#include <0kelvin.silc>

Back in high school there was this really nice guy named Rodolpho. As high school students go he was a rather fascinating guy. He grew up all over the world, moving from country to country; his parents were in the Peace Corps. Every day at lunch he would regale us with tales of the strange, bizarre, and exotic. He used to tell us about tribal men that would paint themselves with the blood of lions just before a hunt or a battle, believing it would grant them the strength and ferocity of the lion.

One day Rodolopho stopped coming to school. We all assumed his parents took him to another far off land to do whatever it was they did. I wonder what became of Rodolpho. . . .

art by Dan Dos Santos

I may or may not know what Twitter is really supposed to be for. Maybe it's a hip urban spontaneous social gathering tool, or maybe it's a social networking micro-blog slash IM app that for some inane reason includes SMS. The point is rather moot when no one reads what you write. Twitter failed me yesterday because only half of the people who usually chat with me even know what was going on some 12 hours after the tweet. Was it Twitter's code? No, it was the social network aspect of Twitter that failed.

Because you guys will ask and I really don't want to repeat myself, here is how my birthday went:

1. I had planned on having a nice and relaxing lunch with Holly. I nearly got that. It was nice but not exactly relaxing as I was unsure if anything would settle well. Turns out it did, so win for me, except the entire process took 2 hours!
2. Due to the extra long lunch (90 minutes longer than usual) I had to work late, but decided not to work too late and make up 30 minutes on Friday, so that I might better enjoy my birthday. This was a mistake.
3. I tried to play Bourne Conspiracy while waiting for my folks to return home from errands, as we were to have a steak BBQ at their house to celebrate my birthday. It is now roughly 1700 hours and Emma is in a screaming hysterical fit. This continues until 2030 hours, with only a short break (15 minutes) while she's in the car.
4. Instead of 4 adults eating a steak BBQ it was 3 of us eating a cold steak BBQ while Emma screamed and wailed and turned beet red. It was then decided that we should go home and try to put her to bed in familiar surroundings. This means the planned cake and games time was canceled (maybe postponed).
5. We get home and Holly puts Emma to bed while I put in "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" in a vain attempt to salvage something of my birthday. Yay. I'm 31.

I didn't ask for much, and I stupidly allowed myself to be optimistic that I could have a nice dinner with my family and play either a lawn game or a board/card game. My birthdays don't usually turn out exactly as planned but none have bombed as bad as this one. No cake, no presents, no fun, only 4 hours of screaming that set me on edge and gave me a headache. Instead of being "the birthday-boy" I was "dad". Le sigh.

Here's the start of my list.

1. before I go to bed, I must touch each exterior door's lock.
2. No part of the body is allowed to hang off the edge of the bed.
3. Never look at the attic/crawl space entrance... never.
4. shoes on or socks off.
5. no food on the plate is ever allowed to touch other food on the plate.
6. the pat down (and seemingly random times throughout the day, I must pat my various pockets to make sure wallet, keys and cell are all still present)
7. Keep one hand free at all times.
8. check every stranger for a weapon
9. always sit with back to a wall
10. always identify your exits
11. narrow stairs are bad. Narrow stairs that lead to basements are worse.
12. I have to force myself to step on cracks in the pavement, or on the lines that separate tiles at the store.
13. Separate small candies by color. Then eat from the larger groups until all groups are even, then alternate so that the last "round" is one of each color.
14. Never turn off the radio / mp3 player / cd player / etc in the middle of a song.
15. If I think about breathing, I have to continue to think about breathing until some outside stimulus distracts me. (I DON'T want to forget to breathe)
16. Toilet paper goes on the roll with the paper spooled from the top.
17. My inbox (email, rss, whatever) must always be zeroe'd. I pretend it's an efficiency thing, but in reality I just can't have even one email demanding my attention.
18. No close talkers!
19. DO NOT TOUCH ME!
20. Just because you have mastered enough of the written language to read my name on my credit card does not mean you may call me by my first name.
21. Rip open individually sized bags of chips, or dump them in bowls. I hate the feeling of sticking my hand in a bag of chips.

I treat RSS like email, in that I want to make sure I've read everything and flagged things I think might be relevant. On a daily basis, I try pretty hard to make sure I mark everything as read before starting my day.

How do you read RSS? Do you leave large groups of things unread? Do you flag articles as a reminder to read them, or do you just keep them marked as unread?

What programming blogs do you read and recommend, and why?

I believe the only people in our community who owned PS2 systems are now PS3 owners.

Should we retire the PS2 forum, or at least add a PS3 forum?

* potential spoiler alert *

The third in an n-part series on "How I Use Quicksilver".

Define words

Thanks to the built-in dictionary on a mac (and optionally dict.org), I can select a word anywhere (or manually enter it in the input box), tab to the second pane, type 'dict', and get my definition right quick.

Note that this is on the weaker side of quicksilver tips; there are so many ways to get word definitions on a mac that just about anyone can do it effortlessly. Right clicking on a word usually gives a dictionary option, and the spotlight-inclined among you can type a word into spotlight to get the definition most of the time.

The second in an n-part series on "How I Use Quicksilver".

Send a file via email.

This one has been done to death in screencasts, but I do it so much I'd be remiss if I failed to mention it.

As many technology oriented people do, I send a fair bit of email with attachments. Dozens of different workflows accommodate this, but I like to involve quicksilver.

I activate this workflow in one of two ways. I either a) select a file that I wish to send in Finder, or b) I wish to send a file that is in a common location that I know is in quicksilver's catalog.

Once I have my file selected in quicksilver, I'll usually compress the file into a zip archive to get past stupid MTAs like exchange. Doing this is a quick procedure: {tab} c o m p [highlights 'compress using...'] {tab} z i p [highlights 'zip] {enter} (wait a second for quicksilver to reappear with my file selected).

At this point, I'm ready to fire off an email. One {tab} gets me to the middle box, I type 'e m a i l', tab again, then type some letters of the recipient's name, finally hit {enter} and I'm done.

In my day job, I measured I do this about 5 times a day, and without any "nifty" workflow in place, it took me about 40 seconds to navigate to my mail app, compose an email, get the name in the 'to' field, click 'attach', find the file in the following dialog, and finally send it. Even more time was required if I wanted to zip the file first.

On the other hand, quicksilver takes about 7 seconds to do this on a slow day.