Category: General

Automator is a feature of Mac OS X Tiger that allows a user to set up “workflows” – sets of tasks, the kinds of things that a user tends to do over and over again. It’s kind of hard to explain without giving an example… Apple’s website says:

You can easily automate tasks such as renaming a large group of files, resizing dozens of images to fit an iPhoto slideshow or creating iCal birthday events using Address Book contacts, then repeat those tasks again and again.

I haven’t used it until just this weekend… when I set up a workflow that lets me get around the copy protection in a shareware game I downloaded.

I found it would only let me play 20 games without paying for it. But if I delete the Preferences file and the files in ~/Library/Application Support/ – voila! It resets the game!

I’ve done this 5 or 6 times, and then realized I could set up Automator so that I could have a contextual menu item that deletes them all in one step! Easy-peasy!

…so, is that lazy, or cheap?

I remember, when I was very young, like 4 or 5 or 6, that my sister and I had gerbils as pets.

And I remember that they would get out of the cage sometimes and hide behind the piano.

And as I look back on those ancient memories, I find myself wondering:

Why?

Why did we have a piano?!

My parents didn’t play the piano, at least not that I ever remember.

I remember getting a guitar for a birthday or Christmas present and having a lesson, but I don’t remember having more than one.

I know my sister did go on to play flute and saxaphone in high school and a bit after.

But no piano.

We were not rich, my family, when I was growing up, and so, it seems odd that my parents would spend so much money on… a piano.

The piano in the apartment on Spencer Creek Road will forever remain a mystery to me.

If you’re a blogger or writer and you sometimes feel you have no idea what to blog about, I’d like to share some of the tricks I’ve learned over the years on how to combat writer’s block.

• The first and best trick is to write about not having anything to write about. Just tell yourself you’re going to sit down and write about your current state for a set period of time, like 10 minutes. After a while, you’ll probably hit a groove and be able to transition into some other topic. And if not, you’ll still have 10 minutes of writing that you can post.
• Almost all bloggers surf, right? Just collect some of the links and other posts you’ve come across and turn a list of those into a post of your own. You give other bloggers links and get karma that way, too.
• Have someone else give you three random words (or, for the more advanced, three random sentences) that you now have to incorporate into a story or post. I’ve written many a story this way, and I’ve returned the favor for other friends, as well.
• Post a picture you’ve taken.
• Post a picture someone else has taken and write about it.
• Go searching for pictures that match a theme.
• Make a random list of things.
• Look through your archives and find a post that needs a follow-up. Feeling down one time? Talk about how you got over it (or didn’t get over it). Digging through your old posts is a gold mine for material.

I’m sure there’s more but that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. Also, my 10 minutes are up.

Feel free to share your own ideas in the comments!

This post is all about “claiming” my blog over at Technorati.

It’s a complicated process I don’t quite completely understand but will allow me to have super-powers and possibly become immortal.

Technorati Profile

I said I don’t understand it completely! Stop looking at me like that.

I’m just doing what they tell me.

Jack Bog’s Blog recently had a traumatic failure. Seems the host for Prof. Bogdanski’s site… lost everything. I don’t know any more details than that, but it seems more like catastrophic incompetence than maliciousness.

Luckily, a friend of the site was able to recover most of Jack’s old posts, along with much of the comments. Those are currently archived here.

The main reason I’m posting this is to simply say, as I did in the comments over there, that on the internets, nothing is truly ever lost. Between Google caches and the Wayback Machine, once it’s on there, it’s there for ever. Well, a long time, anyway.

But the second reason I’m posting this is to remember a piece of software Paul used to reconstruct the site: Warrick, a perl script that searches the various caches and archives for a specific site.

Could be useful in the future… maybe…

Of course, Caleb is almost religious about backups so it would take a very catastrophic event for me to lose this site. But, again, better safe than sorry….

My day today has been defined by Greg Graffin’s amused cynicism, Thom Yorke’s angsty alienation, and John Popper’s plea for simple human contact.

No wonder I’m all fucked up.

Since it appears, from research (I’m still looking for examples to link to – for right now I’m just making a note for myself) that most organisms, from the simplest bacteria to complex creatures like, say, human beings, modify their behavior more easily when rewarded for positive actions, rather than being punished for negative actions, my goal for myself is to begin training myself to ignore my “bad” actions, to the point of distracting myself and avoiding thinking or dwelling on them… while simultaneously creating a reward system for positive actions.

Harder than it might sound. Still seems worthwhile, though.

So, lately I’ve been thinking about income. Specifically, are there any ways for me to bring in more income that doesn’t involve working overtime at the County. Y’know, start my own side business for fun and profit.

Here’s the brainstorming list I came up with. It’s a work in progress.

• Credit card arbitrage
• Stock market
• Writing magazine articles / short stories
• Technical writing
• Publishing a novel
• Blogads or similar on my website
• Running a webhost or server
• Computer consulting
• Teaching night classes
• Playing online poker
• Book scouting
• Online surveys
• eBay
• Digitizing pictures/videotapes
• Being a driver for strippers late-shift entertainers
• DJ-ing
• Selling artwork; photos, paintings, etc (my own or others’)
• Laying out resumes or flyers for others
• Movie reviews / music reviews

When brainstorming, I didn’t censor any idea, so some of those may seem a little shady. I’m not saying I’m going to do all of them. And almost none of them would be enough to completely replace my current job, at least not in the next year or two, I think.

But if I could combine several of them and get a steady income from them, I could string them into a satisfactory replacement for the 9-5 grind, and regain some of my independence.

And maybe this list will give ideas to any of my readers who are out there looking for work. If you’re in business for yourself you have much more control over your time and focus. The downside is that any benefits have to be provided by yourself, too; but it would be money to tide one over until they landed that awesome corporate job.

Sorry it’s been so quiet around here. I spent a few days at the beach with family last weekend, and since then I just haven’t been feeling the urge to write.

Don’t look at me like that. It happens. It’s normal.

There’s so much I want to blog about. Got a couple of posts in drafts that I’ll finish this weekend. So, we will shortly be returning to the “new post at least every day”, of that you need not fear.

I’ve got some good pictures to post, too… but the camera is inaccessible until after work. How’s that for a tease?

Waking in the middle of the night to find a warm black fuzzy drooling purring cat nestled in my armpit was both disorienting and comforting.