Over 25? Yer too old.

If you're one of the people who thinks that there's no age discrimination in the tech biz, go read this help wanted ad posted on Craig'sList. And then explain to me why on earth one of their top requirements is "recent college grad."

Live and dine in LA?

We're going to be in the Los Angeles/Orange County area this weekend, and we currently have Friday night free. Anyone up for dinner? Let us know.

And to answer the next question, yes, of course we'll be back in time to see Alton Brown in Santa Rosa on Sunday. Barring any Jet Blue disasters, that is.

PowerBook Battery Exchange

From Apple, there's a new 15-inch PowerBook G4 Battery Exchange Program:

Apple is voluntarily recalling certain lithium ion rechargeable batteries that were sold worldwide from January 2004 through August 2004 for use with 15-inch PowerBook G4 (Aluminum) notebook computers.

There's more info on the Web page above, including what serial numbers you need to check for and where to find them. For once, me being an early adopter paid off! (whew)

BloggerCon

I just got sweet-talked into registering for BloggerCon. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a free conference within driving distance.

Just a word of warning, though: it takes place on Nov. 6^th, only 4 days afte the election. Depending on how the election goes, I may be on the lookout for folks to get very, very drunk with. Don't know who I am? Just look for the red-headed woman with the large bottle of tequila.

Happy Birthday Benjamin

We here at Backup Brain would like to send big Happy Birthday wishes to Benjamin Warner Fleishman.

Textmate announced

I've blogged previously about my love/hate/love relationship with BBEdit, so I'm looking forward to checking out a new OS X text editor, TextMate.

Need an editor which feels like it was built for OS X, allows end user innovation through heavy customization, supports easy macros, configurable syntax highlight, column selection, foldings, and many other "standard" editor features?

Lots more about it, including movies of it in action, can be found here. (Via Steve)

Clicker vs. 10.3.5

Over at O'Grady's PowerPage, Emory Lundberg covers Salling Clicker vs. 10.3.5 HID Support. And over at MobileWhack, he wrote Mac OS X 10.3.5 Gives a Free 'Clicker'. I don't have a Sony Ericsson K700 or S700, so I really appreciate it when other people do my work for me!

Contribute 3 shipping

Because Tom doesn't do enough self-promotion...

Macromedia announced yesterday that Contribute 3 is now shipping. That means, of course, that Macromedia Contribute 3 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide will be shipping shortly, so go get your order in.

Wired Style

Wired says:

Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the "I" in internet.

At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.

Backup Brain house style, however, will remain (respectively) Internet, Web, and 'net. Why? Because we like it that way, darn it.

Letter of the week

We enjoy our local rural weekly paper for a variety of reasons, but my favorite bit in this week's issue was this letter to the editor. Go read it, it's priceless. How many errors can you spot?

Mailman question of the day

I'm not the first person to notice that open source documentation is an oxymoron, but today's frustration for me could be a learning experience for someone else, so I'm blogging it.

Problem: you're running Mailman, and neither of the template tags <MM-Digest-Pw-Box> or <MM-Digest-Submit> display as you'd expect on the user options page (i.e., they don't display anything at all). Looking at the so-called documentation just says "It is important to note that within the source there are embedded Mailman fields that are inserter [sic] on-the-fly when the user loads the page. You can identify the Mailman fields because they are enclosed in angle brackets and are of the form <MM-Field-Name>". Of course, nowhere in any of the docs is there a list of what those field names are, or what they stand for.

Solution: you've got a template file from an older version of Mailman that you're trying to use with a newer version. The answer is to find someone with the updated version of the template and use that instead—it's considerably more advanced. If you can't get it from anywhere, just ask me for it, as I've got it now.

BTW, if anyone knows where I could have found this answer anywhere online, please let me know. I'm expecting that I'm going to have a lot more Mailman (aka pairList) questions in the future, and I'm getting very frustrated that there doesn't seem to be a good resource for what I'd think would be common problems. Or maybe I'm just the lucky duck who only runs into uncommon ones?

ReplayTV gets the Gold!

Gotta say, I can't imagine watching the Olympics without that essential accessory: our two ReplayTV boxes (or the Tivo equivalent, I guess). Because we have two Replays (living room and bedroom), networked via the house's 100 Base-T Ethernet, we can record on either one, and watch it all in either room. Between the two machines, we have something like 88 hours set to record of things that looked interesting. Best of all, we can fast forward through all of the commercials and filler and sports that don't interest us (that FF button was a big help during the opening ceremonies). It allows us to sample sports that we don't care too much about, with hardly any penalty. For example, today we sampled beach volleyball, sailing, women's synchronized diving, and judo, zooming past volleyball, dull qualifying swimming matches and cycling. That may be the last time we watch any of them. We also watched sports we care about: swimming and men's gymnastics. Coming up in the less-popular sports category: taekwondo, skeet shooting, fencing, synchronized swimming, and rhythmic gymnastics. I tried to explain that last one to Sean; I think he thought I was pulling his leg. I'll show him.