Month: March 2007

Update: I was burned by the April Fool’s Joke. If you can’t pull it on April 1, I don’t know if it counts… but oh well.

The acquisition of F**ckedCompany.com by TechCrunch makes some sense. Still, Mike Arrington might want to reconsider this quote.

That does not bode well for the future – there just isn’t anything left to invent.

Whether we’re riding a boom, a bust, or something in between in the tech/Internet world, predicting the end of innovation feels foolish.

On Tuesday, when David announced 100 billion DNS queries for OpenDNS, the chart was enhanced with a dancing banana. Go ahead, click through and see.

Back yet?

Good. Now compare the dancing banana to Snappy, the dancing logo of the original Snap.com, shared here. (Thanks to David, Snappy loops continually now.)

This is before Snap became NBC Internet (NBCi), before the company went defunct, and before the Idealab folks bought the easy-to-remember domain name and relaunched a search site. We’re talking 1997-1998.

I am not nostalgic for all of the dot-boom era, but Snappy always made me smile. Here is a less animated, less yellow version of the original site logo:

And another year has passed. Kids happily re-gifted some of their presents to me, and cupcakes were enjoyed by all.

I started the day in darkness with a mile run on the Kezar track, as I’ve done occasionally in past years. 5:23 left me convinced that I haven’t slowed down too much, although I can’t find records of past years (which is why I’m blogging this). Staying under six minutes is the general point.

clock hits a milestone today, too. I started this blog four years ago. Three years ago, I was still blogging heavily. Two years ago, the posts were slowing down. One year ago, little had changed. This year has been pretty light, but this is still post number 1224.

The next month at work is going to be hectic, but fun because we will be sharing cool stuff that’s been under development for a while. Eight months in, and we hit 100 billion DNS requests today. Lots more to come!

I got to take credit for something today that I didn’t do, thanks to the wife. How much longer before the boy reads the blog and asks me what I’m referring to? 😉

(Yes, I owe you big time.)

Last week, the boy wanted to make Inca masks. I told him we might find something on the Internet, so he typed away. Didn’t get a great response from the Safari address bar, but I think he’s starting to get the idea. Note: I never did find useful instructions for such a craft project, even with some later searching. Pointers welcome!

I have not yet turned Growl back on, but Growl was not the problem. I took the iMac G5 into the Genius Bar last Saturday night (yes, I’m that much fun), for the second trip in three days.

Good news, though, was that I left the computer there that night, and had it back, free of charge, with a brand-new power supply on Monday night. All is well once again, and my computer wakes and sleeps easier than I do once more. The Genius Bar experience was quite good all the way through, especially with the availability of online appointment scheduling. I didn’t want to be there, but all three visits were quick, and I got competent helpful people, at no charge. That is ever more rare, so it is notable.

Norman Mailer‘s best-known book The Naked and the Dead filled my nights over the last few weeks. I didn’t plow straight through, but I became more interested the further I went on.

My grandfather served on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II. The island warfare depicted in this book, following an army platoon, wasn’t his war, directly, but I wondered about how his Navy experience jibed with these descriptions.

The profiles of each individual sharpened the book wonderfully. The range of characters gives every reader of the book someone to identify with. Mailer’s characters were better than his story, but the story isn’t bad.

I knew Mailer’s name, and several of the titles of his books. But I had never read him until now. I was prompted to read his work after seeing him twice in recent months. Once was on film, in the documentary When We Were Kings.

The second time was at the City Arts & Lectures series early last month. I was happy to have a ticket, even though it was back row of the balcony. Very entertaining conversation, in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily assume is true of all authors.

Being able to engage on the page, in an extended, polished flow of words, is not the same skill as speaking and thinking in full sentences and connected thoughts. Mailer has both talents, polished over a lifetime. After all, Mailer ran for mayor of New York and generally enjoyed the celebrity (literary and otherwise) that the success of The Naked and the Dead brought him at the ripe old age of 25. Nearly 60 years later, he’s physically frail, but mentally acute. We can all only wish for so much.

I’m putting all training details over on WeEndure, but a race is worth noting. Emerald Nuts Across the Bay 12k was this morning. I didn’t spend more than a few strides enjoying the morning view on the Golden Gate Bridge, but the weather was pretty nice and the race felt good: 47:39. I last ran this race in 2000, running a 46:54.

At times, the head gets racing, and despite myself, I can’t sleep. I’ve been up for a bit over two hours already. Been a productive time, actually, but it’s going to make the rest of this day pretty tough… the boy wakes up in probably 10 minutes, so not much point in trying to go back to sleep.

It’s also “the night before the night before” I join the running crowds for the Emerald Across the Bay 12K tomorrow, so I would have liked to be rested. Oh well. I’ll nap this afternoon if circumstances allow.

I’ve scheduled another visit to the Genius Bar for this evening, to fix the problem I thought was already solved.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, I suppose.

Update, March 17th The sleep problem reoccured, and now it’s gotten worse: the computer won’t start up. Heading back to the Genius Bar tonight. 🙁

I suppose the good news is that maybe after all this is solved, I can turn on Growl again, since it’s not longer clear that was the (only) problem.

It took a genius to figure out that Growl, the notification system for Mac OS X, was what caused the iMac G5 (PowerPC) to stop waking from sleep. I got totally fed up with unplugging the computer and restarting just to use the computer after two days, and made an appointment online to bring it to the genius.

Seriously, the genius was Ben at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store near Union Square in San Francisco. He repeated the problem which caused me to bring the computer in this evening (phew). Then he did a bunch of hardware checks without finding anything.

So, we started from another system, and the problem went away. Therefore, a software problem. First place we looked (at his suggestion) was in the Startup Items, since he’d seen that I had Quicksilver installed. He knew that utility does some low-level stuff, although he didn’t think that was necessarily the problem. I saw the Growl preference pane in the list, disabled it first, and BAM, problem solved. (I’m quite happy Quicksilver was not too blame. THAT I could not give up.)

That Growl was the problem is (a) surprising and (b) too bad.

Surprising because I’ve had Growl installed here at home for at least two months, so I’m not sure why it would start to cause a problem this week.

Too bad because I like the notifications, even though I use this computer less than the MacBook at work, where Growl is, well, growling along happily. It’s version 0.76 of the Universal Binary. I haven’t looked around to see if this problem is common/reported, but making this post to help others who may fall afoul of the sleep gods.

I was slightly misled by the slightly burnt smell coming from the computer (when I was looking at it closely). Ben at the Apple Store thought it was just dust near the processor, which really does get hot. Seems to be right.

I’m just happy I can put the computer to sleep again. I’m headed there myself.