Curious Creature

Whether you liked the man or not he was an icon. Odd to believe he’s gone but I hope he’s found peace finally.

Is it just me or is it odd that Iranian police have shields and vests that say “police” in English?

I know the historic influence of the British but it still seems odd now.

Photos courtesy of andrewsullivan.com

At what point does a person stop, look at their life, see how many precious minutes have been wasted on trivial things, and say “enough is enough”? That’s where I find myself right now.

Read more…

Happy to say that with minimal fuss I was able to get the newest release of Ubuntu Desktop, 9.04, running on VMWare Fusion on my Mac.   Five easy steps:

1. Follow this blog post for the install (he also links to the bits I am here) – but don’t worry about his suggestion for the mouse driver since the VMWare tools install takes care of it.
2. Once the install is completed uninstall VMWare tools (they were installed as part of step 1 but not all of it was done..vmhgfs isn’t set up).  You might have to remount the install “CD” by selecting “Install VMWare Tools” from the Virtual Machine menu.   In any case untar the tools tarball and run the uninstaller.  The uninstaller is in the bin directory of the vmware-tools-distrib directory you created.
3. Follow the directions here for getting vmhgfs to work.
4. Rerun the vmware tools installer in the distribution directory you created in step 2.
5. Bask in the glow of a job well done

AT&T 2nd level support really came through for me.  After writing here about having my connectivity problems return and getting in touch with AT&T tech support I can happily report that I am now routinely getting 900kbps (on average) at my office.   There was a problem with a tower in the area and it was fixed.   I’m a seriously happy camper.  Pandora here we come (again)….

Update: Problem solved!

Awhile back I wrote about having found a solution for the data connectivity issues that were plauging my iPhone in 3G mode.  At the time a call to AT&T Tech Support made my reset my network settings which appeared to clear up the issues, and it did help….for about a day.

Since then I’ve been having the same problems and I contacted support again.  The agent I spoke with was very helpful.  I didn’t get the run-around and after some questions he told me that he was going to refer the case to a higher level of technical support.   Despite the higher level of tech support not honoring my request for email contact I was able to get in touch with them to get the ball rolling on what I hope will be a resolution.

It certainly is odd though.  More testing indicated that I was actually getting worse transfer speeds in 3G mode than if I switched the phone into EDGE mode.  3G was netting me about 50kbits/s while in EDGE I was averaging about 140kbits/s.    Those are not the results I would have expected.  Of course this is still only happening at my office.  At home I routinely get 1400kbits/s download and about 400 up.

It certainly has been an aggravating experience but I have to say that my interactions with AT&T’s tech support have been very good so far.  I hope that continues

The MacHeist 3 bundle looks fantastic but I think they’re unlock priorities are off. Why was BoinxTV the first unlock level instead of The Hit List and Espresso? Those two applications certainly would have a wider audience than BoinxTV. Hopefully MacHeist 3 will sell enough copies to unlock those two applications. I’ll be buying my copy later to help the process along

Last week I ran into an odd situation with our HTML output from JasperReports in Internet Explorer 7.  All text, link or otherwise,  was being underlined and I’m not really sure of the root cause other than it would appear we ran into a CSS rendering bug.   The same thing does not happen in Firefox 3 (though my research indicated that the same issue occurs in Firefox 2).

In rendering HTML output JasperReports inserts various anchor tags of the form:

<a name="JR_PAGE_ANCHOR_0_1">

It doesn’t use these with href attributes but it does use them for some purpose.

Our global CSS file indicates that anything that is inside an anchor tag should be underlined.  This would make sense assuming that anchors are used for links (a pretty good assumption).    We also use the Dojo JavaScript framework and the Dijit ContentPane widget allows using the ContentPane (normally used with a DIV) to show external content.   That external content can be “scrubbed” to allow it to play in a nicer fashion with the overall site design.  That is where the problem occurs.

The scrubbing of the content coming in to the DIV, to filter out things like styles, TITLEs, and other tags, is where IE seems to have issues.  Those anchor tags mentioned previously, and which look fine in IE when previewing a report inside of the iReport designer, now all have text inside them underlined.   The quick fix, or so I thought, was to remove the A tag from our global CSS file.  That fixes things until someone hovers over any text at which point another CSS rule comes in to play for a:hover and all text is again underlined.    Probably time for another CSS tweak…

I obsessively read lifehacking blogs.  I’ve been slowly weaning myself from them but the last frontier I’ve yet to conquer is personal finance blogs.  I still read those obsessively looking for nuggets of information that I might apply to my own life.   If only I could find that one last tip that would put me over the edge and on my way to financial freedom!  I’m over the edge, just not the edge I was hoping to be on the other side of

As I was reading Get Rich Slowly today and catching up I came across a guest post titled The High Cost of Having Children in which the author,  Cathy from Chief Family Officer, talked about the choices she and her husband have had to make in their financial lives because of their choice to have kids.   One of the comments also pointed out that many of the top tier personal finance bloggers are kidless.  All this really hit home for me and had me really scratching my head as to why I’m struggling so much with direction in my financial life.

When is enough advice enough?  Why am I reading these blogs and setting my own standards by what these people, in different financial situations, are doing?  Don’t get me wrong, I find these blogs have really valuable information but I think it is far too easy to use these people to set standards for yourself that are impossibly high instead of simply looking at the advice being offered and using it as you see fit.

I, like the author of the post, am not in a position to pay off all of the debt I have right now, really concentrate on it like JD from Get Rich Slowly has done.  I’ll be in his second stage, again as the author notes she will be, for a long time to come.   There is absolutely nothing wrong with that either.  My life is different from JD’s.  I need to make other decisions, hopefully smart decisions, as to how to proceed in my financial life.

At the very least I think I learned that I need to put some distance between myself and the personal finance wizards out there…at least for a bit.

From the Earth Hour website:

Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming.

Strains of George Bush saying “you’re either with us, or with the terrorists” eh?

Maybe the clowns at WWF need to think that some people might need to keep their lights on….maybe a symbolic hour of no lights is impossible for some.

Assholes.