In the past I pointed at colibri as the best windows file launcher, but I’ve recently switched over to Launchy after it was mentioned in a sourceforge contest. There’s still nothing on the windows side that’s as elegant as Quicksilver on OSX, but Launchy is getting close. If you’re unfamiliar with this kind of tool, they function thusly - hit a command key sequence to invoke a text entry area, then begin typing the name of the program you want to launch. The tool will begin offering guesses as to which you want to launch, and you can use your arrow keys to pick the appropriate response, then hit enter and off you go. Instead of hitting enter you can hit tab then choose an operation, like, say, ‘reveal location’ or ‘move to.’

It sounds cumbersome but these tools have changed the way I use computers in a significant way. It’s funny - what’s old is new again, since this category of tool is sort of an effort to stick a gui on top of the command line interface we all knew and loved in DOS or in unix.

Anyway check out launchy if you’re on Windows, it’s great.

So we’re about to go live with the next phase of our project at work, and as part of that we’ve been testing our materials. Part of that is checking for broken links, and this led me to check if there was anything better out there than Xenu, which I’ve been using on Windows for years. Turns out there isn’t, despite Xenu being incredibly long in the tooth and weak on the user interface side of things. If you need a link checker on windows, Xenu is your tool, trust me. Just remember to turn it down a couple of notches - on a fast windows machine, it’s an effective webserver denial of service attacker because it can bounce requests so fast.

So thanks to my friend Tony, I have a Pownce account and have some spare invites to share. If you’re not familiar with it, Pownce is the latest project from Kevin Rose, the former techtv host who started Digg. To be honest aside from sharing the occasional file I don’t really see the use of Pownce yet, but I also failed to see that Digg would take off, thinking at the time it was slashdot only with dumber people commenting, so who knows, maybe I’m missing something with Pownce and it will be the next big thing.

It’s basically like twitter or your instant messenger client, with some web-publishing capabilities and an Adobe Air client. If you want an invite, leave me a note in the comments with the email address you want it sent to and I’ll hook you up. If I don’t hear from anyone I’m going to register for inviteshare and see how well that works - it’s a great idea, no idea if the implementation is good though.

Check out the jingproject, a new application from techsmith, the folks who make Camtasia Studio, a product I use regularly to produce things like this. Jing is not nearly as feature rich as Camtasia is, and it takes a bit to get used to its interface, but it’s free (at least for now), runs cross platform, and outputs to a single swf file, which makes it easy to embed anywhere you want. I’ve been experimenting with it at work because while I like Camtasia, it has two issues which bug me - it can’t output to a single swf file in a usable manner, and it crashes a lot. So far Jing has been stable and is producing decent screencasts for me.

This image was gross enough that I didn’t want to put it on the front pages of my site - if you’re interested in seeing how this is progressing, check it out, but be aware it’s pretty disgusting. It actually looks much worse than yesterday, though I suspect this is because the topical agent I spray on her three times a day is drying it out and what’s happening is scabs are beginning to form.

Credit where it’s due - she’s a total trooper about all this, with her lampshade on and having to deal with me spraying her injury with what must feel like acid to her based on her reaction (this from a dog that normally seems pretty immune to pain). She’s moping a bit and seems to crave affection a bit more than usual but is otherwise coping pretty well with it all.

So Soolin and I go swimming. Afterwards, she goes to the bathroom, and I collect it in a poop bag and deposit it in the cargo hatch under the floor of my car, then forget about it. It spends a day baking in the sun on Sunday. Monday morning I open up the car and yyyyyyeeeeech! My car reeks. Dunno yet what I will do to clear that out of my car but was I ever bummed on the way to work Monday morning.

We’ve been to the vet and Soolin actually had two things going on. She had a skin infection on her neck that she’s recovering from on her own, and she had a different kind of skin infection, a hot spot, on her leg, which you can see in all its disgusting glory below. She has to wear an elizabethan collar to keep her from licking the thing which makes her miserable, and she has to take pills for a week and have the infection sprayed with something that stings like hell, but she’s already on the mend.

So after several weeks of manic activity - hiking, traveling to Cape Cod, Long Island, and upstate New York - I decided to take a breather this weekend. Friday I went out with a match.com connection in Lee, MA and had a great time. We went out to dinner at the Bombay Grill, during which I tried the Hot Lemon Pickle soup. Who can resist a soup with that name? Turns out I should have, it was (intentionally) served cold and was inedible - very spicy with a terrible texture and taste. When they first set it on the table I took one look and ‘cat food’ sprang into my head. I couldn’t get it out, even though it tasted nothing like cat food. The dinner was otherwise very good however. Afterwords we  had a drink and a cup of coffee at a local sports pub/pizza joint. Saturday I basically vegged out - gaming, reading, tossing the ball with Soolin, napping in my lawn chair. It was great. Sunday we went to our favorite swimming hole, Puffer’s Pond, for a couple of hours, then it was some errands and more relaxing at home. Saw a mediocre movie, Zodiac, from the normally reliable David Fincher. I fell asleep during the last half hour not once, but twice, which I think sums up the main issue with the film quite nicely - not a bad film but it falls apart in the end. Ironically this sums up my weekend as well because by Sunday afternoon I noticed something was up with Soolin. She’s been scratching more than usual the last week and as we went to bed I noticed she had chewed off all the hair on her leg and couldn’t stop worrying at it. I ended up getting very little sleep because I kept waking up whenever she started on herself again, chiding her and curling myself around her in an attempt to block her from reaching her legs.

We’ve got an appointment with the Vet this afternoon to look things over. Hopefully it’s not the dreaded mange, which the Vet things is unlikely, and is instead some kind of allergic reaction.

Comment spammers found a hole in the gallery software I use and managed to pollute it with about 6000+ viagra/nekkid people/hair tonic ads. I made a valiant effort to cleanse this stuff manually but man, 6000 something is just too many to deal with when you have to click delete one by one and wait for the page to reload, so ultimately I took the ‘nuke the site from orbit’ option and ran a script to delete all comments. It’s a shame, there were some classics in there, including various ones about our annual camping trips, and the one from the angry woman who later died. I’ll work to replace the commenting system with something less susceptible to spammers, but for now, sorry - it’s all gone.

I’m back. A tree fell on my house and knocked out power and internet. I was away and was getting on the ferry when I checked my voicemail Sunday night and discovered the police had taped off my house because a tree had fallen and there were live power lines jumping around in my driveway. That problem was cleared up by the time I got home 3 hours later, but I had no power and no access to my driveway. I also had police tape across my door but I was exhausted and figured they wouldn’t mind if I took it off. I was right, though when I woke to flashlight in my face at three in the morning at first I thought the cops were there to bust me for breaking into my own house. Turns out the power company was there at 3AM to get the power working again and the guy in the bucket truck was on the other side of the window from me trying to find the power connections.

Anyway things are back to normal now, though the house took a minor beating and I lost some things to broken glass - some of my winter jammy type clothes, most of my exercise clothing, and Soolin’s dog bed, all of which were encrusted with glass chunks and powder. It could have been much much worse - had that tree fallen a few more feet in the wrong direction it could have taken the front of the house off or even knocked it over. 3 days without internet was ultimately the worst of it.

What would you do were you me? I have a samsung laser printer that’s treated me well. Its first toner cartridge, which lasted about 2 years, is finally dead. Replacing it will cost me ~$80. The samsung has two inadequacies - it’s USB only, so I have to swap the USB cable from laptop to windows PC to linux box, depending on what I want to print from, and it’s monochrome. I could get a networkable color samsung laser printer, the 300N, for $299. Were you me, would you drop the $80 on another toner cartridge for the non-networked monochrome printer, or would you spend a good bit more to get networking and color? On the one hand, buying the toner feels like I am throwing close to $100 away, but on the other hand, I don’t really want to be spending $300 at the moment.

Well, had another great weekend. Saturday was standard domesticity. The weather had promised mostly cloudy and dim, so I hung home, ran errands, and cleaned. Of course the weather turned out to be wrong and it was mostly sunny, but what can you do. Sunday I headed to Haystack mountain which is near Wilmington, VT, and summited it with Soolin. You can check out my route there and back again, and check out the part I was sure I would get turned aroun and lost in.

The hike itself was decent. The summit was great - exposed rock, scruffy pine everywhere and nice views of a lake and the region to the east. The trail itself wasn’t that challenging. A big piece of it followed an old gravel road bed and there were only short sections of significant incline. All in it was about 4 miles round trip and the toughest thing about it was the heat. Fortunately it was a very breezy day which helped with the bugs and to cool me off.

I saw no one on my way in, but I ran into a lot of folks on my way out. I took some decent photos with my new camera including a couple of panoramas - I’ll post here again once I’ve got those online.

[edit] I forgot to mention the height. ~3100 feet at the summit if I recall correctly, although in this case I only personally ascended about ~1k of that because the drive to the trailhead was where most of the mountain was climbed - some seriously steep roads too, there were a couple of places where I thought the car simply wouldn’t be able to climb without slipping.

So I commute to work on my bike as often as I can. There’s this great bike trail that pretty much runs door to door from my house to my office, and it’s tree lined, shady, and has water running alongside portions of it. These are all good things because they help to keep it cool and comfortable. There’s one downside though, which is that there are tons of bugs flitting about under the trees, and almost every time I ride to work I end up with one or two in my mouth. Sometimes they get caught in my throat and until today I thought that was the worst of it, but on the way home a (beetle?) smashed like a grape against my upper teeth. Talk about the ultimate bug gross out, I had no water on the bike and ended up pulled off the side of the trail trying to cleanse the bug slime out. Gross! Still, never one to be ashamed, I’ll just fess up: my name is Dave, and yes, I eat bugs.

For about two years in college I lived with my friend Will. His Dad had purchased a house adjacent to campus as an investment and many of us rented rooms in it over my years at Wooster. It was a great investment for him I guess, and it’s actually now a part of the college campus. During the summer between the first and second years in the house, Will rented it out to some folks, a couple of whom were friends of ours. These friends agreed to take care of the cats of other folks who had headed home for the summer, so the house ended up with a large cat population. In the latter half of the summer the folks living in the house decided to make a road trip to the west coast. They couldn’t figure out what to do about the cats, so the geniuses bought several huge bags of cat litter and dumped them into what had been the coal room in the basement of the house. They then bought the largest sack of dry catfood they could find and slit it open and left it laying in the middle of the kitchen. Then they split for the west coast.

Will and I knew none of this when we showed up a couple of days before classes were to start to settle into the house. We opened the house and gods, the stench! Dust bunnies, dry cat food, and hairballs were all over the kitchen, and aside from the cat food, scattered through the rest of the house. The worst though was the basement, which was so rank it was hard to go into it without gagging on the smell. Meanwhile there were no cats to be seen.

Needless to say, we were pissed. We spent hours shoveling the ugly mess in the basement into bags, vacuuming, wiping up dried cat yuck, and mopping out the kitchen. During this we both noticed there were fleas around but it was all part of the broader mess and we didn’t think much of it. After a couple of hours we finished a first pass on the house and went out to pickup a pizza. When we got back we settled into the living room with some beer and the pie.

What happened next was mind blowing. Within 5-10 minutes of settling into the couch we were both attacked by hordes of ravenous fleas. I’m not talking dozens or hundreds, I’m talking hundreds of thousands of the little bastards. We both were starting to frantically scratch ourselves and while so doing I pulled down my sock and my ankle was literally black with fleas, it was astounding. We ended up running from the house in a frenzy to escape, out in the backyard scratching and spraying ourselves down with a hose. We both feared to reenter the house. I ended up staying with my Aunt and Uncle. I can’t remember where Will headed off to.

It took us weeks to completely purge that house of fleas. We had to go through several rounds of bug bombing which required us to abandon the house for a day then return to vacuum and scrub.

As to why they all suddenly attacked, all I can do is speculate. We had been in motion for the rest of the time in the house, so maybe the fact that we were finally still for a while gave them the chance to all beat a leaping path to us. Or maybe the couch was the locus of the infestation. I don’t really know. As to our friends and the state of the house, basically no one would fess up. When they got back and discovered how pissed off we were it turned into a finger pointing game with no one willing to admit they were responsible.

Meanwhile, not that I was ever a fan, but MAN do I loathe fleas after that experience.

Rogue Trooper is an FPS with some very light rpg elements that’s available on a number of systems. I played through it on the PC thanks to my gametap subscription. It’s a little better than I expected it to be, and worth the ~$5-10 you can get the game for off of ebay or via valve’s steam download service. The game is clearly a console game, with low poly environments and enemies, not especially detailed character models, muddy textures, chunky movement, and fairly linear level design, and yet despite all this it’s pretty fun if and has an engaging pulpy comic book story to play through. The PC port is also better than most console ports and has configurable controls, supports a wide swatch of resolutions including the widescreen stuff. The lite rpg stuff in the game is cool too. Basically you can collect resources from the enemies you defeat to power up your gear, produce ammunition for your weapons, and develop new pieces of equipment. It’s all predetermined as to when you can develop new gear, but there’s also a nice tension  between producing ammo and health packs versus saving towards upgrades or new weapon systems.

All in all this is a relatively fun little game for those who enjoy FPS.

Check out this chart of real estate values over time. It’s hard to believe we’re not in a bubble when you see it diagrammed like this, not just any bubble either, a bubble to end all bubbles. I’d love to see this compared to a chart of what happened in Japan to get a sense of just how bad the landing is going to be.

[via reddit]

100 commodore 64 games in 10 minutes, that’s the promise of the youtube video below. So many memories brought back by this, it surprised me how well I can remember the games in these clips. I’d say I recognized more than half of the games they run through in this thing. I do think they missed several classics from that era, at least for my friends and I - Rocketball isn’t there, nor is Spelunker, aka the greatest and toughest C64 game (which I solved!) of all time, and only one of the Ultima games is shown. Still, this is fun to watch if you played games in that era.

Home. Also, never made it on my ambitious hike. Met a beautiful woman for a hike in Lenox MA, had a great time, spent more time than I expected, and then my Mom preferred to do dinner Saturday instead of breakfast or lunch on Sunday, so I never made it up to the Siamese ponds. A trip for another day I guess. The blind date was great, which probably means I’ll never hear from her again based on how the other connections I’ve made have played out. We did go on a nice hike though in Lenox, MA in Kennedy Park.