Standing On Boxes

Apple thinks I should buy a new iMac. You know – one of those beautiful 27″ ones with the obscenely fast Intel cpu (I think it’s an i7 – yup – a quad core i7 – with an ATI Radeon HD 4850 GPU. Whatever that means.)

For the small sum of $4K maxed out (16GB memory, 2Tb HD) (Yikes! )

I think Apple needs to stop checking my credit rating whenever I buy something from iTS. Because this? Not gonna happen. I got an iPhone this summer instead of a new Mac (and my MacBook is still good for a couple more years.)

Found over on one of my favorite feminist leaning blogs (In response to a post about the Religious Right (US division) meme that women are ‘baby ovens‘ (and all that implies) :

When is the Rapture going to take these people away so the rest of us can live in peace and sanity?

(Not that I actually care but — A trigger warning for those who subscribe to the Republican/Right/Men’s Rights Association definition of feminist/feminist sympathizer. You won’t like anything you find there. So don’t bother clicking on that link unless you like raising your blood pressure because the folks there? They take no prisoners.)

And forget it before you can write it down — a couple days later?

I need it – at least according to an ad on tv this afternoon.

My renters insurance is up for renewal… I wonder how much it would cost to add to my policy? Oh wait… my insurance co. doesn’t do flood insurance. I’d have to get that stuff in the ad.

Of course, in order for a flood to endanger my apartment… it’d have to flood the city I live on the edge of (I live on a hill). Something of Biblical / apocalyptical proportions. Maybe they have flash-flood insurance (I’m not at the top of the hill)?

It’s been a while since I looked at Squeak. (Open source cross platform Smalltalk). Just haven’t had the time.

Looks like it’s been ported to the iPhone as iSqueak

(There’s even a couple apps written in Squeak available on the iTunes app store. I bought 1 (a wiki server app) more as a way to show support for them than anything else. Not sure what I’m really going to do with a wiki on my iPhone.)

- unfortunately, it isn’t going to appear on the app store any time soon since it really IS a Smalltalk environment and you can write your own programs and run other people’s programs (Just look at what happened to that C64 emulator when Apple found out the Basic interpreter was enable-able (Is that even a word?))

But if you know an Apple iPhone developer…  and you want to do some Smalltalk on your iPhone/iPod touch… and you ask nicely… maybe they’ll build a copy of it for you.

Issues –

• Hopefully, the Squeak image used by iSqueak can be updated outside of the iPhone VM — because it doesn’t want to get past the second change set (10420) on my iPhone. (And, given the way the iPhone OS does multi-tasking… you can’t have that going on in the background.) — or I’m doing it wrong.
• Keyboard support? Sure, it starts up with a Squeak VNC server so you can access it externally… and there isn’t a whole lot of screen space on an iPhone in the first place…  but… (Okay, there are examples on using the keyboard in a program written with Squeak… but that isn’t exactly the same thing.) — I’m assuming I’m missing something.

We’ll see what happens.

Just hanging out today. Watching a bit of tv. Reading fic.

• UT beat Georgia by some overly large amount.
• The Best of Top Gear (Not sure if it was a single Top Gear episode or segments from different episodes)

Trying to kill a Toyota truck – it was run against a tree; drowned in high tide; a camper was dropped on it; a wrecking ball hit it. They had to set it on fire to break it completely (I assume. They don’t show it running after the fire).

A race between a speed skater (whomever was fastest in the world when that segment was filmed) and a new Jaguar. On a speed skating oval. We all know who won, right? Wonder how much it cost them to run a car on it.

Something about a Lamborghini and the running of the bulls in Pamplona(?)

A challenge with vans (3 different sizes – one per host. Not US mini-vans. These are vans used to move/carry things. Used by tradespersons – plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, etc.)

Some kind of car hockey (Mini-sized cars on snow) (Norway somewhere?) and a large “puck”

Blowing up a 23 story apartment building from the 60′s London — (And 240 feet up at the top of this edifice — is that Toyota truck, somehow rescued from the fire. Not sure it was still running though. They took it off a flatbed. Oops — they bought a mechanic and once they pried it loose from the rubble — he got it started.  It wouldn’t pass an inspection (the frame is cracked in half – only the bodywork holding it together) but it actually was still mobile enough to drive into the studio at the end of the show.

• And now a “Top Gear” Special Guests episode – which I’m not going to comment on as much. Not familiar with the celebrities.
  • Jeremy Clarkson (the tall guy.) raced a couple mountain climbers to the top of a 1200 foot mountain. He had an Audi RS4. His route to the top was 60 miles of twisty roads around a lake. One of the climbers was the celebrity (some kind of famous “speed” climber). The climbers got to the top approx. 10 minutes before he did. And they beat him back to the bottom — they jumped (yes, parachutes).
  • Some history of a famous Ford (British of course) van. And then — some famous race car driver/celebrity ( Sabine Schmitz had bet Jeremy she could drive a van around the Nürburgring faster than he did in a brand new Jaguar. So they took her up on it. She got close. (See the wiki entry on her for details of her Top Gear appearances.)

Argh! I was playing with the WordPress iPhone app right before lunch. I put down my iPhone and in a moment of inspired acrobatics knocked over my coffee cup, spilling coffee on my desk – drowning a pad of paper and splashing coffee on my iPhone, headphones (for my iPod touch elsewhere on my desk).

The iPhone seems to have survived. I wiped it off, took it out of it’s protective (but non-waterproof) case and wiped it and the case dry again.

Hopefully, that’s it.

Hopefully no coffee got inside the iPhone and the dreaded moisture sensors (I have Applecare but I don’t think it covers this.).

And, unlike the orange juice incident several weeks ago, my current keyboard (A Digital LK461) survived.

Fingers crossed.

And the WordPress app? Didn’t seem to want to update my blog from there. (But that could be Yahoo’s hosting service which seems slow/glacial when accessing the database WordPress uses.) And it lost the post when it failed to upload.

She got a part (the villain) in her school play!

Posting to my blog using the WordPress iPhone app.

Went shopping after work.

Usual chain of events:

1. Leave work before 6PM.
2. Go to W-mart (Yes, I know it’s not ‘hip’ to shop at the mart, but only liberal socialist types can afford to spend twice as much on food by going to a “regular” grocery store.(And hey! If W-mart employees are so poorly paid that they can’t afford health insurance and have to use Medicaid/Medicare/Emergency room — THAT is coming out of my taxes anyway. So I might as well save the rest of my money.)
3. After shopping — go get gas (the new buggy gets much better gas mileage so the gas trip is only bi-monthly now)
4. Buy a lottery ticket (maybe I’ll win… really.)
5. Car wash (unless- like today, it’s rainy out.)
6. Go home and unload the car.
7. Eat diner – something I just bought.

That would be me. If I don’t start exercising (more), the trend around the middle is headed wider than my shoulders. And not from drinking beer but soda. (I drink more soda than anything alcoholic.)

Starting the move from my old Radio Userland blog at http://radio.weblogs.com/0104508/ to WordPress (It won out over Drupal for ease of startup.)

Should take a few weeks. I found an export tool to get things out of Radio (It was mentioned on the Radio Userland discussion page) Converting From Radio Userland to WordPress.

It isn’t perfect. But I think part of the problem is with Yahoo. It creates a MovableType export file and WordPress can import that

BUT it can’t seem to import every entry at once. 96 on the first try.  Not all of my entries had titles… so I’ll have to deal with those. Easy to fix before importing them (the title info is there, it just didn’t get exported as the title every time)

Done: 27-Feb-2002 — 6-Oct-2009 (1,144 entries imported total) [8-Oct-2009]

(Need to fix the categories being imported also. Multiple categories are being imported as a single category with a really long name. Oops.)

Blank lines in the original are being removed (In Radio, a blank line is treated like a paragraph break.) so long posts? All jammed together.

Occasional duplicate post. Not sure how to catch all of these. Maybe there’s a plugin? 10% or so of the last 2 uploads.

And I still have to move over my stories somehow. And fix dead links (Mostly old photos and references to Radio style ‘stories’.)

And it will require a bit of customization. I like the theme I’m using but there isn’t support for other things I want to do – like put up my fan fiction (There’s NOT a WordPress plugin for that.). And that’ll take time to deal with.