Switcher

In May, I made the switch to a Mac. A Macbook Pro to be exact. I've been using it now for a few months and I really like it. I got Parallels to go with it for my Windows apps that I still needed, but I find myself using it less and less. One thing that has thrown me for a loop is the keyboard shortcuts. I'm very well versed in using keyboard shortcuts in the Windows world, but I'm finding it hard to remember all of the Mac equivalents. These are the ones I forget the most often:

CTL+F2 - > Menu bar gotten by using Alt
CMD+Shift+3 -> Print Screen
CMD+Shift+4 -> Print Screen w/ being able to select the area to capture
CMD+Shift+z -> Redo
CMD+Left Arrow -> Beginning of line
CMD+Right Arrow -> End of line
CMD+Shift+A -> Start Menu

I really do miss my home, end, page up & page down keys. I also miss being able to hit Win+E to get a new explorer window, I've yet to find a Mac equivalent.

--JOsh

The Snowblower Fairy

A couple of weeks ago, I left for work in the morning, and as I walked out my front door, there sat a snowblower. It was quite odd, as this being Iowa, we'd recently gotten snow & I found it to be unthinkable that someone would just gift me a snowblower out of the kindness of their hearts.

I asked my wife if she knew where it had come from, thinking that possibly my next door neighbor had dropped it off for us to use. Nope, not his. I asked my mom, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and a few others. No one had any clue as to where it might have came from.

After pondering it for a few days, I remembered that there was a gentleman down that street that repairs small engines. I hypothesized that someone had intended to drop off a snowblower to him to fix. I left the snowblower on the porch for about a week, figuring if my hypothesis was correct, someone would soon be looking for it. After a week & no word, I tried starting it to see if it even ran. No luck, so off it went to the garage to keep it out of the elements.

A few days later after returning from a trip out of town, I was greeted by a note on my door stating that someone had dropped off a snowblower by mistake & wanted me to call them. With all of the snow we've gotten lately, digging out my garage and dragging the snowblower to the front was far from my list of top things to do. I figured that in a week or so, I'd get around to calling the person back & having them come collect their snowblower.

Fast forward to this morning, when I hear a knock on the door. It's the snowblower guy, wanting to get his snowblower. Uggh. The problem being, that it was in the shed behind the house, blocked in by 12-16 inches of snow which would require quite a bit of shoveling to get it. Not exactly what I wanted to be doing at 7:30 in the morning. So, I shoveled my way to the shed & retrieved the snowblower and off he went.

The mystery of the snowblower fairy has been solved.

--JOsh

Blogger Comment Whitelist

While commenting on one of Jason's recent posts, the thought occurred to me that I really hate filling out CAPTCHAS on friend's blogs. It would be nice if Blogger would create a feature to add a friend comment whitelist, so that if I'm logged into blogger, I don't have to input that stupid CAPTCHA to comment on a friend's blog.

--JOsh

Honeymoon Photos

I know this is really late, but better late then never, eh?

Some pictures from our honeymoon at Sandals Resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. It was a wonderful trip and very relaxing. Too bad we got an immediate Midwest Winter welcome upon our return.

http://picasaweb.google.com/joshandmelissa777

--JOsh

Our tax dollars at work

I've been wanting to do a project for a while that involved text messaging, an email server & weather radar images. It seems that fairly often, I'm someplace where I'd find it really handy to be able to check to the radar for impending storms, or to see how much longer a storm will be hovering over. Since I don't have a data plan for my cell phone, I'd dreamed of a way to send a text message to someplace, and have it respond back with an animated radar image. Seems simple enough, right? Well, I've got it mostly working now with some wget & .procmailrc magic. But in the process, I was trying to figure out where to get my radar images. I knew that the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had weather forecast pages that were pretty good. After doing a little digging, I came across this link, http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/remote/ridge_download.htm that outlines just what images they have, where they live on their server, & other very useful information. Usually, it's a cat & mouse game trying to figure out where an image is, if there's time based strings in it's URL & other such nonsense. I think it's great that, as a government funded organization, we, the taxpayers, can use the information that we're ultimately paying for.

And Ryan ought to appreciate this, http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/remote/radarfaq.htm and http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/remote/ridgeimages.htm both specifically mention color blindness and the fact that radar uses color to convey information. And they even point out a site, http://www.ryobi-sol.co.jp/visolve/en/ that has a free for personal use tool for color deficient people that can change their computer display to colors they can discern.

--JOsh

And the heavens parted...

And the light shone, and basking in the light, in all it's gloriousness, was Jimmy John's. At long last, after being smitten with the taste of their delicious subs over 6 years ago, I can finally get one here in Cedar Rapids.

--JOsh

Fuck Vonage!

Grrr... A few months back, I had signed the Forest up for Vonage. We had intended to get a phone number locally, then transfer it to Vonage using the Number Portability Act. Well, long story short, we got out local number from a local cell phone company, and then couldn't get the number transfered to Vonage. I called Vonage from work over my lunch break to cancel. Well, today I noticed I had a missed call last night from some toll free number, 866-243-4357. As I was sitting at my desk this afternoon, my phone rang, and it was the same toll free number. I answer and it's Vonage trying to sell me service. I asked how they got my number and the lady on the end of the phone said that I had previously called them. WTF! I asked, 'So since I called once from this number, you took that as an invitation to telemarket to me at this number?', to which she responded 'Yes.' Double WTF! I told her to never call me at this number again, at which time she started rattling off a speech about how they will do that, but it might take 30 days to remove my name & number, and I may still receive calls until then.

Guess I'll have to start dialing *67 before calling places to ensure that I don't get telemarketed based on a previous phone call.

--JOsh