That Not So Fresh Feeling

In about 12 hours I’ll be in the air heading home from what has been a pretty great vacation. Loads of sun (without much burning!), awesome waves, and general relaxation make me happy. Of course it also makes me a bit reticent to head back to work. My only exposure has been the emails flowing to my iPhone, most of which I’ve ignored. We’ll see how I feel on Monday.

I realize this is lame, but I didn’t feel like typing a ton on the iPhone.

Just a quickie while I gather thoughts for a longer post

I need to rid myself of some extraneous electronics. I’m going to throw them up on ebay, I think, but if someone comes across this and wants to buy something, let me know (my email is over there —>).

I’m going to sell:

• an XBox, a couple of controllers, and some games (mostly sports games)
• a Dell Axim x3i PDA (running Windows Mobile 2003, with wireless access and even a fold-up keyboard)
• a less than 9 month old Motorola Q with box and manuals and cable and pretty much everything

If you want something, drop me a note here, on email, or on Twitter.

My iPhone is coming! My iPhone is coming!

I installed Firefox 3 Beta 5. I’ve been running the Firefox 3 Beta for a while now, and it’s been pretty solid. Well, it was less happy today. To paraphrase an episode of Buffy, it might not be fully-baked yet; it may still be cookie dough.

5 crashes in 3 hours. Maybe I should go back to Safari …

So, last week:

• I worked pretty late every night on stuff that, for the most part, has nothing to do with my job
• Worked late enough on Wednesday, that I had to drive all the way to the Garden to not miss the entire Celtics game
• Rather than parking at the T and paying $3, I drove around and finally parked at the Government Center garage for $20
• I missed the first half of the Celtics game
• I then spent 40 minutes in park waiting to get out of the Government Center garage
• On the drive home, because I parked at Government Center, and not Sullivan Square (like I normally do), I took 93N home
• 93N was some of the worst road conditions I’ve ever driven in, leading me to skid towards parked traffic in front of me
• To avoid said parked traffic (already slowed by an accident), I ended up cutting my wheel as hard as possible, resulting in my car doing a 540 degree spin on 93N, catching the rear left bumper against the concrete median and sitting facing into oncoming traffic who had as difficult a time stopping as I did

So not the best week. Topping it off, my poor girlfriend had all of her wisdom teeth out and has been in pain for the better part of 4 days.

Here’s to Monday bringing on something better.

(For what it’s worth, it isn’t all bad. I went to a fun party, got to see the second half of the Celtics win over the Cavs, had a moral victory over a douchebag trying to cut me off in the garage, and got to spend a lot of time with the recovering girlfriend–including watching Blade Runner for the first time. And my car is in pretty good shape, all things being considered.)

So, about 2 years ago, I wrote a post wondering:

I’ve decided what I really need in life is a little application that runs on my laptop that’s hooked up to my stereo. This would make iTunes think that my laptop was an Airport Express, and my laptop would show up as remote speakers in iTunes.

There were a handful of random Sourceforge projects, but nothing that hit reality or worked. Which kinda sucked.

Then I’m dorking around looking for cool Mac stuff this evening after filing my taxes, and what do I find but this gift from the heavens: Airfoil 3.

There’s a Mac version and a PC version, as well as a little app called Airfoil Speakers. That’s the magic bit. I could download Airfoil Speakers, run that on my MacBook Pro, and hook that up to my stereo in my bedroom. At the same time, I could run Airfoil 3 on the PC, and broadcast music–in sync–to my laptop.

Badass. Now, the one downside, of course, is that it’d be $25 x 2 (that’s $50!) for me to get both the Mac and PC versions. I could probably get by with just the PC version (since that’s where my music is), but it’d be cool to have the Mac version as well (though without a second Mac, I really don’t need it). Pretty awesome.

Now, if Rogue Amoeba can create some Airfoil Windows Speakers, then I could take my old laptop out of the closet, have it sit on my stereo, and be a permanent receiver for my iTunes. That’d be pretty darn slick.

Anyway, thanks Rogue Amoeba. One of my most popular post was that fake AirTunes post, which still picks up residual search traffic every week. Maybe if I throw a sale or two your way you’ll hook me up? Really? That’d be great! Thanks so much. You’re the best.

So, I’m trying out MarsEdit, to see if I’ll post more (which I really want to), if I move to using a local editor, rather than always trying to do things through the WordPress web interface.

I have to say that, so far, I’m impressed. It does a nice autoconfigure to get you set up. Then, it knows that if you’re inserting a link, it’s probably on your clipboard, which is pretty bad-ass. Plus, I can do stuff like emphasis and bold with your typical hotkeys. Kinda hot.

It automagically knows my categories, so I can quickly tag this appropriately. That’s pretty cool too.

Note the use of hot and cool to mean nearly the same thing. I’m nothing if not confusing.

There’s also some cool Flickr integration, where I can quickly grab images I’ve uploaded to Flickr and include them in my post. Like this:

Apparently you can also make it use your real blog style for the local preview. I’m going to have to muck around with that.

The only disappointing thing is that being a Mac user now costs me money. All the cool apps cost a little dough. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to shell out the money for this because I’ll post a whole lot more using this interface. Damn you MarsEdit!

Edit 1: The default Flickr bit linked right, but didn’t have a visible image. I had to fix that.
Edit 2: Editing a post is darn easy. I like this.

Happy New Year.

I’ve got a podcast coming soon with my fave songs from ‘07. I hope to do that this week. In the meantime, here are some pics I took with my new camera. (Yay! First new camera since 1999. Thanks Christmas money and giftcards!)

I’ve been super lazy about posting, mostly because I’ve been ridonkulously busy with work and the holidays and all that fun stuff.

But, I try to update my Twitter (if you care). And I’m going to try to post a bit over the next few days of my vaca (top music of ‘07! the drizzling shits that is affiliate marketing! something else!). In the meantime, hope your holidays rocked as much as mine did and the jolly fat man (or whatever the representative of your holiday might be) brought you Jelly Bellys.

I should spend sometime update my del.icio.us links too. Merry Festivus.