So my good friend Allison invited me to her house in Worcester for a cookout. Good times. I went home in a good mood.
The next morning, mother woke me up. Did you get in an accident last night? she asked. Now, I didn’t remember an accident. I wasn’t that out of it. It made me wake with a start though.
It turns out that while I was parked on that side street in Worcester, someone managed to hit my car. This is the 4th time it’s been hit while it was stationary. Line right up ladies and gentlemen. See the car that only gets dented when not in motion.
This means that I won’t be able to go anywhere while it’s in the shop. No softball games. That’s depressing. It also means that I’m likely to spend my $500 deductible because some jackass in a stupid SUV couldn’t judge the size of his vehicle.
Growl is an awesome piece of freeware that supplies a universal event notification system. Sounds complicated, but basically, it gives applications alternate ways to tell you things.
One of the new features in the 0.7 version is the ability to send these events to networked computers via Bon Jour. For example, let’s say you have a downloading application that issues events upon completion. However, you kicked that download off at your desktop and you want to use your laptop. You don’t want to babysit your desktop to know when it reached completion.
With Growl now, you can designate that messages on your desktop are sent to your laptop. That’s wicked cool. However, what happens if you designate your laptop to get your desktop’s events and vice versa? You get an endless loop. Imagine two kids playing catch. The desktop passes the event to the laptop. Then the laptop passes it back. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Well, unlike real kids, Growl doesn’t get bored playing catch. It keeps going forever and ever. This gets old really fast. At any rate, until this is fixed, try to avoid loops with Growl network notifications.
I just couldn’t resist posting up this piece of spam.
Subject: please call me Frank
From: “Glenn” azjuoyjxqjhm@aanda.datanet.hu
Hi.,
Would you like at least $1500.00 to $3500.00 per day just for
returning phone calls? I do!
If you have a telephone and can return calls you are fully
qualified for this
program.
Thank you,
Johanna
Okay, so which name should I use when I call the number?
One of the neatest things I’ve found lately is the proliferation of websites to manage aspects of your life publicly. Seeing as I’m not totally privacy paranoid, it’s a fun hobby. I recently discovered All Consuming which was created by Erik Benson. It’s a neat way to track books, music, and movies that you’re reading, listening to, and watching respectively.
Robot Co-op, the company that runs 43 Things, bought it up. This means that the two services will soon be intertwined. 43 Things is one of the sources on Tag Central but unfortunately All Consuming is not because they don’t supply RSS feed for their tags. Hopefully that will change.
Erik also does a very neat thing with his site. He collects all his data from many sites into a single place using Bloglines. It’s ultra-slick. I almost do this with Feedburner, collecting my Flickr and Del.icio.us data into the feed. However, at press time, they still don’t allow addition of arbitrary RSS feeds, which is really disappointing. I think I’ll start an aggregation a la Erik’s site sometime soon so I don’t feel pressed to publish all the time. I’ll keep you updated.
I got home really late last night. It wasn’t because of anything even mildly exciting. Rather, my left front tire decided to die. I noticed a slow leak lately (like a couple PSI over a couple weeks) but it decided to shit the bed yesterday.
I stopped at a gas station near work. Guess what. It was broken. I put 75 cents into a broken air pump. That flipped my Hulk rage switch. I had to put the donut on the car and drive home.
Ugh.
