Insane calendar

So I just found out about the new James Bond movie (Quantum of Solace), coming out November 7th, and I grabbed my iPod touch to add it to the calendar so I wouldn't forget. I switched to month view, and started flipping through the months to get to November, when suddenly my iPod decided that it would much rather go batshit insane and fly to the distant future, with no end in sight. Somewhere around 2015 I finally gave up trying to press the home button and held down the hold button to turn it off. After a few minutes of looking at the white Apple logo, it finally turned off/on, and everything was back to normal.

Another exciting day at work.

DELETE! DELETE! DELETE!

Diablo 3!!!

Imagine my surprise (and excitement) this morning when a link to this was sitting in my feed reader.


So now there are two games I'm looking forward to that work on a Mac? What is the world coming to....


(The other one is Spore, by the way.)

Web 2.0 action

I'm intermittently ramping up my use of Twitter and del.icio.us, for those who are interested in such things.

Said ramping may be due to de-ramping of work responsibilities. Although those have been slightly ramped lately. Overuse of the word ramping to de-ramp in 3... 2... 1...

Doctor Who 204

Cool time travel episode - accelerated portrayal of the consequences of The Doctor never getting old while everyone else does, which they're building on a lot this season.

For those of you who haven't been keeping up, I haven't been keeping up with Doctor Who, so I'm catching up.

My computer is ready

My MacBook has a new hard drive and is ready to go. Unfortunately the old one was unrecoverable so I lost a few things... I guess I will have to start using Time Machine again...

Great, now this is going to be the longest work day ever...

...Or not

Well it turns out the hard drive is pretty dead, so they're replacing it (for free), and are going to attempt to recover its contents (not for free, unless it doesn't work). All this is going to take 5-6 days unless I'm very lucky, so it looks like I'm going to have to rediscover my Vaio.

I am not particularly thrilled with Apple right now (however irrational that may be).

Now I want one of these (yeah, right).

MacBook trouble

As a few of my recent Twitter posts allude to, upon returning to Cleveland last night I discovered that my MacBook no longer booted into OS X. After trying the few things I know how to do with Macs (or, depending on your opinion of Macs, the few things that are possible to do with Macs), I decided that I would pay a visit to the Apple store and see what they think.

Today at work I Googled around a bit and found someone who had a similar problem, and resolved it by taking out the hard drive and putting it back in. Since my problem happened after driving back to Cleveland with my laptop, I'm hoping the hard drive just rattled loose a bit and this will do the trick, which would agree with the symptoms I've observed. Unfortunately, I don't have my set of small screwdrivers up here with me, so I may end up having to go to the Apple store after all.


Updates, for those concerned, will be posted later today.

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Grand Prix

So I didn't do extremely well, but whatever... 3-3-drop... here's my list

Plains x7
Forest x10
Rune-Cervin Rider
Windbrisk Raptor
Devoted Druid
Spawnwrithe
Woodfall Primus
Safehold Duo
Wildslayer Elves
Loamdragger Giant
Medicine Runner
Mudbrawler Raiders
Scuzzback Marauders
Swans of Bryn Argoll
Tattermunge Duo
Wort, the Raidmother
Scuttlemutt
Thornwatch Scarecrow
Wicker Warcrawler
Prison Term x2
Barkshell Blessing
Manamorphose
Runes of the Deus
Safewright Quest

UPDATE: I checked online, and I ended up 613th out of 1124, which considering I only won 3 out of 9 possible games, doesn't seem that bad.... I am also now officially tied for 2nd with lots of other people in the Dayton/Springfield area in Pro Points ranking... with 0 Pro Points.

MXH178, now with bookmark power!

For all of you (which, judging by the number of comments, is a lot of people) who have been wanting to bookmark an individual section of my website, the wait is over! Each of the links to a different section, while still just hiding/unhiding a div now changes the url, which can be linked/bookmarked/stared at. For example, if you want to look at my icons, all you have to do is go to http://filer.case.edu/mxh178/?icons. Hooray for javascript. Also, while far from novel, I came up with this on my own. Besides being self-congratulatory, that means that it might not work exactly as planned.

Spore

I got the Spore Creature Creator demo today. It's pretty fun. Check out these guys I made.

RATAWHA??

OH MY GOD WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME RATATAT HAD A NEW CD??

Okay, to be fair, someone did, but I didn't believe them, and then I forgot about it. But apparently it's the truth.



UPDATE: It was Dan.

Keeping your applications fresh

There is nothing particularly wrong with the icon for AppFresh, an application which figures out which of your applications have updates available, but I don't think it really conveys what the application does. Yes, it's a modified version of the little internet/network globe thing that Apple's Software Update application has in it, but that same icon is used for network disks, and networks in general (among other things).

So since I fancy myself something of an icon person these days, I made a sketch icon for AppFresh, but I didn't just remake the original like I usually do. Instead, I made this:

If you can't tell what it is, it's because I'm not actually that great at making icons. It's a ziploc bag with an application inside/on it. I like this idea enough that I'm going to attempt to make a more "normal" realistic-looking version of it. Someday.

Some more Helvetica

I finished making the Helvetica icons (the letters, anyway, which are available on my website), and it occurred to me that a single letter might not be the most useful thing to differentiate applications. So, taking a page from Adobe's book, I made a few icons with two letters.

From left to right: Address Book, iTunes, Firefox. I think they still need tweaking...

A few more icons...

I just finished a few more icons for my "sketch" or "drawing" icon set.

I also started making "letter" icons, which seemed like an interesting idea at the time.