scot hacker's foobar blog

Just noticed it’s 5:00 and it’s not dark out yet. That means winter is already half over. But hey, I haven’t gone snowboarding yet this year. Will have to rectify that.

Oh – welcome to . He and I go way back… my birdhouse and his enterzone were some of the earliests arts and literature sites on the web, and we hooked up in a private mailing list called antiweb that i’m still part of. Interesting that LJ kind of manifests some of the web’s collaborative possibilities that we used to get so fired up about on antiweb.

Whoo! Got offered a teaching gig today. I’ll be running a four-week class on database-backed web sites this April. It will be counted as part of my regular job, not as a separate job, but that’s okay – a terrific opportunity.

After two months, I finally got my hands on the jschool web server today and set up Apache, PHP, MySQL. Should go into production with it tomorrow. It’s hard to get used to how slowly things move in the university universe. I really wish we could have done this whole thing on OS X rather than 2K, but hey, at least it won’t be running IIS.

In other news, Amy is still pregnant ;) Hard to believe that in 3/4 of a year, our life will be all about sippy cups.

Number of friends who accompanied Amy and I to breakfast at Mama’s Royal Cafe’ : 2 (Mike and Chris)

Number of delicious cookies left in the container Chris gave for us for Christmas: 3

Number of houses Amy and I looked at today: 4

Number of houses we saw that we would actually want to live in: 0

Number of messages on our answering machine when we got back, offering congratulations on our pregnancy: 8

Number of miles Amy and I ran yesterday morning: 3

Number of days since Amy had her last cigarette: 3

Number of days I have left to quit smoking, per agreement: 24

Number of weeks until our friends Will and Sage birth their own little bubba: 2

Number of PowerMacs our landlord got dirt-cheap at a job site: 2

Number of landlord’s new PowerMacs capable of booting from CD: 0

Number of pounds per square inch of pressure I made sure was in the tires of our boring Toyota this afternoon: 33

Number of days before I pick up the now-fixed motorcycle I pranged up last June: 3

Number of people who have commented recently that my current LJ picture makes me look overly serious, or like an escaped prisoner: 3

Spent the day at MacWorld Expo, just did the exhibit halls. Got a kick out of AppleSkinz — they make plastic G4 case overlays like tribal tatoos, American flags, licking flames, etc. Would be an okay idea, but most of the designs look like they come straight out of the Harley scene. The appearance of the people behind the booth would tend to verify that gross, and very unfair generalization. They’ll do custom ones out of EPS files too.

Saw the new iMacs – in person pretty much what you would expect after seeing the pix and videos. Still feel torn about that design. They’re extremely functional – gotta hand it to Apple on this one – they actually put function over form for once. I’m sure a lot of people love the design, but it reminds me too much of the furniture we all had in the early 70s, all that molded white plastic curved stuff out of Kubrick.

Hunted down and found a good deal on a combo USB/FireWire external drive enclosure. $99. Going to format it FAT32 for PnP compatibility b/w macs and win machines, carting MP3s around, backups, etc.

Went to see David Pogue (“OSX: The Missing Manual”) speak. He was pretty good and I learned a few tricks, but he seemed like an Apple schill, too obviously skirting problems in OS X and talking only about the good stuff. The clincher was during the Q&A. I axed him about his personal OSX wish list for future releases. He claimed he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to see improved. Riiiiiigggghhhhttttt.

Stopped at the Omni Group booth and thanked them for OmniWeb’s great cookie viewer, which was invaluable debugging php cookie problems the other day. Got a demo of Graffle – great app, but can’t think of a personal need for it. Bought a boxed copy of OmniWeb at educational show discount.

Bumped into an old work mate from the Adamation crew. Made me feel kind of nostalgiac, but not really.

Just occurred to me — how long before people start decorating their new iMacs up like Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away?

The J-School is hosting a seminar on multimedia reporting for the Maynard Institute. I’m standing by for technical assistance, and will be teaching an HTML class on Wednesday morning. So far it’s going like clockwork. Assisted some students today getting familiar with a DV camera – took them out into the field…. MacWorld was going on so we accosted some Mac users in a cafe to get opinions. Well, not everyone you talk to has opinions on this sort of thing.

Will attend MacWorld on Thursday. Some pretty big announcements today, but it looks like Apple grossly overhyped the whole thing. Or rather, all of the announcements were for the consumer market – the pro market didn’t really hear anything exciting.

Played with iPhoto tonight. Fairly impressive image database, though in its current form it won’t replace ImageRodeo, ACDSee, or Photoshop for me, so I don’t see myself using it all that much.

There are about a million ways to set and parse cookies, and every browser handles them differently. Spent all day doing PHP cookie tricks for user authorization for our intranet. Think I finally nailed it for all browsers. Days like this, you want to pull out your hair (or pull *some*one’s hair anyway). Then when you’re done there’s this great satisfaction.

I break horses… ( – smog )

Forgot to post the other day what a trip it was that none of my nieces had ever seen a turntable or LPs. I was replacing a belt on Amy’s parent’s old Dual and the girls all gathered around. What’s that? You put a disc in there? I think they were unclear on the concept because I came back later and the platter was on the floor (they had seen me remove the platter to replace the belt). But we had a good dance party. They had never played air guitar before either.

The later you’re born, the more history you have to work with.