Month: December 2007

Cycle, Cycle Two (thousand and 7)

I finished out the year with about two hours on the bike. Not tough hours by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a good ride from the house out past the Borough and back through downtown Mystic. No major insights, ‘cept for an appreciation for a good latte at the end of a ride, and the eternal quandary about how much is the right amount to wear to balance being cold at the beginning and being too hot during the ride. I erred on the side of being too cold, and had chilly toes at the end.

While I’m at it, I outta sum up 2007, and review my resolutions. The short version?

Cow and Boy Comic StripThe longer version is below the break:

Continue reading Cycle, Cycle Two (thousand and 7)

My wife can kick my *$$

So, it’s official: Missy’s a far, far better runner than I am, or likely will ever be.

We’ve both given blood in the last week, and set out to run together this morning. Every downhill, she pulled away from me, and pretty much the whole first part of the run, I felt like she was really pushing me.

But, running faster’s the only way to get faster, so I hung.

We headed over Cow Hill towards downtown, and swung back north on River Road. I tried to bail just south of IH-95, but Missy goaded me into keeping on. About mile 5, I stopped and walked for a while as she went up about a half mile, and back about a quarter. I made it the two miles home.

I still love running with Missy, but it’s a different flavor. Now, I feel like I’m running out of desperation – need to get skinny so she doesn’t leave me for the pool boy (But Billy, you don’t have a pool! Tell me about it. Still can’t figure out why we keep paying for pool service…)

All kidding aside, life’s great. I’m taking about 10 days off, we’ve got company coming, and we’re going to trek into the Big City (NY) to take the kids to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I’m gonna get to see the cube at the entrance to the Apple Store outside of FAO Schwartz. And, we get to ride the train.

Running’s been great while on vacation – good run on Sunday, and Missy got me out the door on Monday, even though I wanted to rest. Christmas was good – I’d convinced Missy that we needed a Wii back in September, so it’s been sitting in our basement since October. I dig it – it’s as revolutionary a concept in video games as the Atari 2600 was. And the good folks who write games for Nintendo seem to be able to avoid the siren’s call of looks over gameplay. Not that the games aren’t pretty.

Gaah – 18 weeks until OKC. This is going to suck.

Merry, Merry Christmas

Your Daily Pearls Before Swine

Seriously, though – Pastis knocks this one out of the ballpark.

The “Merry Christmas” part, though, is in the realization that we aren’t bound by Airplaneseatreclinology any more.

Oh, and Deene’s got a wonderful post about Christmas.

Postscript: Pastis proves he’s a softie at heart with my absolute favorite holiday special moment of all time:
Pearls Before Swine apes Charlie Brown's Christmas Special

F’n Webkinz

So, my kids got Webkinz for Christmas, and there’s a little snag.

Using a Mac, OS 10.5.1, with a fully patched version of Safari 3.0.4 and a fresh install of Flash Player 9, I cannot see the confirmation code when trying to register a new account.

Cannot get confirmation for Webkinz login

I tried using a system with Ubuntu 7.10, Firefox 2.0.0.11, and Flash 9 as well, but could not see the login.

The minimum requirements are:

Windows Requirements

  • PIII 1.2 MHz or higher
  • Windows OS 2000/XP
  • RAM: 512MB recommended
  • Browsers: Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0, AOL Explorer 1.5
  • Monitor Resolution: 1024×768
  • High Speed Internet Required
  • Adobe Flash 9

Mac Requirements

  • 1.2 MHz or higher
  • Mac OS X 10.3
  • RAM: 512MB recommended
  • Browsers: Safari 1.2.3 or higher, Firefox 1.5
  • Resolution: 1024×768
  • High Speed Recommended
  • Adobe Flash 9

I clearly meet the Mac requirements, yet when I try to register – Bupkis.
To make matters better, you can’t even request help from Webkinz without having created an account (I deleted my email and the Webkinz code before taking the screenshot):
Send Help request to Webkinz
While I’m thrilled to see that Webkinz is trying to work with Macs – decent low end specs as their minimum requirements, I will not purchase any more Webkinz until they actually are compatible, or can tell me what’s wrong with my machines.
And I do have to give them Kudos – on my Ubuntu machine (Firefox and Flash 9), everything was working flawlessly until the same breakpoint I got on my Mac. So it does look like Webkinz is making an effort to be cross platform.
Postscript: I tried to do this with Parallels and an XP virtual machine, but that was running IE 7, so it didn’t work. Finally, our computer for running Quicken, a Windows 2000 machine, was able to get us logged in. Not quite sure what the trouble was.

Elmo’s Christmas Countdown

Worth seeing. List of interesting bits:

  • Jamie Foxx and Elmo doing the hip-hop version of the Nutcracker Suite
  • Probably the first fart joke I’ve seen in a Christmas Special
  • The Sopranos playing Bert and Ernie
  • “Christmas Chutzpa”

Gripe with iApps

So, I’ve got my first major bone of contention with Apple’s iApps, iPhoto in particular.

I’ve been trying to burn a CD with some pictures from the Church’s Christmas Pageant to share with the Christian Ed director and another woman at the church. Which should be as simple as selecting the album, clicking “Burn CD”, and getting asked how, exactly, I want to burn the CD. In my case, I shot in RAW with my DSLR, and wanted to burn to JPG to share with folks who just want the snaps.

Instead, I had to:

  1. “Export” the pictures as JPG to a folder on my hard drive (This should have been the only step, IMO – I should have been able to use this dialog to burn the CD)
  2. Create a burn folder in Finder
  3. Drag the exported folder to the burn folder
  4. Burn the disk

I wouldn’t use this to suggest that the bloom is off the Mac rose, but merely to suggest an improvement.