Dave Kellam

I got back to Kingston a day or two ago, but haven’t been able to access the internet. My housemate has the router and modem in his room and decided to lock the door before he left. The problem is that he decided to unplug the router before he left, which meant no internet access for me. Jerk.

Now I’m off to Quebec City over new years, so I won’t be back online for awhile. I’ll get back and have a day or so of relax time and then Golden Words needs to be edited. That means your staffers. Be there on Sunday, the fourth, or behold the wrath of a thousand frogs eating spaghetti. Hope you understand — new layout software, means it’s going to be interesting. And classes start soon too. Enjoy the rest of the holdidays.

Art Renewal Centre, the place to find high-res photos of paintings and such (via filmmaker). And 100% Muon Proof, the place to find low-res animated gifs of Donald Rumsfeld scratchin’.

Christmas was allegedly held yesterday and I received some objects. A bunch of clothes, a stocking containing large quantities of candy and oral hygiene products, and a shiny new digital camera, more details will be reported as the story unfolds.

I’ve been spending time in front of the computer but a lot of it has been trying to write an application to upload screencaptures to the website. I think I bit off a bit more than I could chew to start off with though. I decided to start off with an applescript program rather than diving into objective c, although I doubt it would have mattered much. I have the initial interface created, and it kind of works, i’m just having trouble getting it to read the values out of the text fields. I think my problems lie more in trying to make it so the computer saves all the preferences before I made sure everything actually worked.

Beyond that, there’s isn’t anything of much importance to mention. I’ve been at home, I’ve been sleeping a lot. They have good food here, that’s a plus. I’ve spent time in malls trying to get some shopping done too, that can be a trying experience around this time of year.

I love my cordless trackball; it really makes sense for a trackball to be cordless, you can lean back and rest in on the arm of a chair and surf away. Now the downside to having a cordless device is when you forget half of it somewhere. I brought the transmitter home but left the trackball on my desk. The lack of computer shops in Brockville means that Dave had to buy a relatively standard and boring two button mouse from microsoft, blah. I also picked up a pci usb 2.0 hub, my external powered hub has been really flaky and likes to lock up the system when I sync the palm or camera. I haven’t installed it yet though.

On another note, do any of you mac freaks know a good way to automate taking screen captures and uploading them? Actually, my biggest annoyance is the pdf file that the standard mac screencapture keystroke generates. I could write a folder action that converts the pdf to a jpg and attach it to the desktop. I could probably use curl or something to upload it too. I haven’t had much luck finding one, although I know a number of them exist for windows. Oh, folder actions are pretty cool if you haven’t played with them. Here’s a good one for attaching to the desktop, it will convert read only files to writeable (if you drag attachments from Mail to the Desktop, it makes them read only.

Check out the Excel love letter at the end of this post, it made me laugh. The post itself has a point, which is that weblog posts tend to have too much metadata and not enough of whatever that person is trying to talk about. It’s also kind of funny that the post itself is kind of hard to read because there’s a so much crap strewn in the middle. Gargh, brain!

Of course I’ve been done for awhile now but have failed to post much of anything. Haven’t really been up to much, just taking it easy. Stuck around in Kingston to see Return of the King, as Brockville is sorely lacking in the theatre department. Apparently they’re going to have one in by 2005 though, just about the time I could care less. As far as the movie goes, it held up well and wasn’t a disappointment. There’s the standard “The ending drags” complaint, but it’s more the sitting on your ass for three hours. He should have saved a longer cut for dvd, or at least put an intermission in. On the plus side, the theatre didn’t have any previews attached to the movie.

I’m back home for awhile now, a day earlier than expected. My dad was given tickets to a hockey game tomorrow night, so it looks like that’s what I’m doing. Nothing much new, although I did add the BlogTimes bar to the page. It gives a visual indication of when most of my posts are, or at least it would if I managed to write more than once every couple days.