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Garrett Murray lives here. He's the senior developer at Blue Flavor by day and an amateur writer and comedian by night. You can read more about him or
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Garrett Murray

As promised, episode 14 of the podcast has been released a mere five days after our last episode. Two episodes just before the end of year... this truly is a Christmas miracle.

We want to sincerely thank all of our listeners. Your support has kept this whole thing going—your feedback and your suggestions and your praise have made this all a hell of a lot of fun and we wouldn't be doing it without you.

We released 14 episodes in 2006 and we're excited to get started in 2007. If you haven't subscribed, you're crazy. And if you have, tell your friends!

12-18-2006 @ 19:37

A reminder to send in your entry for the first podcast contest: "What is the Miss America (or Universe) pageant a cover-up for?" To enter simply send your answer to podcast at garrettmurray dot net. We'll read the winning answer in episode 15.

If you haven't heard about the contest, you can listen to the backstory in episode 13.

@ 10:06

I'm trying not to be too upset about the teaser trailer for the fourth film in the Die Hard series, Live Free or Die Hard. I'm trying not to be too upset that Die Hard with a Vengeance was such a good third film (especially after the stink-fest that was the second one) and this trailer makes the new film look like it was directed by Michael Bay. I'm trying not to be too upset that Justin Long (the fucking Mac guy) is in the movie as Willis' sidekick.

I'm trying not to be too upset that the plot is described as "McClane takes on an internet-based terrorist organization who is systematically shutting down the United States."

I'm trying, I'm really trying.

12-15-2006 @ 10:26

Wow, I hadn't logged into Blingo in a long time, but today I won a $10 iTunes Store gift certificate thanks to a friend. I love little surprises like that. Maybe I should start using the site again...

12-14-2006 @ 23:41

Now what? I use Camino as my primary browser (I switched from Safari to Camino about six months ago at the nudging of Shawn, a switch which I believe was a wise choice), and until November 26 I was running the latest nightly and really enjoying all the new features and speed increases. And then November 27 came and the Camino crew landed Cairo.

Don't get me wrong—Cairo is a good thing for Mozilla in general (or, at least, it will be down the road), but currently Firefox and Camino alphas and betas have all-new rendering bugs and quirks and issues. And, quite frankly, I don't think the anti-aliasing with Cairo is as good as people keep claiming it is. Maybe that will be worked out in the future, or maybe I'm missing something, I don't know.

So now I can't download new nightlies, which means I'm stuck with a not-quite-perfect Camino that has some noticeable bugs. Take, for instance, the way it totally goes nuts when you're on a page with embedded Quicktime media, how it slowly consumes more and more resources, etcetera.

I tried switching back to Safari last week but it was immediately uncomfortable. I love the way Safari renders but it feels slow and clunky in comparison to Camino these days. And Firefox... boy, I wish I wanted to use it but I just don't. The look, the feel, it just isn't right on the Mac yet.

In the mean time, I'm going to keep using the nightly from November 26 and investigate some Safari plugins and such.

@ 20:16

One of the many things we've been working on in the last few weeks are two—that's right, two—new podcast episodes to be released before the end of the year. This is the first, episode 13. Nearly 30 minutes of podcasting goodness. And, in about a week, we'll release episode 14. Two episodes in two weeks? It's a Christmas miracle!

Seriously, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, now's the time!

12-12-2006 @ 12:53

The last few weeks have been mostly a blur. I have three large projects going at work (all in Rails), along with a million little side things and loose ends. At home, a lot of time has been spent working on SimpleLog, helping Katia polish grad school essays, working on a new podcast website, and, when I can, playing Zelda. December is usually the breeziest month in the year for me, but right now everything is cramming together at the last minute.

SimpleLog development has been going for over four months and I'm really anxious to release. I've had a lot of help from all over the place and we're getting very close but, as usual, it's just not ready yet. It doesn't help that I keep adding features and tweaks. It's hard to nail down a release date when you keep changing the app. It's all for the better. The next version is going to be so significant of an improvement that I don't look forward to writing the "what's new" text because it's going to take all day.

The podcast website, which I've been talking about redesigning for months and months is getting closer to completion and I'm really anxious to get that up and done as well, since the current site is awful and really killing me. I hope to wrap it up before January 1 so that we can start 2007 with a fresh site.

And then, of course, there's the Wii and Zelda. I can't describe how great Zelda really is. It's hard to put it into words. Besides, I don't want to spoil it. Let me just say—the $250 USD price tag for the system is worth the cost just for Zelda alone. It's that much fun. There are also rumors that the next game is coming much sooner than you would expect.

I know these catch-up posts are annoying, but I wanted to give everyone an update on what's going on around here.

@ 12:42
12-01-2006 @ 18:30