Standard Time

Just a reminder: Daylight Savings Time ends tonight, so you get to sleep in an extra hour Sunday morning. Enjoy!

Sean on Ann Coulter

The three of us are watching tonight's Real Time with Bill Maher, and his guest, Ann Coulter, comes on. Sean looked at the screen and said, "Aaaaah! It burns, it burns!"

Screwed again

This just pisses me off, so I figured I should blog it and maybe save one of y'all the frustration:

If you recall, last week I upgraded this blog from MT 2 to MT 3. Six Apart's pricing scheme, again, says that if Tom and I had separate blogs, we could each have three for no charge. Because we have a single joint blog, though, we have to pay $70. We did get partial credit for the money that we donated two years ago when we first moved to MT, which meant that the upgrade cost us $25 (on top of the $50 original contribution, for $75 total).

Just now I found out (via Niall Kennedy), that we could have gotten it all for free. If I'd joined the Six Apart Professional Network (cost: $0), I'd have gotten a five-author commercial version ($200 value, and better than what we just paid for) thrown in.

No, I'm not saying that the software isn't worth paying for, or that programmers/companies don't deserve something in return for their time and effort. What's frustrating is that there's a backdoor for those who know about it, but the suckers like me have to pay.

[Note: for those who say that this is for professionals who're planning on consulting/installing major MT installations someday, well, I gotta do something with the wedlog.com domain someday, and an MT/TypePad service might be just the thing.]

Anyhow, the point of all this is that if you're in the same boat we were a couple of weeks ago, go join the professional network—you might save a few bucks.

For the undecideds

I sent this in an email earlier today, and I thought it might also be worth blogging:

If you know anyone who's still on the fence (me, I can't understand those people), send 'em to these sites: Republican Switchers, Republican for Humility, Another Republican for Kerry, Back to the Mainstream, and that notorious fuzzy-headed left-wing rag The Economist.

Happy birthday bear

As is traditional on October 27^th, I would like to wish Tom the happiest of birthdays and a Good Bear Day to everyone.

RSS feed down

If you can read this, you probably aren't using an RSS reader. For some reason, it appears that MT may not be updating the index.xml file while I'm here at the conference, or at least I can't get it to show up with today's new posts. Crud.

If you have any idea what the problem is, or how I can fix it, let me know. Oddly enough, opening the file via BBEdit's SFTP says that the file is updated, but checking the file any other way says that it isn't. I'm stumped.

Later note: the problem seems to be whether you're inside the Westin or outside. Outside, things are fine. Inside, we've got some kind of proxy caching something-or-other that keeps us from always getting the latest/greatest. Brent told me that I'm not the only one seeing RSS feeds from several months back.

iPod Photo

Given that I bought a new iPod a couple of weeks ago, it went without saying that a new one was about to ship. The iPod Photo was announced today. I don't know enough to make a real analysis of it yet (yeah, as if that's ever stopped me) but my first take: I hate the idea that iTunes syncs photos. I like apps that do one thing really well, and iTunes should, imo, handle music. Photo syncing should be done by iPhoto, and if Windows users don't have iPhoto, well, that's their loss.

At TenCon

I'm here now at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, and Tom will be coming in later today.

If you're here, could you do me (and you, and others) a favor? Launch SubEthaEdit and look for a document I'm sharing named "Bluetooth — READ ME". It's your chance to improve my BT session tomorrow afternoon. Add to it what you want to know, what you think is interesting, what problems you've had, etc. I can blather about BT for a lot longer than 45 minutes, so this is a way to have the session focused on what you want to hear about.

And remember, the Blogger get-together is tonight. See you there?

TenCon tips

Brent writes about the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference:

In case you’re going, but haven’t been to a conference like this before, here’s a tip: turn on iChat and log into Rendezvous. It’s a great way to find people you’d like to meet. You see that so-and-so is logged in, so you say, "Hey! I’d like to meet you—where are you?" It works.

And here's the flip side, for those of you who fret about privacy:

See that red circle? Decide whether or not you want it checked. If it's unchecked, anyone who sees you on iChat can add you to their regular iChat Buddy List. If it's checked, you get all the benefit of being able to rendezvous with conference attendees, but they can't bug you the following week when they're back at their desks.

Me? I leave it unchecked. It's not that hard to figure out what my iChat handle is, after all.

Bonus TenCon tip: along with opening up Rendezvous iChat window, download and run SubEthaEdit. Why just take your own notes during sessions when you can add to and share the benefits of everyone else's notes instead? And even better, take a look at the notes being taken of the sessions that are running simultaneously and see if they're more interesting than the one you're in.

Mac OS X Conference starts tomorrow

Just a reminder: the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference starts tomorrow in Santa Clara, CA. And whether you'll be at the conference or not, you're invited to the Blogger get-together on Tuesday evening. I've seen some of the RSVP's; if you can only make it to one blogger get-together, this should be the one to make.