Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts... yay!

I have finally figured out how to use the keyboard shortcut to access the app menu bar. Nice. That and now I've also changed it so that when I tab through a form, it doesn't skip dropdowns etc. By default it only goes to the text areas and lists. Why? I've got no idea.

The more that I use OS X, the more I am able to do with it. There is still some weirdness between the same apps (like FireFox) that throws me off, but other than it's going well.

One thing that I don't like is even if I do find the equivalent key combo for doing something in OS X that I do in windows, is that it's usually awkward. Like what I just found for putting focus on the menu, in my macbook it's fn-ctrl-F2. F2 also brightens the screen, so every time I use that, my screen brightens a notch which is annoying.

Moving from windows in the same "app" was weird too until I found command-tildy did the trick. Weird, but comfortable since it's close to command-tab.

Having said all that, it's hard not to love my macbook since it's so fast and pretty... :-)

House hunting: got one

We have been hunting for a house for a while. We saw one last one last week (let's call it "U") and we ended up comparing all houses we saw after that to U. It's been nagging on us since we saw it that they it might be picked up by someone else.

Then they dropped the price on the house.

They are having an "open house" today, but we didn't want to wait. We contacted our real estate agent yesterday and pushed her a bit for us to see the house. Then we put in an offer and it was accepted. There was other people putting in an offer at the same time, so we were sneaky and put in a late offer that was only good for like 2 hours.

They accepted it. :-D

Now, we have to finalize financing and do a house inspection. If those are good, we start packing. Woo-freaking-hoo! Don't get me wrong, I love our apartment and I'll be sad to leave, but it's time.

Ahhggghhh!!!

Sometimes I wish that something like this would happen. How's that for a short feedback cycle?

The approach defines the outcome

One thing that I have noticed is that it is most important how you accept feedback / ideas, and less of what the outcome is. If you get buy-in and the people suggesting ideas feel that they are on the same side, rather than an "us vs them", everyone will be happy and addressing the ideas will progress in a collaborative way.

If you bring up an idea and someone says "wow, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard", that gets your back up even if it's true. This also means the idea dies before it can really be explored which doesn't help anyone.

A co-worker of mine takes the opposite route. If I brought up an idea like "let's put salt in our eyes to make it rain!" I can picture him saying "That's an interesting idea. I had not looked at the problem from that angle before", and then you work through the pro's and con's together. With that first sentence he gets buy-in and instantly you are on the same team and are addressing the problem together.

The outcome might be the same for both, but one divides teams, the other builds them.

You think?

The headline says it all: Celebratory gunfire kills 3 in Baghdad. Wow. You'd think that people understand when the bullets go up, eventually they come down. Kills 3, wounds 50 others. *shakes head*

It's the little things

It sounds really stupid, but to feel better about having had to slug through a particular difficult problem, all it takes sometimes is a "Well Done!" at the end. Another thing that I've found works too is bribes: 5$ in Tim Horton's gift certificates goes a long way to feeling about addressing peoples problems.

It's not much, but it makes the day just a little bit better. ;-)

Eat your own dog food once and a while

The other day I was working on a testing library that I use to help check for system.out/err, .printStacktrace() and other "non production ready" types of code. Mumbling under my breath about how I couldn't believe that people would be checking in that kind of code at all. Then I paused: I don't remember if I was using logging properly in my testing library. Sure enough, I point the code checker tests at its own project and it fails. Ooops. First step is ensure that the library that checks for "bad" code doesn't contain any, then I can bug other people about it too. :-/

I'm starting to like it...

Purging that is. I've always had a hard time throwing "stuff" out. Now I'm starting to slowly get used to the idea. If I have not used it in the last year or 2, toss it. It can't be that important.

I find that a lack of clutter to be quite calming. That's also a super hard state to keep things in, so it takes a lot of work and I'm not really there yet. So far it's been somewhat easier because the things we've tossed have not been worth much. I'm going to have a harder time when I toss out things like text books even though I never look at them.

Next time I get a set of book shelves, I'm getting ones with doors so that even if I have a lot of things that would normally look cluttered, I won't see it and it won't bother me. The hard part has been keeping everything in "its place" while in a small apartment since every time you have to access something, it seems that you have to move 3 things first. Ah well. I guess this is why we're house shopping. ;-)

I give up... for now

I've been trying to get GnuCash working on my new macbook to no avail. I've tried to follow the instructions that the gnu wiki links to, but I keep on getting:

checking if (www main) is available... no
checking for gconf-2.0 >= "2.0"... no
Package gconf-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gconf-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable No package 'gconf-2.0' found
configure: error: Library requirements (gconf-2.0 >= "2.0") not met; consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your libraries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them.

I've tried to install the missing lib with fink, but all that I have found is frustration. My idea was to get gnucash working so that I can do my business taxes this year with real tax software, but I think that I'm just going to use what I did last year: spreadsheet software. Yay Open Office!

Who's pictures are those?

Something that happened today is really bothering me, and I'm not sure that it should. But it does. A friend took some of the pictures that we had put on flickr and uploaded them to facebook. Now, it's not like the pictures were not on the 'net already. It's not like we don't share the pictures with everyone, including friends, anyways.

I don't get why it bothers me so much. At best it feels like bad etiquette, at worst it feels like stealing... Part of me thinks that's an irrational thought. I still can't get over it though.

We asked our friend to take the pictures down. I feel like an ass for asking, but it's going to bother me if we didn't.

Ewww... gritty!

I don't mind getting wet when biking if it's raining. I don't mind getting gritty when it's dusty and dry out. What I do mind is when it's wet and gritty. Gross.

On my way in I hid under the queensway bridge by Lees while the worst of the downpour was on, but at some point I had to venture out again to make it to work. I wish that I had something other than soaking sandals to wear today though. *grumble*

Slowly getting used to it

I am starting to get used to my new macbook. The biggest issue I have so far other than finally getting wireless working (hint: the wrong wep key was saved in the key chain and was not being overridden when I typed it in) is figuring out the keyboard shortcuts. I use shortcuts. A lot. So discovering when I use ctrl, when to use the weird apple key, and when OS X still keeps it secrets from me is frustrating. I'll figure it out eventually.

Ahhggrrhh!!!

Crappy. I just broke my headphones while at work... my ear buds are at home. I tried to tape them together, but no luck. Then I stabbed myself in the neck with the broken plastic. Ouch.

It's definably shopping night tonight.

Macbook come to meeeee!!!

The other day I finally ordered a macbook. Got some memory upgrades and a slightly larger hard disk. Currently FedEx says that it's in Anchorage, AK. I'm very excited about not using slow hardware. Now I just have to figure out what to do with my old "waffle iron" laptop.

In case anyone is wondering what 'ol waffly is, it's a Toshiba Satellite something-or-other from like 2002. It had a smallish hd then (20G), smallish memory (256M) for the time it was bought. I've been using this constantly for everything. Often the cpu is near maxing out, the hd is thrashing because there is no space left and there is no free memory. Needless to say, it runs hot most of the time.

After all the load I've put it under, the battery still holds power for close to 3 hours, I have not had a major failure (knock on wood), and it's still kicking along. Now that I am thinking about it, I'm actually really impressed. It's not pretty, light, fast or cool, but it's worked pretty consistently for 5 years without wiping the disk. I hope that my new macbook will do as well.

It's the warm cream

I've been playing around with different types of coffee, different brewing ways (drip, french press, "pod", store bought) and I've found that there is only one thing that really "makes" a coffee for me: using cream and not milk. 1% milk just doesn't cut it.

In restaurants out east they had 18% cream. Wow, did those coffees taste good. I bought coffee cream the other day from loblaws and it's only 10% and it was much better than using milk, but still not super. Here 18% is whipping cream. Mmmm...

Will I keep cream in the fridge just for making coffee? Sure. I think that my happiness is worth that. ;-)