Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
It took all weekend, but it was well worth the effort. I started Friday evening with priming, followed by painting on Saturday, and chair rail creation/installation Saturday night and Sunday. It was a lot of effort, but we love how it turned out!
Pardon the crap on the floor 🙂 More photos can be seen in gallery.
I think I have mentally committed to stop using Mozilla Thunderbird for email. There, I said it. And honestly, I’m a little sad.
Here are the top reasons why I’m going to switch, in no particular order:
1) Lack of an integrated calendar. Seriously, I’ve waited for what, 4+ years now? You can’t call Sunbird viable either, it’s at version .5 and sucked about 2 months ago when I tried it…again.
2)Lack of integrated todo lists and notes. I’m tired of having crap strewn all over the place that I’m trying to keep track of.
3) This goes for FireFox too, because it gets on my nerves too. I really like the ability they both have for extensions/plugins. They’re a great feature. However, I can never let myself really “depend” on an extension because as soon as a new version of Thunderbird/Firefox is released, they inevitably don’t work (aren’t upgraded). So I’m left with a basic email client lacking the features I wanted from the extensions.
4) Lack of an address book. This has more to do with a shared address book that I can use between my desktop and laptop. Tired of it. It has resulted in me having no address book whatsoever, and simply remembering (or trying to remember) email addresses that I need. Not to mention physical home addresses.
5) Thunderbird freaks out. It hasn’t happened in a little while, but often it will download thousands of duplicate messages. That then requires me to get a plugin to delete dups. See #3 regarding plugins. Also, every so often, my inbox will show that it’s completely empty due to some corruption. Thanks, but no thanks, I want my email where I left it. The internet tells me that I should compact my inbox(es) every so often to avoid the corruption and there are plugins to do it periodically. See #3 regarding plugins.
6) I really miss the days of a single pst file to get backed up. As such, I haven’t backed up my email in… 4+ years. Nice.
7) I’d rather pay for an email client that I’m happy with than kludge one together, that I’m not as happy with, with extensions and add-ons.
I was writing this out in hopes that I’d convince myself not to drop it. But I think it has solidified even more.
Outlook 2007 here I come.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Chef Version 1.1. Download the full version here, but if you’re a current user, you can download a much smaller upgrade now!
Enjoy!
Within the past two weeks, Ana has really started to actually look pregnant. It’s much more exciting than her just being tired with nothing to show for it, so to speak 🙂
Also, she called me this morning at work and told me she felt the first kick. Two actually, the first caused her to put her hand on her stomach just in time for it to get bumped by the second one! Pretty cool 🙂
With just a few hours remaining in July, I’m happy to report that this month saw my first several sales of Chef. It’s interesting how that very first sale made me feel – just a couple days prior I had been asked by a few people if I had sold any. At that time, it had been released for right around 3 months and I’d had not a single sale. I almost felt embarrassed to respond with the “0”, I think because of how much work I’ve put into the software and maybe I was just being silly to think that I could make a little money with it. Thankfully I may not be silly to think that after all.
July also saw my first real support incident with it, one that was a little hairy but which I got resolved in a little over two evenings. It resulted in a new build, off of my 1.0 branch which forced me to make some changes (for the better) to my build system to allow building multiple code lines. This also allowed me to use Perforce’s integration capabilities to automatically merge this bugfix into the mainline – my first dealings with this in Perforce.
As I type this, I’m running an RC build of sorts for version 1.1 which I plan on releasing later this week. I’ll get it installed on our Chef PC and run a few more tests before calling it good. Look for it on Friday morning!
Last night I decided to start burning the recovery DVDs for the new HP computer in our kitchen, but the burn kept failing on writing/verifying disc 1. After several attempts and ruined DVDs, I hopped online and spent 15 minutes chatting with an HP support rep; restore DVDs are en route to my house. Thanks for not being a PITA, HP.
The day has finally arrived. We have a “Chef PC” in our kitchen!
This is the HP Touchsmart IQ770. That’s right, it’s a 19″ widescreen, touchscreen, all-in-one desktop running Windows Vista Home Premium and Microsoft Media Center. We first saw it Friday night at Office Depot, and today they had it on sale for $300 off.
Overall, it’s a pretty loaded machine – dual core AMD, 2GB RAM, 300GB hard drive, TV+FM tuner (gotta run cable to it still), wireless connection, gigabit connection (gotta run some networking to it), DVD burner with lightscribe, etc, etc.
Thank you HP for coming out with such an awesome machine that’s a perfect fit for Chef. It sits tucked away in the corner of our kitchen providing lots of cool capabilities (calendars, music, Chef!, tv, games, weather). It’s exactly what I pictured a couple years ago when I started writing the first incarnation of Chef; cool to see it actually running in the kitchen tonight!
As some of you may or may not know (or care), Illinois government is overdue on a budget. Our wonderful (uhh, yeah) Governor is in an annoying little fight with the representatives, seemingly over everything. As a show of protest, here’s how special sessions (ordered by the Governor) in Springfield went today (courtesy of the Associated Press):
The Johnson Blog 