Sunday I had an opportunity to pick up a lightly used Wii ($200 for the wii with 2 controllers w/ nun-chucks, Wii sports, Lego Star Wars, Super Mario Galaxy and Command and Conquer 3 for 360). It's pretty cool so far. Does anyone have some recommendations for some "must have" games? I also have been looking around for the "friend code" or whatever is needed to let my Miis run around and get in trouble on other people's Wiis and vice versa.
(This blog entry was automatically generated by Multiply's Wish-list Cross-posting feature.)
Below are items recently added to my Amazon wish-list. If you are familiar with anything below and have any comments or alternate suggestions, please leave a reply.
Here's an awesomely funny video of the count (from Sesame Street) singing about what he loves to do the most. It's not dirty, bad and it's totally safe for work, but I defy you to not think anything bad when watching it...
As some of you may be aware, I am a recent mac convert. The second mac has been doing much better (it crashed only once on the first day I had it). Beyond that, the only crashing has been pretty much limited to Firefox. Anyway, there's a weird issue I've been having with parts or all of particular icons disappearing from the dock when I mouse over them. It's not every icon though, just certain ones. I think which certain ones changes sometimes too, but I don't have records of what disappears when. Here's some examples:
This is just included to show how things should look. This is system preferences when the mouse is over the icon, but not quite near the center enough to trigger the issue.
And here it is with the mouse over the center. Gone... Except for part of the shadow.
Here's illustrator. Notice that only the top part of the icon is gone.
And here's Dreamweaver. There's a chunk gone from the middle of the icon, but most of it is still there.
And here's Flash. With two different chunks missing.
And finally Numbers with a different chunk of the icon missing.
So there's examples of most of the icon disappearances I have been seeing. Not included in this list (mainly because the post editor for multiply SUCKS when inserting images) are the following:
Top part of the eclipse icon, address book goes away entirely, iPhoto goes completely away, the top part of the HP Device Manager, the top part of HP Photosmart Studio, the top part of VMWare Fusion, the top part of Keynote, the top part of Pages, the top part of Apple - Mac OS X, and the top of the trash.
And actually it wasn't until posting this that I noticed all the ones that are missing a chunk off the top.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. I'm not even sure what to google for to see if anyone else is having this issue.
Last week I was out in San Diego for business. It was pretty standard. This week I am back in San Diego for training. So far it's not been so standard, so I figured I'd get this posted here so I can refer people here rather than retelling the story for the 200th time.
I left Denver on Monday. When I checked in I decided to click the "Change Seat" button to see if the plane was full or not. As it turned out, "not" was that answer, so I moved my seat from 7A to 18A. 18 was completely empty. Only once I was on the plane did I realize that I think the airline puts all the families and people traveling with small children near the back of the plane. Landing was screaming in stereo. They need to have something in the safety demo about kids needing something to eat or suck on during takeoff and landing and then they don't have any issues with their ears not adjusting correctly.
On the last trip I got a car. On this one I decided I'd just share with other people out here at the same time. For the arrival time, the plan was to get a ride from my manager who arrived about 30 minutes before me. When we landed, I found that my cell phone had lost its mind and would not let me make calls. Everything went to some voice message about americanroaming.com and saying I could buy roaming minutes for $.25 or make collect calls. I thought at first I just had bad reception or something but calls last week worked fine from the same location.
So I ended up using a pay phone to give my manager a call. Then I got to wait for baggage which took a whole lot of time and then it was on to dinner. That went pretty normal.
After dinner I was dropped off at my hotel to check in. I was given my key and told I had been upgraded to a two bedroom suite. Sweet! So I got over there and found that my key didn't work the first time. Or the second. And something else was strange. There were noises coming from the room, like the TV was on and people were talking, so I head back to the front desk. I am told that someone accidentally put the wrong key in my folder and I was in a different room on the other side of the hotel. So I get the new key and head the other way.
This time the key works. I fumbled around looking for the light switch when I hear someone inside call out something like "Hey, they assign you this room too?" I don't remember exactly what he said but I backed out real quick and shut the door. Back at the front desk they told me they didn't have any record of someone being in that room. I assured them there was someone in that room. So then 20 minutes later she finds another room, this time on the 4th floor. I head up and walking down the hall I notice how incredibly loud it was. People listening to TV so loud that the hallway sounded like a movie theatre.
At the end of two long hallways, and passing many many many doors I finally arrive at my "suite". I find the light and look around. Not only is the room $20 more expensive this week, but it's maybe 1/10th of the size of the room I had last week. It's smaller than my room at home. I think between the double (not queen) bed, the couch, and other miscellaneous furniture there was not a whole lot of floor space. This was definitely not an upgrade or two bedroom suite. There was a fridge and a stove, so it is technically a suite, but compared to last week where I had a living room and a separate bedroom, this room would likely fit in the bathroom of the last suite. After I picked my jaw up, I called the front desk to ask if I'd be getting a discount from the room rate quoted since the room provided was not the room I was told I'd get.
So I try to use the phone again. No dice still. So I decide to "phone home" on the computer. I discovered that not only did I not have enough battery to get my fingerprint scanned, but I'd also managed to remember to leave my power cord at home behind the couch. So no computer that night, it'd be TV and sleeping. That was fine. Until I figured out that the toilet would run all through the night. Filling, dripping, occasionally flushing itself. All... Night.... Long. And the bed sucked. So I didn't sleep well that night. Not to mention that the sound level turned out to not be a lot better than the hallway. I could hear people open and slam their doors, the TVs, etc.
When I got up in the morning I found that the shower wouldn't completely convert from bath tub mode to shower mode. The little thing that switches it would only pull out halfway which meant half the water went up while all the rest continued to go down. Which meant that there's no water pressure from the shower head, and there's too much volume for the drain (and maybe that was just jacked too), so it wouldn't drain and I ended up showering in ankle deep soap water. Good times... Good times.
After breakfast I went to the front desk and told them my complaints and asked to be moved. I was told they didn't have anything for right now unless I wanted a smoking room (um, no), but I could "check in" again after 3. That was fine, so I went and grabbed all my stuff. After a long and stupid hectic day at work and eating a crap-ton of sushi (second time in my life to have it, first time was last week) I checked in again. I asked this time that there was not someone already in there. To the best of their knowledge there was not.
So I went and found my room (again at the end of two long halls, although I passed a *lot* fewer doors on the way there). When I got to my new room I found I now had a living room, two bedrooms, three beds, three televisions, a fridge, microwave, stove, 2 full bathrooms. In short *WAY* better than what I had the night before and significantly better than what I had last week. I also then noticed a basket of meat, cheese, chocolate, crackers, jam and candy on the table with a little letter saying "Congratulations, you've been selected as our guest of the week" along with a survey asking how they are doing.
I managed to get a temporary phone at work along with another power strip, so I am thinking tomorrow will go a lot better than today or yesterday did.
Anyway, it's now 12:30, and despite Fight Club being on TV, it feels like it's 1:30 or 2:30 am and I have training in the morning, so I'll end this one. But yeah, interesting trip so far.
When I got home last Friday, my laptop we DOA. In any windows mode (normal, all 3 safe modes and last known good config) it will blue screen and then immediately reboot. It took about 10 of these before I even noticed that the screen was blue before the computer bounced. So I took it apart and cleaned out the dust bunnies, got it all back together (with 5 extra screws left over), and it still was doing the same thing.
So Sunday afternoon I went and got one of the sexy new 24" iMacs. The stuff I'm going to need to do is definitely doable on a mac, and there's the promise of being able to run Parallels or VMWare Fusion should I need some windows stuff.
I am having some issues with it though. The first evening I had it, I probably played around with it for 5 or 6 hours. It hung completely where the mouse would move, but no applications would update, move, respond, etc. Ctrl-option-esc did nothing. So I had to hold down the power button until it would shut off. This is before even installing anything. I had a complete freeze from installing a dashboard app. Not good. And after running iDVD once, it will not start any more. I've had this thing for just over 48 hours, right now.
To top it all off, I clicked something which brought me to a page about Leopard, which, as it turns out is the next version of the OS, not the one I have. So that's another $139 there. I am trying to figure out if I should be taking this machine back to the store and waiting until I hear that the issues with lockups have been resolved, and until it comes with Leopard, or seeing if I can get a free upgrade to Leopard.
Any thoughts, suggestions, brilliant words of wisdom?
I have a situation at work where I will need to do some public key encryption using PHP. Does anyone have any experience using asymmetric encryption in PHP? I've found a few places that say using GnuPGP is the way to go, but this is via system() calls to command line utilities. I am looking for a nice happy API sort of way to do this (like MCRYPT now). Does anyone have any ideas on this? Thanks in advance.
