warp.byu.edu

IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) is cool. It's a standard protocol for printing across HTTP from any OS to any type of printer. It has made the world of Linux/Unix/Mac printing *so* much easier. The problem is that the Apple's desire to make things easier only allows you to enter the IP address. This works perfectly if the printer is on the same subnet as your computer. But what if you are a long way from your printer (on the network)? I fiddled with it for two hours today before I found success.

I fixed my Internet today by going to the 5 GHz wireless N range. I've had problems with my wireless for months now. I've been through several base stations, and they all do the same thing. They report that everything is working perfectly, and my laptop says it is connected, but they won't give out an IP address. Even if I manually assign a correct IP and DNS server, the connection still doesn't work. Then, after about 60 seconds, the connections drops for a few seconds and reconnects. Then in another 60 seconds, it drops and reconnects again.

When did it start? The dumbing down of everything, I mean. I watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics last night, and I must say I was amazed at the breadth and scope of what the Chinese did. It was cool.

But it had one serious black mark on it: the NBC commentators saying stupid, obvious comments every 10 seconds. Comments like "wow, the here's another technical marvel", or "look at that LCD screen (repeated 28 times)", or "that's an ocean on being projected on the roof" are what I'm talking about.

My third daughter had her first loose tooth this week, and she came to me asking help in pulling it. What an exciting day for her (in our family, Lily the tooth fairy gives good money on the first tooth lost). It was not quite ready to come out, but she was determined so we did it anyway. [Edit: It *was* quite loose - I wouldn't dream of pulling a tooth that wasn't loose enough already - I would just have waited a few more days to be sure]

Some of you young'uns may not remember, but about five years ago, SCO launched some of the most frivolous lawsuits against IBM and other open source companies. In the IBM suit, they asked for a couple BILLION dollars. Yep, billions.

My hard drive fritzed out yesterday. It actually still read the data, but it was horribly slow and was making funny noises. I had outgrown my 200 GB laptop drive anyway -- now that the 500 GB ones are out, I took the drive failure as an excuse to upgrade!

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision on the 2nd Amendment was a landmark, historic decision. We saw history in the making yesterday. Personally, I am ecstatic about the decision -- the right to protect ourselves from government and other threats is as basic as it gets. The funny wording of the 2A has finally been clarified.

Whether you agree with the decision or not, though, it's scary that it was a 5-4 decision. If just *one* of the five justices would have felt differently, we would have had a very different history going forward.

For some reason, MS decided to make the default font in Office 2008 "Cambria". In a world where almost all papers are required to be in "Times New Roman" (or some extremely close variant), why did they decide everyone should use Cambria? Are they so deluded as to think they can change the college (Times) standard with Mac Office 2008? Or do they just want us Mac users to be super cool with a better font?

Saved me again today. I deleted an entire directory from my Palm Centro storage card, then I synced with my Mac. I was expecting the Mac to replace all the files on the Centro, but I had the setting to "Sync", which means that if I delete on the Palm, it deletes on the desktop! In one fell swoop, I lost an entire (very important) directory subtree. Hundreds of files were gone.

I logged into Time Machine and found out that it had backed up last Thursday night. A few minutes later, the directory subtree was back.

As I posted last week, I'm back on the Palm platform for my cell phone. Palm is aging, but it is still one of the best corporate PDAs. By itself, the Palm isn't the strongest contender. However, with a few added applications, it becomes extremely productive. Here's my list: