« | August 2006

Perhaps I should have known better... Better than to write what I was really thinking on the net. I've heard the spiders are out there listening, watching, reading. Taking notes, names and now, apparently kicking ass.

Our ass it seems. Try it now for yourself. Check Google to see if we come up on any matches for twisted melon or even twisted melon apple remote. Nope, not since yesterday afternoon. There hasn't been a single visitor to the site linked directly from Google in 24 hours. Prior to that there was at least one every few minutes and visitors even showed up with such oddball searches as easy twisted facts for kids.

So what's wrong? What happened? Your guess is really as good as ours. Apparently Google themselves have no idea, their FAQs on the subject filled with so much gibberish you'd think they had monkeys actually writing all the code. What kind of database do they keep where they don't know how or why things suddenly vanish? Until two weeks ago Google had a couple of my older pages archived and I had to manually purge them by jumping through some hoops. These are nonexistent pages that pointed to a server that has not been running for at least a year. So you can't get them to get rid of stuff that doesn't exist and you can't get them to keep stuff that does. Oh boy...

Maybe I should watch this free expression of concern and criticism. This may be what got the site into hot water in the first place. The night before last, I made a post somewhere else about how I had just switched to using Mint for site statistics and was just about to give Google Analytics the farewell boot. In the same post I slipped in a couple of comments describing what I thought of the Google Adwords program (don't bother searching for it, I'll summarize: it's a scam). So as I put on my tin-foil hat, could this be more than just a coincidence?

Google, please don't say it's so! I still love you, really. At least the curvy sexy search part of you. So what if I don't like your bulky unfriendly analytics nor your bank-account draining adwords. Please give me another chance. I know we can still play with image archives together and a good scan over your usenet groups can still be fun. If you promise not to take over the world, so will I. Gooooogle!

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Anyone hitting the news on the interweb has probably caught mention of the recent Apple battery recall affecting a reported 1.8 million units. I narrowly escaped the last recall in 2004, but no such luck this time. The pack on my PowerBook G4 falls right in the middle of the first newly recalled range. What have I got to say about this?

Thanks SONY!

I wonder if there has ever been a recall on cube-shaped Sony Dream Machine clock radios. It's one of the few Sony products I own and it's definitely been showing its craptastic faults since shortly after it was bought.

Back to these smoking-hot batteries... I don't generally leave the PowerBook sitting on my bed nor flame-inviting sofas, but it does spend many nights on the coffee table, dining room table or on a bed-side shelf. Usually plugged in and always with the battery installed. I'll knock on wood right now (which two of the previously mentioned surfaces are made of) that I haven't had any problems. The battery definitely gets very warm, but it's absolutely frigid in comparison to the temperature of various other parts of the computer. There's no way to keep the PowerBook on your lap for instance — not unless you want a skin graft later in the day.

I'm glad Apple is doing the right thing here with such a far-reaching recall. Sure, perhaps less than 10 people have voiced complaints according to the recall, but it would sure suck to be the 10th and left with potentially disastrous property loss.

The opportunity to visit Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) site also enabled me to find out my Black & Decker CMM1000 battery-powered cordless lawn mower is also the subject of a recall. Great.

I suppose both of these are just mild icing on the cake for the week. On the weekend I discovered the hot water heater/tank in the house was leaking. Of course I found this out because water had leaked under the maple laminate flooring I installed in the adjoining room, causing it to swell and warp. Yes, fun times.

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I wonder when we'll get the time to convert this static site (and manually updated news/blog) to a nice managed system like Joomla, don't you? I'm getting jealous of all that tagging everyone else has going on in their fancy WordPress templated sites. ;)

I also wouldn't mind putting in some neat little playlist/music/interest features too. I listen to a lot of music and it's streaming from an MP3 player 99% of the time, so it wouldn't be too difficult to hook something up real-time. Plus even if gets some of these bands an extra sale or exposure here or there, all the better. I get scared when I start to see artists I like get dropped from US distribution.

My favorite band, The Charlatans had this happen not too long ago. Thankfully something was worked out with a new label and it hasn't beeen difficult to buy their albums in Canada. Though I did pay a hefty $30 for the last one, Simpatico, after tax. That's what you get for an impulse purchase in the suburbs from HMV.

Sadly I'm also behind in ripping/encoding by about 20 albums right now, so today it's old-school CD spinning. Give them a listen. I'm still “getting into” this new album and will save a better and more rounded music-related entry for another time.

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I didn't promise to make this a “daily” blog did I? Ok, that's good. I've been so wrapped up with work lately that my sharp focus has left me with little more to think about than the tasks on my to-do lists.

We're wrapping up Mira 1.2 which I would have liked to have in your hands early last week. Hopefully the extra quality is worth the wait. Most of the web content has been updated and currently sits on my local machine waiting to be pushed live. The same goes for the built-in help files which, let me tell you, aren't so fun to keep up to date.

I'm glad everyone seems to be getting along with the software — at least that's what I'm taking from the slow-down in help/support requests. Like I've said before though, we still love receiving mail from customers.

The unfortunate development in the past two weeks has been a significant ramp in SPAM. It's to be extpected because there are currently multiple email addresses listed in plain-text right on the site. They'll have to be replaced with an online form soon to prevent automated address harvesting. You'll still get a real reply from a real email address when you write of course, and your replies can all be done in email too.

Most of the SPAM this past week seems to be in Japanese, which likely has something to do with a recent listing in a Japanese web gallery. So far however, I can't tell if they're trying to get into our PayPal account, selling prescription drugs or just peddling p0rn.

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That extra-long weekend was just the perfect amount of time off and even though I didn't have any down-time for reading, the great outdoors did provide some fun and relaxation. There was even a bit of excitement thrown into the mix with a mid-day water rescue (I had to rescue a couple of friends who were stranded with a canoe due to changing weather, wind and a lot of waves). And of course there's nothing like a couple of severe thunderstorms while on a kayak trip in the middle of nowhere. Fun times all around. Really.

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) wraps up tomorrow and it got me thinking about the fun times I've had out in San Francisco. For years I was practically a fixture at ATI's Macworld booth, but this year that wasn't the case for obvious reasons. Since the business is relatively young and operations are in bootstrap-mode, I just couldn't justify taking time off to attend WWDC. Being able to expense stuff like that while working for a larger corporate entity ("The Man") was obviously a sweet perk.

After the first trip it became second nature traveling around San Francisco. With only small changes here and there, including where I stayed, everything else stayed pretty much the same. I've done a bunch of the tourist stuff like visit Alcatraz, ride the cable cars and smell the sea lion stench down by the docks. Some places were visited each time I was in town, one of those was the Metreon next to Yerba Buena Gardens. It was always on the way to the Moscone from whichever hotel was “it” that year, but most of all, it's where the two-fisted burrito lived.

Si, delicious burritos from Luna Azul, what looks like any little food-court joint in some forgotten shopping mall. Ok, I can see you asking “Luna Azul?” Yes. I've had Tex-Mex and “Mexican” in countless places in Canada, the US and of course Mexico. So many claiming to be “authentic” and a few claiming simply to be good. Many weren't. This little place in the Metreon didn't pretend to be anything it wasn't. They were just selling an alternative to the BBQ chicken, pizza and pasta you could pick up next door. But I liked the burritos so much (chicken, beef or chicken and beef), that I'd often joke it was the only reason I was going on the trip. It didn't end there. They serve some tasty fresh nacho chips and some of the best salsa I have ever sampled. Ok, now my mouth is watering (and I just ate 30 minutes ago).

Does anyone know if Luna Azul make their own salsa on-site? Or if it's a commercial product? I'd love to get my hands on a tub of it, but I'd probably settle for a jar/bottle. It slipped my mind last week to ask a couple of people to consider packing a burrito away in their carry-on baggage for their return trip (or maybe subconsciously I just didn't trust them not to eat it).

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It's the second long-weekend of the Summer in Canada, the civic holiday (first weekend in August) and I'll be driving for about 5 hours in the morning to spend the weekend on the shores of Lake Temiskaming.

I probably won't be answering any emails this weekend and I've already promised a few people I'll try to stay off the PowerBook while sitting on the dock. I need some relax time and it'll give me the chance to catch up on some reading anyway. Yes, I still read some stuff that's printed on paper. I'll get back to answering questions on Tuesday morning, so hang tight.

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For the second day in a row it's baking outside, which is probably great if you want to make cookies on the hood of your car or fry eggs on the sidewalk as so many people are fond of doing. But if you're trying to keep an office cool, it's non-stop running of the air conditioner and the wonderful electrical bills it brings.

We're working on a number of significant new featuers for the next point version of Mira (1.2) and I thought I'd post a little teaser image. The icon selection and text in the image are just a random sampling, not any specific menu.

The upcoming version will also ship with a number of high quality matched-style icons — it will probably include two different sets in fact. Putting 2 and 2 together you can probably see where this is going.

You can see three sample icons below which will make their way into the built-in sets. The icons/images are all done in-house and the largest set is already up to over 160 icons. Mira won't include all of them, but a sub-set that makes sense for the way they'll be used.

I'm considering putting up the bulk of the sets for sale, packaged in different formats and sizes for royalty-free use on the web or for personal use. A few Twisted Melon original desktop images should also be online soon as freebies (I'm not talking about logo-ridden promotional stuff either, but real usable day to day desktop images).