Not that I watch much TV; this adds a forth season pass to my TiVo. F1 doesn't really count as a show though. That leaves Battlestar Galactica, which has jumped the shark a couple of times now but I'll stick it out to the bitter end just to see how they wrap up. And Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is spotty at best. But I absolutely can't stand reality TV so this is kind of all I have. At some point last summer, Heather and Logan were out of town and I was home working on the house. I was getting ready to start an all day trim caulking project (all the cold weather split most of my joints this winter, so I'll be redoing it all over again soon), that I still haven't painted, and I needed something for background noise. Turned past USAHD, and the Burn Notice intro was playing and it caught my eye. So I sat down and watched part of the episode and kind of kept it on in the background. Ended up being a Burn Notice marathon leading up to the season finale so I left it ...

Take a look up in the address bar. No more unsightly /index.php/2008/12/15/post-name up there anymore. Just sweet, sweet /%category%/%postname%/. Super easy if I were smart and ran Apache instead of IIS. Maybe one day I'll get around to moving my home server from windows to some flavor of linux. Who am I kidding, I've got a family, a job and mortgage ... no way I'll ever bother. So, I've known about isapi rewrite filters for a long time but just kind of never bothered. And back when I first looked, the only big option was Helicon's asapi rewrite which, unfortunately, the free lite version has too many limitations for what I wanted to do (not run rewrites on all of my websites). But this time around, when I just looked on a whim, I get Ionic's IIRF which is free and runs on individual sites. To setup I used this guy's tutorial because it was the easiest to read. Not that there's anything hard here, I just like really really easy when the kid is running around and the wife is asking me about Christmas decorations. In case the link goes away here's ...

A lot of people moan that this functionality should've been included by Apple and be fully supported. Anybody else who had excluded this would've been ridiculed, but being Apple, they get away with it. Was it a business decision so that they can market their own Time Machine backup appliance? Or was it lack of programming time/talent? As usual, I'm documenting this for my personal effects so that I can easily reference it later; but if somebody finds this on google and it helps, great. It took me a couple of minutes compiling how to pull this all together from a couple of different sources. Just a quick note: I find the difference between the windows and mac community is that mac people never document anything completely. They either leave out steps they just assume people should know or their poor writers. Not sure which. On a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, this one is going to be a 4. Just because you have to know how to setup a server in the first place that has an SMB share ... or a NAS I suppose. I'm going to go ahead and ...

It came down to the last corner of the last lap. And fittingly, he won the championship by one point where he lost it last year by one point. Cynics won't help being able to believe it was orchestrated. Timo Glock, who'd chosen to stay out on dries when everybody else dove in for wets, clawed up to forth putting Hamilton in sixth behind Vettel. Lewis, not able to put any moves on Vettel in the closing laps appeared to lose the championship to Massa. Massa and Ferrari were celebrating on Massa's victory lap. And then, out of nowhere, on the very last corner of the last lap Glock wobbled on the increasingly wet track letting Vettel and Hamilton by, giving Lewis the fifth place finish he needed to go one point up on Massa. Sadly, it was the most exciting event of the entire race. Another season over. I won't see another race until the baby is born.

I know I said I was leasing this one to force myself to keep it for more than a year. But I don't think that's going to happen. I'm trying to use the soft car market to get out of my C300. Hopefully I can work it so that the low interest rates for CPO Audi's and the low auction prices on lease returns will absorb my substantial negative equity. I'm still trying to find out how, mathmatically, leasing works because for what I'm paying per month and what the residual is I shouldn't be this far behind. My guess is that if I kept it another year I'd be in better shape, but I don't think I can put up with it that long. While I'm waiting for stuff at work I figured I'd compile a list of pros and cons. And just so that I'm not being pessimistic I'll put my likes first. But I've come to the conclusion that this is a 20k car with 15k worth of badges. Likes Suspension. Although it's gotten a little brittle with the colder weather and/or mileage it's still very comfortable for the cornering performance it delivers. Handling. ...

What a novel fking idea! MTV puts some music videos online; now if they'd just put them back on TV like it says in their name then it'd all be good. Strangely most of the top picked videos right now are 80's stuff. Are us old codgers the only ones that watch music videos now? I tried to pick the absolute lamest video in history to embed. C+C Music Factory |MTV Music

There's a perfectly good tut on lifehacker but I wanted to copy it here so that 6mo down the road, when I want to do this again, I don't have to worry about the link being dead. There are reports that the rename trick has been squashed, but I haven't verified. So this is the GarageBand way. Which also means it's Mac only ... which is fine, this is for me so I have a guide on how to do it next time. And I have a Mac. So fire up iTunes and GarageBand, find the song you want to turn into a ringtone (this is of course assuming that what you want as a ringtone is already in iTunes) and drag it from iTunes into GarageBand. If it's not in iTunes, just open the file in GarageBand right? Now that the file is in itunes click on the Cycle Region button which activates the region loop tool (images stolen from LifeHacker) Now adjust the region to the section of the song you want; it has to be < 40sec and I've found that sometimes GarageBand complained and wouldn't export certain selections > 30sec. I don't know what the ...

I needed a place to drop iPhone wallpapers so that I can grab them without having to put them in iPhoto. Probably going to be updating this post for awhile with more wallpaper as a I make/find them. [update] I'll probably just end up setting up an iPhoto album/event just for wallpapers, but I'll still leave this here and update it anyway.

[update: Google now has an app that'll setup the gCal / iCal sync for you. Sweetness. link]   So first, let me lay down the framework of what I'm trying to accomplish. At work I'm now using google apps (gmail for domains) instead of exchange server. But I'm so used to the Outlook interface that I set up Outlook as an imap client for gmail (don't forget to enable imap support in the gmail interface). So where does that leave me for a calender? Well luckily google already has a windows desktop app, google calendar sync, that sync's gcal into the outlook calendar; so I'm covered there. But at home, I'm primarily on the mac which means I'm using iCal and then syncing that to my iPhone. Google calendar has CalDAV support. Just follow the instructions and gCal and iCal sync. Which also means that if you set your iPhone to sync all calendars you've now got your gCal on your iPhone. None of this was more than a google search away so the reason I'm recording this is to remind myself of one small, undocumented step. Either that or I just don't know ...

I'd previously messed around with iWphone plugin and wasn't very satisfied. Today I was monkeying around and googled up iphone wordpress plugins and hit on WPtouch. It's way cooler looking than iWPhone but it still needs some tweaking. Need to do: padding around images; images that are floated cause some funkiness with text add some cooler looking icons for stuff (wonder if it'll auto format the round corners and such like the iphone does? ... highly doubt it) check out how it's resizing large images ... see if I can take advantage of that for all images that ended up being easy ... just using 'max-width' ... duh. obviously the qt embed plugin doesn't work with it so see what I can do hiding those fix previous/next links on single post page if the next link title is wraps and then pushes everything down [update] I can't figure this one out, the template is floating the next link left and floating the previous link right, no problems there ... I text-aligned left and right to help readability but for some reason the right arrow still pushes text above it there's a huge gap between displaying the # of comments and the comment form; can't figure ...