Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Tonight Erin and I were looking at After The Rapture Pet Care after Matt mentioned it on Twitter.

And of course, I’m like, “We should sign up to be caretakers, and make some money off this.”

And then I realized it would never pay out, because the whole point is that we don’t believe the rapture’s a’comin’. And then we laughed till we hurt.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

I know it’s been a couple years, but it’s still disappointing how quickly Danica Patrick went from “See, women can legitimately compete in male-dominated sports” to “TEEHEE I’M A SEX OBJECT!”

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

So that I don’t have to go looking for this again next time, you can move the dock to the left, center, or right (or top, middle, or bottom, if you have it on the left or right side of the screen) using one of the following Terminal commands:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string middle

Then restart the Dock for it to take effect:

killall Dock

Update: Bryan’s comment made me realize I wasn’t really clear on what I was talking about here. In the Dock settings, you can choose to position it on the left, right, or bottom of the screen, but by default, it will be in the middle of that edge. These commands will pin it to one side. So for example, if you have your Dock on the left side like I do, and use the first command (with the start option), it will appear on the left side but right up against the menu bar. Or use end to get it up against the bottom – this is where mine is, see:

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

I don’t want to say too much about the iPad. It’s been covered plenty by more informed and eloquent bloggers than me, but I do want to talk about the ramifications a bit.

There seem to be two opinions on the iPad: the folks that say this is the future of computing, and the folks that say that first group is a bunch of rabid Apple fanboys that are willing to pay too much for an overgrown iPod Touch. There are some people in the middle, but they don’t seem to care in the least.

I fall into the first group, and maybe even with a hint of fanboy rabies.

Erin asked me the day before the iPad announcement why I was so excited about a device I probably wouldn’t buy, especially since I got a Kindle the week before. For me, it’s not about this device, I explained. The more important thing, I think, is what it will do for the industry. Let’s be honest: smart phones before the iPhone were not pleasant to use. Since it’s introduction, smart phones have improved across the board. Even if I don’t want what Apple is selling, lots of people will, and it forces the competition to step up their game – and that’s good news for us consumers. The iPad may not fundamentally change the world, but in a few months, you’ll be seeing people using them on subways and airplanes. How many times have you seen a Microsoft Surface in the wild?

So point one: the iPad is likely to inspire copycats and “iPad killers” that may or may not improve on the idea, but which move forward the ideal of personal computing in some way.

Point two: iPads (or the new class of devices into which the iPad falls) will change the way we do a lot of things in our daily lives. This is from The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

You know, at first I wasn’t so impressed with the iPad, but the more I thought about the ways in which you can use it, the more excited I got. As a piece of leisure technology – something you just have laying around your living room like a newspaper – it’s a lot more user friendly than a laptop or an iPhone.

I don’t see the iPad making a lot of headway in that space in the near future. Most people won’t spend over $500 for a device that falls somewhere between a glorified toy and a wimpy laptop; lots of geeks will, but not many regular people. I expect this type of device to be used in business environments a lot more, because it really does fit a space between phones and laptops that isn’t adequately addressed by netbooks. There are tons of things that could have been done on the iPhone, but for screen size, or on a netbook, but for horsepower and usability, and the iPad is going to exploit those areas.

Consider a doctor’s office. Docs could use an app that allows them to carry around their patient files for the day, along with every medical reference worth converting to digital media. A netbook might work, but in terms of speed and ease of use, an iPad makes more sense: the doctor can quickly tap around to look things up, make notes, and share information with their patient. The form factor makes it easier for someone to share what they’re looking at with another person.

Or, consider a conference with an expo hall. Conference staff greet attendees as they arrive and check them in on the spot, without having to deal with long lines at the registration counters. The exhibitors have a couple each to collect sales leads and show off product demo videos and things like that. If exhibitors are selling products, it can be used as a point of sale.

Most of the comments I’ve read about the iPad this past week are about how people will use it at home and how it will compete with the Kindle and netbooks that are already on the market. I’m much more interested to see what kind of business application come out of it, because I really think that the iPad is a lot more accessible for any kind of face-to-face uses like these.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Just about every week, I see something about an open source product that I don’t like. Usually it’s just some admin feature that could use a couple more options. Most of the time, it’s a really irritating but trivial bug, like escaping single quotes in the name of a blog (looking at you, WordPress µ).

And every time, I think, “I should make this better and get involved in this project. Maybe this could be My Thing.”

And then I remember that I don’t get around to most of the projects that are already My Things. But someday, somewhere – I’ll fix something.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

I don’t think I ever mentioned it here, but Erin and I made a deal not too long ago: if I averaged three visits to the gym each week (at a minimum of 45 minutes each) for two months, I could splurge and get myself a Kindle. And, I have to keep that rate up for two more months, or she takes it away.

Well, I’ve had my Kindle for just under two weeks now, and I love it. The original thinking was that it would fit on the little shelf on cardio machines better than a book would, and I would be inclined to spend more time working out if I had something to read. And that part worked – I spent well over an hour on the elliptical and stationary bike the other day, reading on my Kindle. But I’m finding that even away from the gym, I like reading on it better than other medium; for example, the e-ink screen doesn’t have the glare of glossy magazine pages, and is much more comfortable for long blog posts than a laptop screen.

Which brings me to Instapaper. If you do any significant reading on the web, Instapaper can make your life much better. This free service gives you a “Read Later” bookmarklet to click when you come across an article you’d like to (surprise) read later. Logging into their site will show you a list of the articles you have saved, and gives you the option of just viewing the text of each article without all the ads and whatnot. This comes in handy when used with the iPhone app, which can download just the text from all your saved articles. I used this every day on my metro ride to my old office.

That text parsing is also used to generate a Kindle-formatted file of your latest 20 articles – and this is where I get the most out of my Kindle. I save a crapton of articles in Instapaper, and every day I plug my Kindle into my laptop and download the latest 20 so I can read them comfortably on the Kindle’s e-ink display. As I read, I use the highlight function to note things I want to look up later or quotes I’d like to share on Tumblr.

Outside of Instapaper, I’m also fond of the PragPub magazine from The Pragmatic Programmers – also available in Kindle format – and I’m looking for more free periodicals that I can load on there.

When I first looked at the Kindle, I considered how many books I would have to read on it to break even. Most books are $10 for the Kindle version, which isn’t a significant savings over the paperback version, so it’s hard to justify $250 on a cost-savings basis. But I quickly found that most of my time with the Kindle will not be spent on regular books. Thanks to Instapaper, there’s no limit to the content I can read for free. Along with free magazines like PragPub and all the free post-copyright books available on Project Gutenberg, I doubt I’ll even wind up buying too many books on there. And even THEN – there are some that are free or dirt cheap, like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

In summary, I couldn’t be happier with my Kindle, even if the iPad does take a good chunk out of their market share (but I’ll get to that another time).

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

I just want to point out two little utilities that have been making my life much easier for the past week or two.

Window management on the Mac has always been less than perfect: the maximize button never quite does, and on apps like iTunes, it does something else entirely like switch to the mini mode. Cinch and SizeUp, from Irradiated Software, make it all better.

Cinch allows you to drag a window to the top of the screen to make it fill the screen entirely, or drag it to one side of the screen to size it to the half of the screen – pretty handy for viewing Finder windows side-by-side.

SizeUp takes it a step further by adding keyboard combinations for those actions and several others, like filling the top or bottom half of the screen, or one quadrant, or centering on the screen at half the screen size, or moving to the same position on another monitor or Space – all sorts of good stuff, really.

Cinch is $7 and SizeUp is $13, and I have found that the two in tandem are well worth the $20 total.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

New Year’s Day seems less and less important with each passing year. I know I’m not good with resolutions, so I’ve never really bothered with them, but I still feel like I should at least take a moment to look back and think forward and consider where I am compared to where I want to be.

I almost said that I’m in the same place I was last year, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 2009 brought me a wedding to a lovely lady, the adoption of an adorable dog, a zero balance on my credit cards, and just last month, a new job. It was hardly uneventful, but still: just like last year, I want to relax more, but also accomplish more on my own projects.

Like most years, I spend January 1 looking over blog posts and such from the previous year, reminiscing a little bit. There’s a new one this year: the Last Played field in iTunes. My current iTunes Library seems to have begun around March 12, 2006, as that is the earlier date I have. It’s weird to look at my music and see that I haven’t listened to songs I once loved in well over three years, and now, it feels wrong to play them and overwrite that date in Last Played. Is that weird? That seems weird. I don’t think most people actively avoid playing music just to keep from overriding an insignificant bit of metadata.

Anyway, I feel the same as I did yesterday. I still don’t really know exactly how I want this year to be different, but I hope I start figuring it out soon.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve got a few development sites running on my laptop, and I generally want them to be at the document root to mimic the live site as much as possible (ie, at http://localhost/ instead of http://localhost/Clients/ClientA/). Until today, I’ve been switching the Document Root in MAMP every time I switch projects, which is fine when you only switch projects once in a while. I just made some config changes to make this easier and a little more sensical, and I thought I’d write about it here in case anyone else is looking for ideas on the Googles.

First, open /private/etc/hosts and add hosts for each client you want to host, so your machine knows to look for the domain on your own computer. I use local.clientname.com because it’s unlikely that most sites have a local subdomain, but you can use something different. My host file has these two lines at the bottom:

127.0.0.1       local.clienta.com
127.0.0.1       local.buffalostuff.net

Then run this in Terminal to flush your DNS cache:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Now, you can navigate to those URLs (http://local.clienta.com and http://local.buffalostuff.net in my case) and MAMP will serve up whatever it has.

That’s half the job. Now, you need to configure Virtual Hosts for the domains. In the MAMP Preferences, on the Apache tab, make sure the Document Root is set to your Sites directory (in my case, /Users/bboland/Sites/). Then, open /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf, and add a virtual host at the bottom of the file for each domain:

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName local.clienta.com
DocumentRoot /Users/bboland/Sites/ClientA
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName local.buffalostuff.net
DocumentRoot /Users/bboland/Sites/BuffaloStuff
</VirtualHost>

Stop and re-start the servers in MAMP. Now you can navigate to those two sites and actually get the right content.

The biggest problem I see with this is maintenance: any time you take on a new project, you need to make sure you update the hosts file and Apache config. But, since you only need to do it once, it’s not that bad.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Not unlike last time, I’ve been putting off posting because there are more important things I haven’t had a chance to write about. So, I’m declaring blog bankruptcy yet again, with the understanding that I feel bad that I haven’t written about:

• Our awesome wedding
• Our awesome honeymoon
• Turning 26
• Being in DC for four full years
• Leaving the job I’ve had for those four years
• Starting a new job
• Paying off my credit cards (thanks entirely to Erin)
• Various other more minor things

I still intend to write about that stuff soon-ish, but I’m not going to feel bad about posting about other, smaller stuff in the meantime.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Kottke’s idea, not mine, but I like it:

Allow two classes of apps in the App Store: those approved by Apple and those not approved by Apple. The unapproved apps would only be accessed through direct searches (they would not appear in top 10 lists or be featured on the front page), would carry cigarette-grade warnings that it might kill your phone and cause cancer, and maybe Apple would take a slightly larger cut to incentivize developers to get apps approved. Non-approved apps could still be pulled from the store by Apple at any point for blatant violations of Apple’s guidelines. That way, if developers want to skirt around all the headaches of Apple’s approval process and if users want to gamble on an app to run on their own hardware that Apple won’t or can’t approve in a timely fashion, they can.

Not that Apple would ever do such a thing.

Via Quick App Store idea.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Merlin Mann, in Three things about Marco Arment (emphasis mine):

We all need to figure out what the fuck it is that we can do to make this gig better for everybody. Yes, starting with ourselves and the ones closest to us. But, I’m more convinced than ever that the path to feeling whole and happy means bucking up, dropping the “poor me” act, and stopping everything you need to until you figure out the next thing you can do that would make you feel alive and useful — driven by something other than the need to rationalize why you aren’t where you want to be.

Doesn’t have to be a cool computer program or a rocket to the moon. But, it’s worth remembering that we all have at least a little potential to do something bigger and more useful than pissing ourselves about what we don’t have or what we can’t do.

And part of Marco’s response:

There’s only so much time in the day, and only so many days in our lives. There’s enough great work out there that you don’t need to waste any time with anything that isn’t great…

Life’s too short to drink bad coffee or read bad blogs.

Make the effort to care.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

I was a fan of Zend Studio 5.5, but for whatever reason, Zend Studio 7, with all its Eclipse-iness, just doesn’t do it for me. I don’t do much coding these days, so I’ve stuck with my beloved TextMate, even though I missed the full suite of functionality – especially debugging.

But now that I’ve finally gotten around to installing Xdebug and MacGDBp (following instructions on TechnoSophos) I may uninstall Zend altogether. It’s lighter, it’s quick, and it will be plenty for the little bit of debugging that I need to do.

The only complaint I have thus far is that I can’t seem to get the xdebug.file_link_format option to work:

xdebug.file_link_format = "txmt://open?url=file://%f&line=%l"

That txmt:// link should be included in stack traces in the browser, so that clicking on the name of the offending file will open it in TextMate to the right line, but it’s not using the specified format. The Xdebug documentation claims that it wasn’t introduced until Xdebug 2.1…but the latest version is only 2.0.5. It’s a minor thing, but it would be nice.

So I’m content. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do. And don’t bother wasting your time to tell me I should be using vim – I loves me some TextMate.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

From The Foamy Rules for Rabid Tools:

Think of it like this. What if I told you that each time you wanted to save a file, you had to stand up, climb up on your chair, and jump up and down, yelling, “I would like to save my stuff now!” The first time you had to do it, it’d be kind’a fun, but after that it’d drive you bat shit crazy. It’s a similar feeling each time I reach for my mouse. I feel I’m engaging in an unnecessary task, which is always going to waste my time, because with a mouse sometimes you miss and missing is a tremendous waste of time.

It’s not a post about keyboards or mouses, but I liked the quote.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

For someone that has terrible handwriting and spends most of his time on a computer, I sure do have a complicated relationship with notebooks.

Like most geeks, I’ve liked Moleskine notebooks since I first met one. They feel nice. They’re a good size. The paper is deeply satisfying to write on. Something about writing in one makes you feel like you’ve got something important to write – or should, anyway.

And that was a problem. That nice little elastic band and the quality of the notebook actually caused me to not use them for a long time, even though I had one in my messenger bag all the time. It’s stupid, I know, but subconsciously, I was convinced that such a nice notebook deserved to be filled with something better than random lists, fragmented notes, and little sketches, all of it in poor handwriting. It caused just enough resistance that I wouldn’t use it – there was that tiny subconscious barrier, from pulling the notebook out of my bag, pulling off the band, and making my notes look good enough for the notebook, and that was just enough. It was stupid, but maybe it wasn’t all me: I mean hell, every one comes with a little insert that describes how they’ve been used by the likes of Picasso, Van Gogh, and Hemingway. How can you not feel a little pressured to live up to the notebook?

A few months ago, I met Field Notes. These pocket-sized notebooks are sturdy, straightforward, and they come from a company that doesn’t take themselves so seriously. They were exactly what I needed.

I started off my Field Notes by putting the date at the top of every page, because it’s nice to know when I wrote something when I go back to look at it again. But as it turns out, that was barrier enough. If I force myself to use even a simple convention like the date at the top of the page, I often won’t bother – even forcing that tiny ‘rule’ on my own notebook was enough to keep me from using it (have I mentioned I’m a little OCD?)

Then I settled on a simple enough convention that I would do quickly when necessary, simple enough that it wouldn’t cause even a split-second hesitation when I reach for my notebook. If a page has any to-do items on it, I put an empty checkbox in the upper corner. If it’s some kind of reference material – notes from our dog’s vet appointment, a list of restaurants we want to check out, decisions made at some meeting at work – I write REF at the top corner. This way, I can flip through and see what pages I need to revisit. I give myself just enough information that it’s negligible include it, but all I really need when I’m looking for something later on.

This worked nicely for a couple weeks, but I soon found that I had more to write than could comfortably fit on a page or two in the Field Notes. And before I knew it, I was back in Moleskines. If I keep it on me all day, and have it at the ready, I will actually take notes during meetings and phone calls – and really, that was what I needed all along. I had to change my perception of it from being a notebook for capital-w Writing, to being a regular old notebook for meeting notes, and now I have it on me all the time at the office. I’ve also started numbering the pages and keeping a simple index at the back of the book, so I can easily locate notes on a particular RFC I was reviewing or a conference call I took part in (a trick I learned from Tim Ferris).

This week, I stopped carrying my Field Notes altogether. Some part of me still feels like I should have a little notebook with me all the time, just in case, but the reality is that I was never using it, so why bother? Notebooks have been one of the more persistent expressions of my OCD, so I’m still kind of surprised that in a matter of a few months, I wound up right back where I started – for now.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Science help me, I’ve become one of those Starbucks people.

Venti pumpkin spice soy no-whip latte, please. Keep the dignity, thanks.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Seriously, you guys: I love fall.

I’ve loved it as long as I can remember. The twin October holidays of Halloween and my birthday probably deserve most of the credit for making it seem so delightful when I was a kid. For a long time, it marked the exciting beginning of a new school year, or even a new school. Every year when it starts getting cooler, I still think about my first few weeks of college, and the beginning of every year when everyone would come back to campus after months away.

In more recent years, I’ve come to appreciate the changing season more than anything else. The summers in DC can be brutal, and the chilling air and early sunset is a welcome reprieve. I like walking home from work on a dark, breezy evening, more than I think most people do. Not to mention, Starbucks only has the Pumpkin Spice Latte for a couple of months.

The past couple years, fall has passed me by. I was too busy working to enjoy it two years ago, and I don’t know what happened last year, but it got away from me somehow. It’s made me all the more present and conscious this year; I’m paying more attention as I walk the streets, drinking in as much of the evening chill as I can because I know it won’t last long. In no time at all, we’ll be bundled in jackets and scarves again, slogging through the measly snow that DC gets but the city can’t quickly remove, and once again I’ll be counting the days till the next October.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Ya know what? I think that if our apartment were lower than it is (the 13th floor), I might not need street-level parking.

We have a small balcony – too small to really use, even, since it’s not even big enough for a chair. But, what if we installed some kind of swing arm just below the ceiling, rigged that up to a motor, and attached a bike lift with an electric winch? How cool would it be to stand outside and use a remote to swing the bike out over the side of the balcony and lower it down?

If I ever own an apartment with a balcony lower than, say, the fourth floor, I might try to get away with this.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

If you keep an eye out for them, there’s a crapload of bikes in DC.

Also, the weather tonight is superb. A mostly clear sky, a little bit of a breeze, and just a scent of that crispy chill that settles in around Halloween.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

As much as I love our current apartment, things could always be a little bit better in some way, no matter where you are. I’m calling this Part 1 because I’m sure I’ll think of more, but for now, I’d love me some:

Street-level bike parking

Our building has a bike rack in the parking garage below the building. It’s indoor behind a locked door, so it’s better than outside, but it still didn’t keep Erin’s last bike from being stolen. The real problem is the day-to-day practicality of it – we don’t have a clicker for the garage door, and it’s a pain in the neck to go down to the garage to walk a bike through three sets of doors and an elevator to get outside. Actually, even parking them in our apartment would be better, if we had room for them.

Ahh, someday.