/dev/random

Yesterday I bought a Brother HL-1440 laser printer, which Office Depot is selling for $128 plus a $30 mail-in rebate. This is a great printer even at the original $150 price, but you can’t beat a laser printer for under $100.
It can print about 3,000 sheets with a $60 toner cartridge, which makes it [...]

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Instructions on a cat grooming product:
1. wet cat thoroughly
2. apply product and comb through cat’s wet coat.
3. keep cat from grooming for 10 minutes.
4. rinse product thoroughly off of cat.
5. dry cat to make sure (product) is completely off cat.
Of course they left out a few steps. Read the hilarious details here.
Speaking of cats, [...]

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One of my neighbors is vacationing in Mauritius now, which I see has been hit by the tsunami. I hope everyone is OK there.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Tsunami”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/12/27/tsunami/” });

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Ho Ho Ho, originally uploaded by mike3k.

Santa came to our party last night.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Ho Ho Ho”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/12/25/ho-ho-ho/” });

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I now have iTunes library sharing working in Linux, thanks to this article at O’Reilly network. Although the article refers to Ubuntu Linux, I was able to install mt-daapd and howl easily in Debian.
I back up my home directory on the PowerBook to the Linux box, so I pointed mt-daapd to the backup of my [...]

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Via Boing Boing: a great collection of free Hindi film music MP3s with a good introduction to that musical genre. This cheesy music is one of my guilty pleasures
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Bollywood for the skeptical”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/12/23/bollywood-for-the-skeptical/” });

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New Office, originally uploaded by mike3k.

I have my new office pretty much set up now and I love working here. It feels more like a real office and I have enough room for all of [...]

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I had my custom desk and cabinets installed in my office today. I haven’t finished moving everything back in place yet, but it looks great. They have to come back tomorrow to add another keyboard tray; there were supposed to be two but they only installed one.
I have 3 computers I use regularly: a [...]

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Boat Parade, originally uploaded by mike3k.

I went to the boat parade tonight. One of my friends manages a building on the intracoastal, so we were able to get a great close-up view of the parade.
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Before, part 1, originally uploaded by mike3k.

I’m having my office remodeled this week. Here’s what my desk looks like now.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Office remodeling”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/12/18/office-remodeling/” });

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I’m now on the board of my condo association. We had our annual meeting and election tonight. There was a pretty big turnover; only 3 of the current board members were re-elected with 4 new board members.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “I’m on the board”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/12/15/im-on-the-board/” });

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For the past few weeks I’ve been buried in some pretty gnarly code, but it’s finally starting to fall into place. I’m converting some old code which used Open Transport to cross-platform BSD sockets.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Coding”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/12/15/coding/” });

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I just got a very heavy package sent from somewhere close to Vancouver via FedEx marked “Do not open until Christmas”.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “A Christmas Present”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/12/14/a-christmas-present/” });

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It’s the 21st century and the religious fundamentalists are still trying to force Creationism into schools. It’s OK if they want to teach it in a religion class, but creationism has no place in a science or biology class. Evolution is generally accepted by all scientists since there’s sufficient evidence to prove it. Only the [...]

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I finished the last of my holiday shopping today. This is the first time I’ve ever finished early. Usually I wait until the last weekend and go into a panic trying to find the right gifts. Now I have to wrap the gifts (which I’m really bad at) and write my Christmas cards.
I did a [...]

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WorldBeatPlanet and MacMegasite are getting hit pretty hard with comment spam. It looks like the spammers are randomly hitting articles with a low node number. To prevent it, I disabled comments on both sites for all but the most recent articles. I now see that my log is filled with errors like:

Comment: unauthorized comment submitted [...]

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The condo president needed a DVD documenting the tree root damage which broke a major pipe. She video taped the repair job, which I imported into iMovie via FireWire, exported to iDVD and burned the DVD in about an hour. I did it on my old “Sawtooth” G4, which I upgraded to a 1GHz CPU [...]

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I always look forward to New Music Tuesdays in iTunes Music Store and I almost always find something new & interesting. Today I discovered Derek Trucks Band, a great jazz/rock jam band.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “My latest musical discovery”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/12/07/my-latest-musical-discovery/” });

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Mike Doughty’s reissued albums Skittish & Rockity Role are now available in iTunes Music store as a $17.99 double album or individual tracks.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Rockity Roll”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/12/07/rockity-roll/” });

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I work for Absolute Software, as anyone who reads this probably knows. I developed the Mac versions of Computrace & Absolute Track, anti-theft and asset management products. Today someone submitted an article to MacMegasite promoting a competing product. Although MacMegasite doesn’t represent Absolute Software, I don’t feel right allowing someone to promote a competing product [...]

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