Anyway, I’m working on the support tickets that came in over the weekend now. However, chances are that the rest of the winter weekend support will be slow.

I do my best to balance family life and Caffeinated life, but when it comes down to the wire, the family will always come first!

Ps: if this post looks like crap, it’s because I’m posting via BlackBerry, unfortunately not the new BB Storm!

Just ran out of the office to get a bite to eat.  Innocent, yes…this time!

The limo was trying to make a turn into the wall of tourists crossing the street and I just happened to be at the end of a good portion of them.  Luckily, I walk fast and he was going slow, so I was just brushed by his front bumper, and his tire grazed my heel, taking off my shoe and leaving a black streak down my jeans.

He stopped the car, rolled down the window and said, “Sorry man, I didn’t see you there.”  Sauntering up to his window, shoe in hand, I said, “Dude, I’m wearing a bright red jacket…”  I took his plate number but since nothing is bleeding or broken so I probably not going to report him…but tomorrow I’m locking myself in the house in front of the computer!

Sounds like a good idea right?  Well, it was supposed to be.

I got the ladder set up, picked up a set of lights, grabbed the staple gun…and shot myself right in the finger.  No idea how–it was a mechanical stapler that requires a fairly hard pull on the trigger to go off.  Regardless, I had a staple effectively stapling my skin to my finger bone…it’d probably be cool if it didn’t happen to me, or if it was two weeks ago during Halloween.

Tried pulling it out with my fingers with no luck, got a flat screwdriver with the intention of prying it out, but had no leverage.  Finally, I was able to maneuver a pair of pliers enough to pull it out…amazing how well the thing was stuck.  I cleaned it up as best as I could, wrapped my finger in gauze and tape, and put up about 9,000,000 feet of lights and other decorations.

Pain meter: No cursing, so it didn’t hurt all that bad.

The only downfall so far is that it seems to be extremely slow…

Either way, Caffeinated Content still works perfectly.

We’ll see, I guess.

Update (10/30/2008): Two days waiting and then selected to be on a jury, so I have to report back again on Monday morning.  I’m sure the first half of next week, at the least, is shot.  Kew Gardens Courthouse guest wifi sucks–50% of the websites I tried to visit are blocked, including Youtube, so no development was done in that regard.  But at least they have wifi!

Update 2 (11/06/2008): Finally done with jury duty.  Real life can now resume!

On a side note, in the coming days, I’ll be migrating to a new server to make room for expansion.  Most things will occur seamlessly as the DNS servers resolve, but one or two services might take a little longer.

First, let me tell you why I got a MacBook Pro, and why I was the first on the block to get the newest (shipped yesterday, in stores today–they didn’t even have them out when I arrived, I had to beg!). Previously, I had always put together my own machines (with the exception of a laptop here and there–latest being an Asus EeePC which is awesome in it’s own right, but way too small for PHP development). Today, something changed. I wanted something that just worked, worked well, and could do everything I threw at it and more. Enough of those chincy Vista crap outs (got rid of Vista, all my Windows PCs run XP at this point), and frankly, enough tweaking and modifying my linux installs to get it to play nice with everything else. So I should have gotten a MacBook? Nah…with the Pro, I’ll have the extra firepower to play some Windows games with it’s built in GeForce 9600 (or save battery life with the integrated 9400M–cool beans).

Anyway. Here’s my unboxing (click the pics for a bigger view):

Here is the spiffy new box. Notice how small it is compared to previous packaging.

Magsafe, ethernet, Firewire 800, two USB, mini DisplayPort, audio in and out, and an ExpressCard slot along with the battery meter.

I had a little trouble at this point getting the cover back on. It seems the little tabs on the cover don’t have anything on the case to align with, therefore you just have to get lucky! Could be a problem for someone changing a battery often…

If you look closely, it’s glossy enough to see the unfinished paint job on the wall behind me–how embarrassing.

So there you have it. The new MacBook Pro 15″ unboxed, up and running. It’ll take some time for me to get into the general workings of a new operating system (I haven’t used MacOS since…oh…1995), but I’ll be sure to post more impressions of it after I do! Of course, I’ve written this entire post on the thing, including the picture uploads, so I’m going full force.

A couple things I’ve noticed while taking pictures. As I said above, the LCD is highly glossy. I’m interested in seeing how well it’ll handle outdoors use. There are a few extremely minor flaws in the anodization…nothing I’m going to worry about. Also, FireFox has crashed three times during this posting. Maybe I’ll try Safari next time.

Next up, installing my development environment so I can get some productivity going on…I’ll probably start with a nice simple XAMPP install, but we’ll see. Anyone know of a good Mac PHP/text editor?

Update: The strange black thing? It looks like an Apple-branded napkin. Maybe it’s a mousepad. Or a microfiber cleaning cloth for this insanely glossy screen. Yeah, that’s it.

Update 2: Added a couple of notes.

Not to be so!  Saturday was a slow day, though I was on baby duty because my wife came down with a nasty cold courtesy of Ethan.  Sunday morning, Anne Marie was about to leave for her mother’s house when she discovered that someone had gotten into our car sometime during the night and took our GPS and Sirius radio.  Thankfully they didn’t break the window or door, but it goes to show how easily a crackhead can get into a car (shouldn’t be surprised, I used to do it as a daily routine when half of the door internals rusted out on my first vehicle, an ‘86 Toyota pickup.  Yes, using a coathanger to open your car door while at the mall gets you quite a few accusing stares…).  Definitely could have been worse!

So Monday, I came down with the cold, and was twice as bad yesterday, and just now clearing up today…going to start quarantining the kids when they get sick.

Oh well!

From thinkgeek.com:

“Cuddle-Up with the Un-Dead

What happens when you take old broken plush toys and bury them in the woods by the light of the full moon while whistling the theme song from “Halloween”? Unfortunately nothing… which is why the skillful design monkeys here at ThinkGeek were forced to come-up with our own scary (but cute) zombie plush.

The Dismember-Me Plush Zombie begs to be torn limb from limb. After all he is a decaying re-animated corpse turned into irresistible cuddly plush. Rip off an arm… he doesn’t mind. Tear him in half.. he’ll barely notice. Pull off his legs… ok now he’s getting a bit annoyed. Steal his brain… now you’ve really done it. Keep your teddy bears under close guard tonight because undead plush have come back from hell to walk the earth.”

I ordered one for my desk, but I’m willing to bet my son (or the dog) will steal him in short order… Hmm.  Maybe I’ll get two just in case…

I come from the midwest.  You know, Wisconsin.  There aren’t many chopsticks in the state of Wisconsin.  Don’t need ‘em to eat cheese, y’know.  Sticks are for roasting marshmallows.  And building fires, houses and barns.  Or to steady yourself while walking through the woods.  Also, the pointy end is a good thing to poke in your brother’s eye, like ma always said.  Whatever. Point is, I’ve never bothered to learn how to use them to eat with.

So anyway, instead of running to the kitchen to find some proper utensils, to defy my germanic roots I decided to use these strange sticks to somehow funnel salmon teriyaki and rice into my mouth.  It wasn’t pretty, and more rice ended up on my desk and lap than in my mouth, but I did eventually finish.  It didn’t take all that much longer than normal, either.  Still, they don’t really make all that much sense to me (kinda like the scales that were left on one side of the fish, or when they leave the legs and shell on shrimp–bleh) but I suppose they do work…inefficiently!  Perhaps an adept at chopsticks can improve on the efficiency, but I can’t imagine them ever holding a candle to the fork which pierces and holds food securely.

Before we start on that old line about chopsticks improving authenticity of the food if you’re eating Chinese, Japanese, Thai or whatever…that’s just silly talk.  In essence, that is the equivalent of saying using a straw improves the authenticity of drinking milk.

Well, it could have been a horrible disaster of a lunch, but turned out okay.  Plus I accomplished something I may have never done on my own.  And yes, there is a moral, but you have to figure that out on your own.