Category: Computer

Being Googled

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I didn’t start this web presence bit for “hits.” If it was all about the hits I’d have given up 7-8 years ago. Still, every now and again I get the odd “hit” which surprises, and today was such a day.

My main site got a hit from Brazil… but that’s not what was surprising. The hit came from a Google search… and even that wasn’t completely surprising. What was surprising was that my little site was the second return for the search “best thing since paper mac.”

I’ll admit that is a little obscure, and I’m sure the page they got from my site was not what they were looking for (a link to a page devoted to my spreadsheet for calculating child support in Florida)… but number two on Google?

We could well be witnessing the high water mark of moi.

Happy Birthday!

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You got me, it’s not my birthday. As far as I know, no one I know has a birthday today. All of this begs the question: have I finally found an edge and fallen off?

Sometime between March and May of 1997, Apple Computer started shipping a piece of hardware they called the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM for short). By my way of reconning, we’re in still in the 10th anniversary window of one of my favorite computers.

That’s right friends, it’s the tenth anniversary of the Twentieth Anniversary Mac (give or take a month or so). In this age of contrived holidays, I think my aging beauty is worthy of a little recognition. In this age of commodity computers, the fact that my TAM is still alive and kicking is a testament to the company that made it. The fact that I still use a ten year old computer on a daily basis… well now I’m getting a little redundant. Please excuse my enthusiasm.

Like I need a reason to loaf… but my pump is particularly primed this morning. Yesterday was our 13th wedding anniversary. With anniversaries already on my mind, today is the perfect day to celebrate another one.

In honor of this event, I’m typing this entry up on the old girl. Posting will be delayed though. I’ll have to transport it via flash drive to my trusty PowerBook at home. (Having my own computer in the office is at best a dark shade of gray… and it’s certainly not allowed to be connected to the network. Hell, we’re not even allowed to have flash drives for Pete’s sake. Now that I invoke his name… who the heck is Pete?)

With iTunes pumping crisp music through the TAM’s Bose sound system… I’m the envy of the office (and if I’m not, I should be).

We don’t need no stinking ear buds here!

My camera phone strikes again.

Admission: Gates ain’t no boogeyman

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As a Mac enthusiast I’ve had occasion to resent Bill Gates’ influence over the computer world. Let’s face it, his products may be nearly ubiquitous, but they’re about as exciting as a Chevy Impala (only less reliable). In the event that you happen to be a Chevy enthusiast – be honest with yourself. If asked, “if you could have any car, what would it be?” How many people would wistfully reply, “oooh, that Chevy Impala is sweet!”

Am I wrong about the Impala? After all, it was the Fleet car of the year in 2006! Few things correlate to “sexy” like “company car.”

OOOO, look at IE7! Boy, I’d like to click it’s buttons.

Kidding aside, I must give Bill his due. Sure he’s ammassed great wealth, but people should be judged by more than how rich they are. Someone told me recently that wealth means nothing – it’s how you get there and what you do once you’re there that means something. There are lots of people who get rich either by luck or by dubious means, and there are countless others that do nothing but accumulate more once they have it. By all accounts Bill is a smart guy and a cunning buisnessman who worked hard to get where he is. Sure, he may have been in the right place at the right time – so luck may have had something to do with his success. But just as importantly, to me anyway, he and his wife have shown themselves to be good people, given what they’ve done with what they’ve earned.

Rich people start charitable foundations left and right – so often I sometimes wonder if it’s more ego trip than true empathy. From what I hear, Bill and his wife apply themselves to their charitable work just as much (if not more so) than they did to their “for profit” work. For that I’ve got to give them credit.

Not only is it a ray of optimism in this cynical world, but it truly gives us something to aspire to.

Flock this

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I don’t even remember where I heard about it, but I’ve recently become addicted to a new web browser: Flock.

It integrates several web services I use: namely WordPress (my blog host), and Flickr. It’s based on the open source code from Mozilla and Firefox… and it works just as well. Plus, it’s got a groovy news aggregator (for RSS feeds).

It may be that I’m just a sucker for something new (and free)… but hell, we’ve got to take our good times where ever we can find them (no matter how pathetic it may seem).

Get Flocked

Airing it out

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There’s a phenomenon frequently associated with “Windows PCs” where apiece of hardware spontaneously takes flight. It’s usually a keyboard or mouse, but in a few documented cases it has happened to monitors and CPUs as well.

Recent studies suggest this “phenomenon” is not spontaneous at all; but rather, a pre-meditated attempt by an owner to bleed off a little pressure from the boiler. Some may call this catharsis… but you know me, I’m hesitant to make a value judgement where computer operating systems are concerned.

I will tell you this though: a piece of computer hardware almost took flight in our house last night. Oh the horror! I haven’t seen my computer do such strange things since… well… ever. Holy deus ex machina Batman! Universal Access was turned on! I turned it off and the problem was solved.

The question is, how did it get turned on? I’m not sure I want to know.

Being snooty

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Our tech guy walks into my office and asks, “Is that your PC?” He was pointing at my mint 20th Anniversary Mac.

“No,” I answered, “that’s my Mac.”

New name, old crap

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There’s a new address where you can fulfill all of your e-Kauffman needs. It’s mykauffman.com!

If you think you’re excited, imagine how I feel! Can you think of a better way to stroke your own ego (for less than ten bucks a year) than to put your name up in pixels?

You can still use the old addresses for my site – because it’s the same site, on the same servers. But why would you want to?

They do call me the expert for nothing

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I’ve been toying with Firefox lately, but for all the wrong reasons. If you know enough about computers and the internet to be looking at this page, you probably know what Firefox is; but just in case you somehow slipped through the net… Firefox is another kind of web browser. That’s right kids, all you folks looking at the web through the Micro$oft window-shade (better known as Internet Explorer) have another option.

Listen to me, putting down the Windows folks when this entry is really about my failings. I’m fast becoming a psychologist’s dream (patient).

There was one reason I was using Firefox: it corrects your spelling as you type text in web forms. There are several reasons why this is handy. For one thing, word processors recognize text that some web based applications do not. I can type up an entry in Word, run a spell check, then cut and paste the entry to a web form; but some of the text from Word won’t play nice (like “educated” quotes). With Firefox I can bypass the word processor altogether and type directly on the web form, and not have to worry about text that won’t translate between the two applications – and still have decent spelling, via the Firefox spell check option.

The only problem here is that I rather like Safari (the Apple web browser). Well it turns out the Firefox affair was all for not… Safari is capable of spell checking on the fly too (as are any other applications that take advantage of the built-in dictionary on Mac OS X). It’s not even particularly well hidden… it’s right there in the Edit menu, where it appears in almost every other application.

It’s bad enough I’ve coughed up everything but my colon these last two weeks (the cold may be common, but it’s a yearly scourge on the head of this household). Did I have to find this out now, while my reserves are down?

Would you like an apple?

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I thought I would check the site out from work during a break in the action, to see what it looks like through Windows. For those of you not in the know, web pages can look different with different browsers – even on the same computer, under the same operating system. So it wasn’t a big surprise when this page looked different on my Windows PC at work, via Internet Explorer. It was a bit of a surprise to find that the page was somewhat broken.

You’re supposed to see a smorgasbord of archives in the right-hand sidebar. Instead, it appears at the bottom of the page in Windows IE.

Mac users will find that the archives appear in the correct position, in both Safari and Firefox.

Who would have thunk it? WordPress apparently is aware of the problem, but I’m not terribly worried.

**Note: forget what I just said. It was only partially Windows IE. Changing the window size (making it bigger) made everything better. If you’re having trouble, just go out and buy a bigger monitor.

The big move

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As it happens, a rev B iMac and a six and a half year old laptop tend to bog down a bit when they’re bombarded with thousands of server requests from the internet. The problem has not been the traffic, but staying useful as a family room computer. Rest assured, you have not missed out on a quantum leap in popularity of this site. A large majority of the hits (say 998 of the 1000 or so a day) were fishing expeditions for vulnerabilities.

Anyway, the great home server initiative has come to an end… for now. I’m still ironing out the apparent kinks in my URL redirection strategy, but the old URLs should work for the foreseeable future.

I know it’s a load off your mind.