Oh, sweet jesus…

Nintendo is running a truly bizarre contest right now. If you sign up for a nintendo.com account and then go to http://www.touchingisgood.com/ you can order a severed mannequin hand. What, you may ask, is a severed mannequin hand good for…outside of giving you the occasional nightmare? Well, if you record a video of your mannequin hand out in the world and submit it to Nintendo you could end up winning a DS or cash. Right.

I just ordered my mannequin hand. It’s going to go in my office right next to my Eric Rudder bobblehead.

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March 30, 2005

The Deep Humor of Babelfish

There was a thread on Italiamac earlier this month about iRooster. Since it was entirely in Italian, and the amount of Italian I know at this point is barely enough to purchase a cappucino, I turned to the always reliable Babelfish.

There is something of an inner beauty to the horribly mangled translations that it spits back at you, almost like an Woodie Allen movie…

I found one that particularly delighted me: (apologies to Dan46)

I am using rooster… wide awake me the morning with music. But he is to share… who has orecchie in order to mean means… ical not risveglia the mac from the state of stop, irooster yes!

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March 29, 2005

Chimp Tunes: Flipping the Switch

Visiting www.chimptunes.com will now take you to the Chimp Tunes website on sixDollarChimp.

Also, I have now added an RSS feed for each of the four Chimp Tunes categories that have been defined. I’ve been using them for a while now in my aggregator (NewsGator, in case any cares) and it’s pretty cool to see what people are listening to, as they listen to it.

I need to look into building some kind of hook into my MT installation to show the last five songs played on the side here. That’d be kinda fun :)

More Chimp Tunes stuff coming as fast as I can dream it up and implement it (the latter is proving to be more of a sticky point than the former… I have tons of ideas at this point about how to improve Chimp Tunes).

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March 29, 2005

It’s only a matter of time

It’s only a matter of time before this particular guy is ready for primetime… And by primetime I mean the market that happens to be 33 times larger than the one that I’m serving currently.

iRooster in the designer

It almost boggles the mind in a way: 33 times more people use Windows than the Mac, and I’ll have a chance to target a sizable chunk of them. Wow.

Anyway, it will be a while before iRooster is available for Windows, but it’s definitely coming along. I have to say, the speed of developing in Visual Studio (2003, not Whidbey. Whidbey’s actually much faster) is truly impressive. I’m able to work far more effectively in Everett than I can in XCode. This is primarily due to the tight and super-effective integration of the Forms Designer with the backend code, and the ease of working with managed code (in such a beautiful language too!)

It will be several months before iRooster for Windows is available (which will probably start off at v2.5, but we’ll see). You know the 90-90 rule, the first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time. The second 90% takes the other 90% of the time. If you go waaaay back to August 2003 you’ll see where I was griping about how much work it takes to really polish an application for commercial release. iR for Windows will be no different.

Also, a few notes about system requirements:
I expect to require at least Windows 2000, just because I don’t expect my target market to still be running Windows 98 (or ME for that matter). Basically, if you haven’t upgraded your OS in the past 7 years, chances are you’re not big on buying shareware. Please correct me if I’m wrong on this. I’d love to be challenged on this.

I will require v1.1 of the .Net Framework to be installed. I’d love to use VS 2005 for this project, but I don’t want to tie myself to a currently unreleased version of the Framework (as beautiful and wonderful as I think it is). Ostensibly, one or two revisions after the initial release will require 2.0. 2.0+VS 2005 makes a number of things that I’d like to support incredibly easy (like using the system’s Icon Title Font, UI layout with Snaplines, possibly ClickOnce, etc.)

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March 27, 2005

Ax Shims

fucker.JPG

You probably don’t want to know…

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March 26, 2005

Stef’s Silly Survey

My friend Stef filled out this silly collection of information about herself on her LiveJournal and I’m going to do the same.

Name: Aaron Brethorst
Age: 22
Gender: Male
Birthday: July 4
Zodiac: Cancer, duh.
Height: 6 feet, thanks.
hair: brown.
eyes: hazel

**FAVORITES**
Food: Japanese, Pagliacci’s pizza, Gelato.
color: VSCOLORS_TOOLWINDOW_BORDER
Season: Spring!
Band: Right now? Probably Green Day or Radiohead.
Singer: Beats me…
Movie: Depends entirely on my mood.
TV Show: Alias, wooooo!!!!
Day of the week: Friday, woooo!!!!!!!
article of clothing: My high-top Chucks.
Body part of opposite sex: Legs. (except for Stef. I love her nose.)
Body Part on you: ???
indoor activity: Sleeping.
outdoor activity: walking, veg’ing in the sun.
place: El Diablo or Kerry Park.
dream job: Gee, maybe being a Program Manager at Microsoft ;-) .

**Which is Better**
Sunrise or sunset: Sunset
Hot or cold: Eww. Neither.
Day or night: Night.
Boys or Girls: Girls
planned or spontaneous: Planned
Pain or no feeling at all: Pain
Love or Hate: Love
TV or movies: Movies (except for Alias, wooooo!!!!!)
Pool or Spa: Pool
buried or cremated: Cremated
One partner or many: One
Beer or Weed: Mac and Jack’s, thanks.
Dance or Sing: Sing in my car.
Plane or Train: Plane.
Truck, car, or van: Car
School or church: School
Big group or small group: Small
Baseball or Football: Soccer.
Soccer or basketball: Soccer.
Ugly and Smart or Attractive and stupid: Ugly and Smart
Phone or in person: Email.
Blond or brunette: Brunette
annoying or boring: Boring
Sweet or Salty: Sweet
Sex, drugs, rock & roll–or–$, power, respect: I’ll take stupid questions for $400, Alex.
Love or Money: Love
Big house or nice car: Big House (have you seen the housing prices in Seattle? Jeez.)
kids or no kids: Kids
beach, mountains, or forest: Mountains.
Coke or Pepsi: Coke
Dogs or Cats: Cats
Bath or shower: Shower
Soft or Hard: Firm, thanks (pillows)
City or Country: City
Pen or pencil: Pen
Destiny or choice: Choice

**FINISH THE SENTENCE**
Pamela Anderson… is plastic.
Eminem…needs better hair.
Fred Durst…paid me ten bucks.
Christina Aguilera…is creepy
Britney Spears…is just pathetic.
MTV…is dull.
Metallica….’s band members are still alive?.
Girls…are fun.
Guys…aren’t interesting to me.
Drinking beer…and listening to the Fiasco.
Love…that Joker.
Parties…are overrated.
Sleeping…is a luxury.
Chris Rock…is funny.
Hanson…scares me. Seriously.
God…i need a bagel.

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March 22, 2005

World+Dog – Redux

There’s been lots of chatter in print and on blogs over the past week about iRooster.

Jonathan on the RAD blog likes iRooster.
So does Amber from TechTV.
Joe likes my new icon for iRooster.
Brian digs iRooster too, and reminds me that I need to create some “Year of the iRooster” marketing material.
Josh from the Apple Blog loved iRooster.
Macslack says it’s slick and flexible.

Oh yeah, and there was a nice little shout-out for iRooster in MacHome Magazine’s Q and A section this month. I’m going to get that one framed ;-) .

Nice.

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March 22, 2005

Windows Media Center Edition 2005: Code 13 and 33 Errors

I just wanted to take a minute to blog this so that anyone else who gets stuck by it doesn’t need to go through all of the rigamarole I did to solve it.

If you run into issues with synchronizing your TV program guide in Windows Media Center 2005, and the issue is either a Code 13 or 33 error do the following:
1. Open up the Date/Time control panel.
2. Make sure your date and time are properly set. (if they weren’t, try downloading the program guide again).
3. Click on the 3rd tab, which controls network time synchronization.
4. Try sync’ing to time.windows.com or the NIST server.
5a. If this fails, make sure that Port 37 is open on your firewall.
5b. If this succeeds, I have no clue what’s wrong. Sorry :(
6. Once Port 37 (Network Time Protocol) is open, you should be all set and your program guide should download quite happily.

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March 21, 2005

YT and Chevette

I just found a fascinating personal account of being a bike messenger over on Kuro5hin. Well worth the read. It’s also good to know that there are certain things that would be undeniably cool to do, but for which I will never have the chops.

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March 20, 2005

Booyah! Take that, Penny Arcade!

:)

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March 20, 2005