typing. But when they don't line up... odd things can happen. Right now, the worst is "Select All." The muscle memory for Command-A gives me Alt-A on the PC, and that just drops down a random menu. It's not that anything catastrophic happens... it's just what you expect to happen doesn't.

google wants $e*109

In Google's sec filing for their IPO, they specify that they want to raise $2,718,281,828. The mathemeticians reading this blog are now getting the joke. I guess it's because they want to be involved in e-commerce.

(from Marginal Revolution.)

pepsi wishes and caviar dreams

Here's the list of iTunes that we purchased with our bottlecaps. (link requires that you have iTunes installed either on your PC or your Mac.)

Lydia and I each picked some of the songs listed. I'll bet none of you can correctly identify who purchased what. I'd bet one of Lydia's dinners on it. ;-)

bulldozer update 1

They've stopped... and it's only four hours after they began today. After they quit this afternoon, I went on a little reconaissance mission. It's a little too hard to describe without charts and graphs, but it looks like in other areas, they're leaving a green border... so there may be hope for some of our trees. However, we still have no idea what's going in.

bulldozers

We knew it was a risk when we chose the lot, so in that respect, we have no one to blame but ourselves. The words "undevelopable" and "been that way forever" were freely tossed around, but today, the bulldozers showed up.

They're clearing the land behind the berm behind our house, and the orange property markers are right past the tree line. The optimistic view is that the berm will still be there, and we will probably be able to plant new trees on it. The downside - no more mature trees, no more deer, and no more bunnies... and no idea what is coming in. It could be anything... zoned "retail." And whatever it is could be tall, short, soft, loud... right now it's unknown.

And, one thing is for sure - property values will change... but we don't know how.