nothing2fancy

Just got back from my 10 year high school reunion

Good times were had by all.

Check out http://nothing2fancy.com/pictures/ for all the gory details.

I just downloaded the WordPress app for the iPhone

Will post review shortly (posted from my iPhone)

We love our condo when it rains

The windows flip out so that you can leave them open when it’s raining. There has to be crazy high winds to get any water inside, and even then, we don’t care too much, everything is concrete.

Awesome feature of Capital One Bank!

If you bring your account to a $0 balance, they close it! Plus they take three business days to transfer your money! So you if you transfer 100% of your balance to a different account you get this great rush when you notice that the transfer still hasn’t gone through, let me check Capital One…woah, I don’t have an account here anymore. HOLY SHIT THEY STOLE MY MONEYS

It’s awesome.

I’m reinstalling OS X 10.5

I’m nervous, but my iMac has been shady lately. iTunes will crash hard every few days. My instance of Safari uses all the CPU cycles when Stephanie is logged in, lots of general weirdness and unhappiness.

I’ve been trying everything I can think of to diagnose the problem: i’ve stopped all unnecessary apps from running in the background, I read crash logs throughly, no idea what was causing all the seize ups. Finally, last week I decided it was time to reinstall Leopard.

This shit made me nervous as hell. In addition to something going wrong and losing data, my biggest concern is actually about my iTunes library. My entire iTunes existence is based around ratings. My phone contains only songs with a top rating. All my smart playlists exclude songs with low ratings. I’ve got best of playlists for the big three genres (Jazz, Rock, Electronic).

Turns out reinstalling Leopard is easy as pie.

Step 1: Use Time Machine to back up your machine. I switched the backup location from my usual 750GB hard drive to a different one, so I now have three copies of my iMac.

Step 2: Insert Leopard DVD, double click on install, select restart.

Step 3: When the computer finishes restarting choose “Restore from Backup” from the menu bar. Pick a source and a destination.

That’s it! The entire process took about 6 hours for a 500 GB hard drive. When I logged in for the first time after the reinstall, everything was exactly as I had left it, except, oddly enough, the background reset to the default Leopard Aurora background. Other then that, everything is working exactly the same as before, minus all the shit going wrong.

Only thing I haven’t checked is if Leopard still refuses to restart while my MyBook firewire drive is plugged in.

Reseting your AT&T Voicemail Password

(888) 331-0500

If 319-621-xxxx is your phone number, press 1
For voicemail issues, press 3
To reset your voicemail password, press 3
For security reasons, enter your billing zip code
We have sent you a text message containing your new voicemail password. Thank you for calling AT&T.

My wireless Mighty Mouse won’t connect to my computer

This has been driving me nuts. I use a bluetooth Mighty Mouse on my iMac. Every time I change the batteries the mouse will disconnect. When I turn it back on it won’t reconnect properly, I’ve got to manually set it up, every single time. This wouldn’t be that big of a deal on a laptop, but since this is my only mouse, it’s a huge pain, I’ve got to keep the old wireless mouse available for battery changes, since the iMac is pretty useless without a mouse.

Turns out, I should have just read the instructions, if you just click a few times when you turn the mouse on, it’ll connect on it’s own. Crap! This has been a huge headache for me.

Google Reader Truncates title, hilarity ensues

Sometimes Google doesn’t do a great job creating the title of posts in Google Reader. Click for full sized version.

Link to Kottke’s blog.

Holy crap, we finally cleaned up our apartment

A mere 3 months after moving in we have finally gotten boxes unpacked, gear sorted and put into storage. We can walk around without dodging crap!

Here’s the view from the front door. The furniture looks all shitty, but we’re going to donate that couch just as soon as we can decide on a new one. The dining chairs are going to be reupholstered in nice fabric and we’ll probably be getting rid of the leather chairs (they were free anyway).

Here’s our computer desk. As soon as we can get a contractor in we’re going to have a built-in desk installed in this little nook. When it’s all said and done, the only thing showing will be the computer, keyboard and mouse.

Stephanie has an old lamp that she’s had since childhood and is not eager to part with. Last night I popped a big ol’ bulb in it and put it behind the TV. It looks pretty sweet when all the other lights in the apartment are off.

Here’s Stephanie cooking up a shit-storm. Those aren’t the final positions for those lamps. We just wanted to put them away in some corner while we were cleaning. We’ll also be moving all those bottles off the top of the fridge once we get a good counter-space to set them on. That, plus getting rid of all the pictures on the fridge, will really clean the place up. [Editor: just kidding, stephanie]

When it’s really raining, we don’t get much moisture coming in the windows. If it pours inside, though, we don’t care. Concrete floors! The two plants there are basil and rosemary. The basil grows like mad. We could probably eat fresh pesto twice a week if we wanted to. Speaking of such, Stephanie, let’s make pecan pesto and rotini tonight.

The storage above the master bath. It’s a bit of a hassle to get to (we’ve got to get the ladder out). There’s a surprising amount of space up there. If I’m willing to tempt death by standing on the very top step of our ladder while hoisting a huge box I think we can get a few more cubic meters of storage up thar.

Stephanie cooking. Notice the magnetic knife thing on the wall to the right. Highly recommended, not only makes you cook better, but it’s awesome for self-defense. You can see our secondary storage above the other bathroom to the top-right in this picture.

More Stephanie cooking. What’s that certificate in the background? Let’s zoom in for a closer look.

hrm….

OK, more pictures

Wandered around Richmond Thursday night. Kept asking random bro’s where the party was. Got stabbed by a hobo.