Whistling in the Dark

It’s been in the high 90s with matching humidity all weekend and it’s not breaking until Tuesday night. I ain’t built for this shit.

Every April my .Mac account comes do and every year I try like mad to find a way not to have to resubscribe. .Mac is Apple’s service that offers email, web space, remote storage, remote desktop, and calendar, todo, address book, mail syncing between Macs. Syncing is the only part I really use and it’s indispensable. The question I struggle with every year is if it’s $79 indispensable (through Amazon, $99 from Apple). On one hand that’s a real chunk of change to just sync. On the other hand I have yet to find something that works as painlessly. Rsyc gets confused by binary files and manually trying to merge the files is a quick path to a drinking problem. I’m still looking for a solution but I get the feeling that I’ll once again be gritting my teeth and rolling pennies to re-up again this year.

My girlfriend and I were driving along this evening when we saw a vulture feeding on the side of the road. I have never seen one in real life and wanted to take some pictures of it so I pulled over as soon as I could safely, threw the car in park, and reached for my camera. I always take my camera with me because you never know if you’ll see something you want to shoot. I pulled out my camera and went to put a fresh memory card in when, hmm, isn’t the camera a little light? Yea, I had my camera, a couple of memory cards, even my tripod but forgot all my batteries sitting nice and charged in the charger. I wanted to offer myself to the vulture as a meal because I am obviously too stupid to live.

Lesson learned: Always, ALWAYS triple check that you have in fact brought your batteries. Just so this never can happen again I’m going to keep a set of plain old alkaline batteries (which hold a charge much longer than rechargeables) in my camera bag

As you can see by the badge on the right I use Jaiku. It’s a microblogging service, which means that you can post your thoughts in 140 character bits. There are other services like it, such as Twitter and Pownce, but I like Jaiku most because it has the best community.

That being said there are some things that are really starting to piss me off with Jaiku:

• Invite only: Ever since Jaiku was assimilated by the Borg  bought by Google they’ve switched from open to all to invite only. I know why they switched (It was starting to buckle under the load) but at the same time by not allowing everyone and anyone to sign up the other services are getting more popular while Jaiku is staying static.
• Mobile client: There’s an official client for Nokia S60 phones but everyone else is pretty much out of luck. While there is a client for the BlackBerry it is painfully bad and from what I understand it’s pretty much the same on other mobile platforms.
• API go boom: Most clients, desktop and mobile, connect to Jaiku through an API server. Unfortunately that server has been down far too much over the last few weeks so if I want to post something or check my friends posts and replies I’ve got to go to the web site.
• SMS posting: Jaiku has finally gotten a SMS short code (a phone number, such as 1234, that you can send text messages to) for the US. The problem is it doesn’t work with my carrier, T-Mobile. I don’t know who’s to blame for that. I just want the damned thing to work.
• Silence from on high: Back before Google bought them the Jaiku guys would pop in now and then and post about ideas and problems. Now a days they’re mostly silent.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Jaiku and am not about to jump ship but these problems are starting to get on my nerves.

Dani and I went to the Flower Show for her birthday. I thought I’d be able to get some great pictures of all the pretty flowers and displays. Silly human.

I took over 200 shots. Out of those I have about 50 that don’t look like pure shit and even those are either blown out or grainy as hell. I simply don’t have the skill to shoot steadily in anything less than great light without either a tripod (no room with the crowds) or by dialing the ISO up to where the shots are more grain than subject. I’d like to blame the camera for having a noisy sensor at high ISO but I know most of the blame lays on my lack of skill.

I have a bunch of ideas for posts and pages to write but they’re racing around my head too much for me to concentrate on any one.