maniacal rage

I haven't been without a computer at home in a very long time, and I must say that it's a very strange feeling. I'm so used to using a computer all the time. Even when it's unnecessary. I'll check my email ten times while watching a DVD. I'll browse the internet while waiting for food to cook. I'll check the weather a few times before I leave the house in the morning.

Lately, I haven't been doing a lot of "real" computing stuff at home (hence the selling of the Quad), except for the podcast, so I'm not feeling a serious lack without having a computer around. It's just the little time fillers. I'm so used to having a computer within reach at all times that I'm going through a little bit of withdrawal.

Combine the lack of computers with Katia being gone for the weekend visiting a friend and me being in the office by myself doing some work, and I've had a very strange and isolating few days by myself. I wouldn't want to live this way, but it hasn't been too awful.

Things will begin to change on the computer-front at home on Wednesday, when the first of a few toys arrives...

Right, so I sold the Quad, and I also sold the older PowerBook. That's fine and all, except that I sold both of them on the same day, and now I have no computer at home. There are new things on their way (more on this later), but they won't be here until the middle of next week.

Until then, however, I'm computerless. I could use my PC (yuck!), but I sold all of my displays! I'm completely screwed. And, to top that off, I have a project I have to finish this weekend, so I'm at the office working here. It's a nice day out, it's memorial day weekend, and I'm here, in the office, doing work. Weee!

Hey, at least there are new toys coming soon...

Over the weekend, we had a small party for my birthday. For a few hours before the party, I had a few people over early to play XBOX 360, which was a ton of fun. We played Fight Night Round 3, bashing each other in the face while yelling and screaming because of the ultra-realistic boxing graphics, and then some Call of Duty 2 (Goldeneye-style four-player split-screen Allied versus Axis action) and it was loads of fun. Truly the official christening of my XBOX 360.

Once everyone else arrived, we turned to drinking, eating and, eventually, playing some pictionary. I had a fun time, and it seems like everyone else did as well. The night ended with a lengthy discussion on current trends popular music and everyone scraping the bottom of the seven-layer dip container.

We bought way too much alcohol, so Katia will be drinking forty beers a day for the next month to get rid of it. You can see a few pictures from the party on Flickr.

Update: Sold!

I'm selling my Power Mac G5 Quad. I don't use it nearly enough to justify keeping it. This is the ultimate studio machine or application server, and I just don't need the speed or beastly power. Don't get me wrong—I love it. I've just realized in the past few months that I use the laptop much more and I don't want to be tethered to a room anymore.

The beast is as follows:

• Two dual-core 2.5GHz G5 processors
• 4.5GB of RAM
• 410GB of hard drive space (a 250GB drive and a 160GB drive)
• Airport Extreme
• Bluetooth 2.0
• Dual Gigabit ethernet
• nVidia GeForce 6600 with 256MB of GDDR SDRAM
• 16x SuperDrive (double-layer)

You can see a few photos of the machine in my Quad set on Flickr. It's covered under AppleCare until December 28, 2008.

Also included with the machine:

• Apple Pro Keyboard
• Mighty Mouse
• Mac OS X Tiger
• iLife '06
• DVI to VGA adapter

What this package is worth:

• Quad: $3,399
• RAM: $500
• Extra HDD: $100
• AppleCare: $349
• Total: $4,348 (not including $375 in taxes I paid)

What I'm selling it for, excluding shipping:

$3,299, which is $349 cheaper than a standard Quad with AppleCare would cost you from Apple (even more savings if you consider tax). Sold!

You save over a thousand dollars on this package.

I would love to sell this to someone local to NYC, but I'm willing to ship it if necessary. I estimate shipping will cost around $150 in the US, I'm not sure about shipping to a foreign country but will consider it.

What a fantastic season of 24 this year. It's amazing that a show can systematically kill all of my favorite characters and yet I think this was possibly the best season yet. Of course, it's hard to compare current seasons to the first, if only because the first season was truly unique, truly new. But boy oh boy, this season was gooood.

I honestly think the writers of the show don't tend to think about the next season when they write the finale each year, so that they're unafraid to really write what the show deserves in its final moments. Last night was no exception. How they plan to deal with this next year remains to be seen (I wouldn't be surprised to see a "Two Years Later" situation next season), but when you look at this season alone, without worrying about what's coming, it's an excellent step for the series.

Minor spoiler alert, so avert your eyes if you want to know nothing about this season: To watch Jack Bauer for four years, growing and experiencing these horrible things, all the while protecting, more than all else, President Palmer, only to see him assassinated, was one of the best moments of this show. To go on and kill most of Jack's friends took real balls, and the show did it without blinking. They took and took and took, and they really made Jack Bauer fight for everything this season. After the past few years, it was hard to watch Jack lose everything, but even more important to see him succeed.

The show is a thriller, a drama, a format in its own right, and it's just amazing television. When I heard that Kiefer Sutherland signed on for three more years, and I was honestly, really, really excited. Television doesn't get much better that this, and I'm already looking forward to January of 2007.

We've been having strange Safari problems in our office for the past few months. I'm not sure when it started, but it affects every Mac in the office (there are about fifteen), and it's very strange.

Safari is unable to load certain websites, including places like the Apple Store (oddly, Safari will load the main Apple Store page, but no sub-pages). When you request one of these sites Safari can't load, the application stays on the "Contacting store.apple.com," sometimes endlessly (no error but never loads) and sometimes for a short period of time before returning an NSURL error:

Safari can't open the page "[URL here]". The error was: "lost network connection" (NSURLErrorDomain:-1005) Please choose Report Bug to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.

Obviously, something strange is going on here. I've done some Google searching, but I haven't been able to find anyone else reporting the same kind of issues we're having here. I feel like this has to be related to our network setup somehow (the office is nearly completely Microsoft technology-based), but we can't seem to find any issues.

While the Apple Store won't load on my Mac when I'm on the network, if I connect it to an outside network the problem goes away immediately. Very, very strange. Perhaps this is DNS related? Either way, it's annoying.

Determined both to enter the hourly raffle for a MacBook and to see the new Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Shawn and I made the journey in at 12:30AM and, after searching for parking for thirty minutes and standing in line for twenty, we're now walking around playing with the new machines.

The new store is nice, although it's hard to get a good grasp of the size due to the amount of people in here right now. The cube, of course, is very impressive (I've taken plenty of photos but must wait until I'm home to upload them). Wish us luck in the raffle! It's late!

Update: Well, we didn't win. It was still fun to go, though. I've uploaded a few pictures from the night to Flickr. Shawn also found us in the timelapse!

Over the past few years, I've collected my share of domains names, a few of which I've never used. Two domains in particular are great names, but I'll never end up using them and I think other people might. So I'm offering them up for sale to the highest bidder.

fingerfight.com
The perfect domain for a site related to gaming, I bought this two years ago and built a site that I never released. I still have the design, which I'm also willing to sell if someone is interested.

usefulmac.com
Another fantastic domain name, obviously great for a Mac related weblog or even to be used as the domain for a Mac application. I currently have this redirecting to my xPad site, but I don't really use it to its full potential.

railsdev.com
I got this when I set up my Dreamhost account, but I never use it. I keep thinking I will, but I probably won't. Obviously, this is a good name for a Rails development house or something similar.

If you're interested in any of these domains (or the design for Finger Fight), please contact me (garrett at maniacalrage dot net).

Right, so episode seven of the podcast is now available. I'm still sick (lucky me!), but we've finally found the time to finish up this most recent episode and get it online. There's one more episode in this season of the podcast, so if you're not already subscribed, do it now!

It's official: Today I'm 25. This is the start of a week-long one-third life crisis, during which I will experience fits of crying, then laughing, then crying again. At one point, I will buy a Porsche and crash it into a ravine. Then I'll go back to my high school and wear clothes that are too small and pretend that I'm still seventeen, and that I don't have to go to work every day and be responsible, and I'll talk about how it's so great to be young and how we'll be young forever.

For the past few years I've managed to get sick right around my birthday, and this year is no different. My allergies tend to start up pretty hardcore in late April, and, perhaps out of laziness, my body decides not to fight off any incoming germs.

Luckily, I'm finally starting to feel better after a week of coughing and snot and malaise. Everyone who has asked about episode seven of the podcast—it's coming shortly. My sickness made it difficult to record audio, and I haven't had time to finish up editing. In the next few days I'll get it online.

I've finally had a chance to switch this site over to my new weblog application, SimpleLog. We're only a few days from release to the public, and things are looking good. Feedback has been very positive and I'm excited to release this into the wild.

In the mean time, it's nice to have the new app in place here, since its administration section is leaps-and-bounds better than my previous version and it's much more fun to post now.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of this transition is that my RSS feed will show up as new for everyone. Sorry about that.

Thanks to everyone who signed up to test my weblog application. I released the first beta today—hopefully this beta process will be swift and I'll release to the public in a week or so.

This is the first project I've done using Rails for mass release, and I have to say that the process was fast, fun and a great learning experience. I've only recently begun using functional and unit testing in Rails—something I should have been doing from the beginning but wasn't—and I love it. Never has it been so easy to test and debug an application. Rails constantly surprises me.

The only low point in the development and testing process was getting the app to deploy at Dreamhost, whose Rails implementation is just downright difficult and maddening at times. It's frustrating that DH can't seem to get it going correctly (a while back they upgraded to Rails 1.1 and broke everyone's sites because of errors in the upgrade process, and had to roll back to 1.0 because of it). Luckily, with plenty of help from the Rails IRC channel and about three hours of searching Google, I manage to concoct a work-around for all of the silly FCGI issues DH has and was able to install the app on Dreamhost trouble-free. Hopefully my testers will have the same experience.

As I've said before: If you want good Rails hosting, go with Segpub. They are the official hosting provider selection for my weblog application, and I don't get any compensation for saying that. I know I sound like a broken record, but I can't say it enough.

I'm going to switch this site over to the new app in a day or two, once I find the time.

A few months ago, our cheap Philips DVD player started having trouble reading discs (especially dual-layer discs, where it would freeze when changing layers and then we'd have to finish watching the DVD on the 15-inch PowerBook). I started looking to get a replacement, but I realized it would be sort of silly to buy a nice new DVD player to use with our extremely cruddy CRT television—one we bought the day we moved in together over three years ago based on the following requirements: Cheap, doesn't look completely like ass, is twenty-seven inches and has a screen that isn't completely rounded—especially since I've been wanting to move to HDTV for quite a while now. And, to top it off, I've been dying to get my hands on the XBOX 360, which pumps out a native HD signal. So, instead of looking for a new DVD player, I started looking for a new TV. And I finally picked one.

We ended up getting a 42-inch Sony Wega rear-project three LCD TV. That's a lot of words that might not mean much, but the gist of it is, it's big, it's pretty, and it's such a huge improvement that I can't even remember what it was like to watch TV on our old box. I chose LCD rear-projection because I didn't care much about extreme thinness in my television—I'm never going to hang it on the wall, and I have a decent amount of space, so the TV being six inches deep doesn't bother me, especially when that six inches saves me a thousand dollars when compared with the LCD version of the TV. The viewing angle is narrower with this TV than with an LCD or plasma, but again—we only watch the TV in certain ways. Instead of trying to buy a TV that fit all sorts of situations I don't have, I bought one that fit the way we watch TV and what we need and I'm thrilled with the choice.

Once I had chosen the new TV, buying a new DVD player was much easier. I went with a Sony DVD player with progressive scan and HDMI output, and chose a player based on the quality of its up-conversion to 720p (my TV's native format), since we'll be watching a lot of standard definition DVD movies on our high definition television. The player was actually quite inexpensive (I was expecting to pay several hundred dollars but only spent one and change), and it looks great even when playing older DVDs. My test cases—King Kong, The Matrix and Saving Private Ryan—all look fantastic on the bigger screen. They're not completely sharp—such is the reality of up-converting 720x480 to 1280x720—but the larger widescreen presentation more than makes up for it. Watching the New York City scenes in King Kong almost gives you vertigo at times.

Rounding out the entertainment overhaul is the XBOX 360 which is, in a word, marvelous. I had the original XBOX, which I later sold, and I liked it a lot. I didn't think I would (based on my intense hatred for Microsoft), but once I had it I truly loved it. XBOX Live! was so well done and seamless, the games were unique and looked great, and I really had fun with it. I sold it more than a year ago to take a break from gaming until the next-generation consoles came out, and ever since the 360 was released I've been yearning to get it. The XBOX 360 is effectively everything that was good about the original XBOX, multiplied by fifty. The XBOX Live! functionality is more integrated with the system, the XBOX marketplace is a great idea (and actually works!), and, my god, it looks fantastic in HD. While it may be true that you don't need an HD TV to enjoy the 360, it certainly helps! An added bonus to the 360 is that, hopefully, sometime down the road, Microsoft will sell an HD-DVD add-on for the box that's cheaper than a stand-alone HD-DVD player and we'll be able to use that to play HD DVDs.

The only weak point of our new entertainment set-up is Time Warner Cable. Their HD service isn't all that great. There aren't a ton of channels in HD, and those that are aren't always nearly as crisp or brilliant as one would hope. Watching older re-runs in 4:3 isn't as bothersome as one would think (the new TV in side-bar mode is effectively as large as our old TV), but it would be nice to see channels like Cartoon Network and Comedy Central move to HD, and shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy really need to make the move as well. Of course, shows like 24 and Smallville look great in HD and, perhaps not surprisingly, the Discovery Channel in HD is really fun to watch. If anything, having an HD TV makes you realize just how terrible standard definition TV really is. When you see an SD commercial while watching 24, it's hard not to laugh at just how bad TV used to look.

I put up a few pictures of the new setup on Flickr.

For the third year in a row, we travelled to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this past weekend for the Cherry Blossom Festival. If you live in NYC, you should definitely put the BBG on your list of things to see (and, quite frankly, keep it on regular rotation).

The Festival is especially nice since the blossoms are in full bloom, it's seemingly always beautiful out and, if you're interested, there are free temporary tattoos. Of course, the BBG is also full of many other fantastic flowers and trees.

You can check out my photoset from the day on Flickr.

Okay, so let's say I'd spent a little bit of time writing a simple and efficient weblog application using Rails, and I wanted to release said application, but I wanted to run a quick private beta test first to make sure it works for everyone. What would I do?

Perhaps I would ask anyone interested in testing this Rails weblog application to send an email to garrett at maniacalrage dot net, with the subject "I want to test your app," and then I would send this app to those people and they would play with it for a few days and report everything was fine and then I would release the app under the GPL and such.

Right. And in case anyone was curious, I would tell them that the app is basically a better version of the app I built to run this site, made easier to configure and install and use.

Update: Wow, okay, we've got enough. Thanks!

I've received a few emails in the past several months inquiring about Oscar's condition post-surgery, so I figured I would post a short update here in response for anyone who is curious.

Oscar is doing very, very well and it seems his problem was the crystals in his bladder, rather than some sort of ongoing FLUTD (feline lower urinary tract disease), although the very nature of FLUTD is that it comes and goes indiscriminately so it's possible he still has that but it's calmed down because the crystals were removed. In either case, he's back to being a healthy, normal cat.

We've permanently switched both Oscar and Felix to crystal-preventing food so as to rule out any future crystal build-up, and the only side-effect seems to be thinner cats. Rather than being ten-point-five and eleven pounds respectively, they're each half a pound lighter, and a little thinner. It doesn't seem to be a problem, but they're due to visit the vet again soon so we'll know then. Neither seems any less energetic or, well, insane, so I don't think the weight loss has had a negative effect on them.

The only thing that has changed since Oscar returned to health is that he seems to be more aware of his own boredom. Whenever he wakes up from a nap or stops playing with a toy and realizes that he wants attention or interaction, he starts crying and whining like a baby until someone talks to him or picks him up or pets him. Oh, and he's grown a large affection for sitting in the bathroom (I think this came from when we placed a smaller, secondary litter box in there for him while he was sick).

Thanks very much to everyone who sent me nice emails about Oscar, I appreciate it.