the world is your acorn

I just discovered that popcap’s downloadable games are all 50% off until 12/23. That means that I am about to buy Plants vs Zombies and waste away the rest of my life. Why does this happen to me?

One of my biggest iphone complaints: you can’t try apps out before buying. I want to get a dictionary app, but have no idea which is best for me, and I don’t have the dollars to go throwing around to check them out. There might a roundup or two out there, but so far I haven’t been able to figure out what I should do.

I already guessed wrong once (I think) when I bought FluxTunes instead of FlickTunes (I realized later that the latter has features that I want). Now I’m paralyzed by indecision. I don’t feel like I should have to do major research before buying a $2-$15 item, but it’s turned into that. Frustrated.

Lately my macbook has been making funny noises and spinning its little beachball more than usual, so I’ve been trying to stay vigilant with my backups until I can make it to the Apple store. Today, I plugged in my external hard drive to get my Time Machine backup up to date, and it failed after a few minutes with the “Unable to Complete Backup. An Error Occurred While Copying Files to the Backup Volume” message. Very helpful–thank you, Apple. So I poked around online and tried things like repair my disk permissions and deleting the “.inprogress” file from my backup drive and deleting my .plist file for Time Machine. Nothing. I even reset PRAM on a prayer. I tried to do a brand new backup on a different drive. Same thing. I finally noticed that the backup was failing at the same place each time, so I opened up the console, filtered on “backupd,” and figured out that something in the Carbonite Application Support folder was the culprit every time. So I excluded that folder from my backup and all seems to be well. Phew. I hope that folder isn’t something that I really should be backing up locally. Theoretically, Carbonite should be backing it up, right?

Fantastic Contraption: A fun, free game where you get a few tools, the goal of getting a red ball into a red box, and an environment.

Simplify Media: Stream your (or your friends’) iTunes library to another computer or your iphone, even when it’s not on the same network.

Good news: I finally installed Office 2008, and while I haven’t yet had a chance to see if anything is cool about it, it’s fun to have a new thing.

Bad news: The paste unformatted macro that i had for Word 2004 doesn’t work now.

Good news: Hard working people out there have written AppleScript to fix my problem. Hooray!

I was heartbroken after I installed Leopard and discovered that it broke Afloat. Well good news, because Afloat 2 is now available, and it’s kind of fantastic. If you don’t already know, Afloat lets you keep windows, well, afloat in osx. So you can set particular windows (only in cocoa applications like safari or preview) to stay “on top,” change their transparency, and even set it so that they’re unclickable. Also, you can set a window to float in all spaces. Pretty sweet, right? Yeah. I’m psyched. Go get it.

I think the last two months have been about as busy for me as I’ve ever been. Lately I’ve just been playing a lot of catchup, which includes procrastinating by spending time trying to find new systems with which to organize my life. So far I’ve ditched Remember the Milk and bought OmniFocus to help me get back into the GTD mindset. It’s also part of my effort to not rely so much on internet connectivity. The next step may be to reintroduce MailTags into my life to help get my inbox to zero. In the meantime, I’ve discovered BusySync, which probably does a ton of cool things but I’m right now just using it to sync my Google calendars to my iCal so I have them locally and can edit them locally. It’s changed my life in a few ways. I mean, it’s nice to have my calendar available and editable when I don’t have internet access. The other thing though, is that now I don’t always have to have a web browser open. That’s huge. It means my GMail and GReader aren’t always up and tempting me, and web browsing requires launching an application, which somehow keeps me from doing it as often. So anyway, this is feeling like a good start. In the next couple of weeks I think I will try and start making better use of the Notes and ToDo capabilities in Leopard and see how that goes.

This coming Friday and Saturday, Dr. James Kakalios is coming to The Parthenon to give his talk, “The Physics of Super Heroes.” He talks about some of the things that we associate with particular superheroes and the physics behind those feats. I guess the talk comes out of research he did for his book of the same title. Sounds neat, right? You get two chances to go hear his talk, and it’s free!

Details:

Friday, February 8, 2008 at 7pm
or
Saturday, February 9, 2008 at 10am
FREE and open to the public, but seating is limited.
Call The Parthenon at 862-8431 for reservations.

From the press release:

The Parthenon enlightens comic book fans and students of all ages, answering the question “Could the Super Heroes such as Super Man, Spider-Man and Wonder Woman really do that?” University of Minnesota professor and author Dr. James Kakalios presents his popular lecture, The Physics of Super Heroes based on his book by the same title on Friday, February 8 at 7:00pm and repeated for teachers and physics students at 10:00am on Saturday, February 9th. A limited number of books (The Physics of Super Heroes) will be available for sale and autographs.

I wish that mail.app had the option each time I send an email to put that sent message into a particular folder. That would save me a lot of trouble and time.