Doing a little tweaking to the ol’ blog here.  Picked up a nice responsive design theme for WordPress based on Skeleton.  It’s not perfect, but it’s nice to start with something solid and work from there.

So, have a little look around.  I’ve eliminated some of the busy stuff, and I’ll probably trim it further still.  I’m going to try to get better at consistently blogging.

Rock on, all.

Macrumors links to what they characterize as a dubious claim of an updated iPod Touch with 3G capabilities.

I’d agree this is dubious for a single reason: at that point, I don’t think they’d call it an iPod Touch anymore. Here’s what I think we could see from Apple: no more wifi-only versions of the iPhone or iPad.

At some point, cell network communication chips just don’t cost enough to justify making a separately designed product without them. My theory is that if you want what today is an iPod Touch, you can buy a cheap iPhone. It’ll still be contract free, it’ll still be cheaper – a cheaper, thinner design, that looks like today’s Touch possibly using the last-gen chip instead of the latest-gen. Maybe it doesn’t have a retina display.

And it will have 3G. If you want, you could turn on cell data (voice as well if you want), if you don’t it will still be an iPod Touch.

Carriers could use this model as your cheaper, pre-paid iPhone. Instead of selling the 3Gs, this could be subsidized to cheap-or-free.

Right now, Apple maintains some level of production on three models: the iPod Touch, the 3Gs, and the 4. If you can eliminate one of these lines, still provide a cheap entry-level iPhone that can do double-duty as the Touch – and can become a phone at any time – it seems like it makes sense to do that.

I’ll grant that’s probably crazy. And maybe with LTE on the horizon, you wait until you can do this same thing with LTE instead of 3G. That then also gets rid of your separate Verizon model. On the other hand, maybe you simply use a dual-mode chip.

Just some crazy thoughts from a fanboi.

I guess that could be scary, and there are things that I’m scared about. But being scared, being afraid, is usually about knowing something could happen, that you have no control over, and fearing it out of sheer instinct.

That knowledge doesn’t make all the what-if’s less scary. But it does mean that I don’t need to be blindly afraid of them. Because I can control myself, and my reaction to that fear.

One thing that I’m not worried about is being a good dad. I am actually luckier than most in that I have two really great examples of strong, kind fathers. If I can follow in their footsteps, I’ll be a great father. If I can improve in any way, all the better.

I know the routine for Delivery Day. I know where to go, I have all the numbers in my phone to call, and I know what should happen, and generally what’s likely to go wrong.

So I remain patient and yet anxious. Time is going fast and slow simultaneously.

All this to say, I’m adjusting to a new perspective. I’m excited about the final Harry Potter. I’m awaiting the new iPhone with baited breath. But these kinds of things aren’t even on the same chart as my joy and wonder at becoming a father. This is the next challenge. This is the greatest thing I will ever do. And I can’t wait to get started.

Yo Gabba Gabba “We Are the Robots” from Mixtape Club on Vimeo.

They’re programming our children to love robots.  Also, I had a dream recently about an oven with arms – and it did not end with Will Smith saving the day.  It did not end well at all, actually.

Now is a better time than ever to invest in Robot Insurance.

1. Your eyes are set to stun, but your looks are set to kill.
2. Nice nacelles.
3. I’d love to go warp speed with you, but I’m prepared to go at impulse if you want to take it slow.
4. Are you wearing Orion Slave Girl Perfume?
5. Do you need a ride back to Heaven?  Because I’ve got a starship.  Just sayin’.

Notice I resisted the “Beam me up…” ones.  Feel free to leave your own in the comments.  Also, I think you can add “Wanna make out?” to the end of any of these for added effect.

1. An Armoir full of Trix.
2. A Social Security check written and signed in crayon.
3. A Black-and-White silent film from Pixar.
4. Jello.
5. Medicare.

Stay awesome, Padizi-o’s!

My favorite part?  Tina looks up and belches.  Totally awesome.

As a thank you for the pleasant surprise, I recorded this little track. It might be an inside joke, but I think it holds its own. It’s only thrity seconds, anyway. Listen to it.

Also, I think the “Megaphone” effect in GarageBand could easily help recreate the voice of the Dalek.

Side note; all those friend links are to livejournal. Can’t just follow the trend, pauld, can you?

Not being big day-trippers, Teeny and I were quite tired when we got back. So we decided to take a nap. I woke up at 1:30 am, Sunday. Oh my. Hence, this strange ramble.

So I replaced 4 (four) hard drives on Friday night. Oh, the carnage! I now have a Western Digital 30 GB, IBM Deskstar 120 GB (the actual dead drive), and two Maxtor 100 GB SATA’s on the floor of my office, with a very happy Western Digital 500 GB SATA drive in my old Mac. By the way, this Mac is a dual G4, 500MHz each, and is over 8 years old. With 1.5 GB of RAM, however, she still cranks out blogger posts all like snip-snap. So why mess with a good thing?

Unfortunately, this may be the final stop for this machine. It is currently running Leopard, via the very tricky Install Via Target Disk Mode from a PowerPC Mac Mini. But because I now only have the Serial ATA drive available (using the Sonnet Tempo card), I don’t have Target Disk Mode available to me. In fact, to get this install up and going, I used the fabulous Carbon Copy Cloner, and the power of prayer, to see my old Deskstar’s contents onto the new drive.

I haven’t seen a lock-up now in 36 hours (yay!), but I am now in NIOTM, Nothing Important On This Machine, mode. If for whatever reason this machine is no longer bootable, and I have some key piece of not-backed-up data, I’m 100% screwed. So, nothing goes on this machine that is absolutely vital to my day-to-day. Fortunately, when, not if, I forget this rule, I’ve got Time Machine and a 1TB Time Capsule to save myself.

That said, the machine is running very smoothly after all the hullabaloo. Also, my power bill should be a slightly happier sight, because a) I shut down my computer for a significant chunk of time (days!) and b) I’ve replaced four (4) spinning hard drives with a single HD. In addition, that single HD is a WD “GreenPower” drive, which means that it spins down on its own to 5400 RPM when I’m not using major disk I/O, and spins up to 7200 when needed. How much power does that save? WD says 40%. I’m sure that’s not accurate, but I know I’m saving power by not having the other three drives, so I feel a bit less like an ecological disaster. At least until I put these other drives in a landfill.

By the way, it’s now required that every hard drive box list the number of MP3’s you can store on a hard drive. That is a very important modern metric for space. Of course, along with that number, you need a disclaimer proving that that number is essentially arbitrary. My box’s disclaimer says,

“Examples of the number of photos, songs, and any other files that can
be stored on a hard drive are provided for illustrative purposes only.
Your results will vary based on file size and format, settings, features,
software, and other factors.”

That’s sexy. Mine holds 125,000 MP3s, and if I can’t fit every one of those on there, I’m suing. So, where can I legally aquire 125,000 MP3s, people?

Don’t forget to listen to Twit 154 in which Dvorak will joke about Greenwashing.

Here’s the deal. I applied the 10.5.3 update to my MacBook a few days ago, when it was released. It took a moment, rebooted, and I was back up and running. Nothing bad seemed to have happened. At least, for the first five minutes.

Then my fan started a-crankin’. For no apparent reason. Now, sometimes that’ll happen when Spotlight re-indexes, or when Time Machine says “I’m backin’ up, and nothing on earth will stop me!” So I didn’t think too much of it. Half hour goes by, and now I’m a bit concerned.

I took a gander at the MacRumors forums, which is a great place to look for mac help. A few people had issues with 10.5.3, but nobody really had my issue. So, I put up with it for a few days – this wasn’t hindering my use of the computer, it didn’t seem to slow anything down. Activity monitor didn’t show anything obvious, either. And even at its loudest, the MacBook isn’t very loud.

Typically, I use it plugged in, so battery life is not an issue. But this weekend, I was carrying the ‘book around the house with me. I expect it to usually get around 4 hours of battery life.

With the fan crankin’, I got less than 2. Something is definitely up.

Checked the forums again, checked Activity Monitor again. Nothing obvious. So I did a quick

ps aux

Right at the top of the list, pid #85, was the IPSecuitasDaemon, trying to start up – and eating 94% cpu, whenever I wasn’t doing anything! OS X clearly knew that that was not a particularly important process, but it was a constant process. According to ps, it had tried to launch at startup. Now, Activity Monitor wasn’t showing me that daemon in it’s default view, but I’m sure I could have tweeked it and found the right screen.

So I run

sudo kill 85

and sure enough, the fan noise fades itself out. And my battery life index jumps significantly.

Point of caution: Be careful with that sudo. su-DON’T use it unless you know what you’re doing. The ’85′ comes from ps, it’s the pid, or Process ID. And kill terminates the process – the UNIX equivalent of Force Quit (in fact, often works better than Force Quit if something is really misbehaving).

Well, that was an extraordinarily geeky post. Rock & Roll all!