The crows woke us at the crack of dawn which opened into a spectacular sunshiny day. After a nice civilized breakfast of eggs and sausages cooked over the camp stove - yum! we needed to go in to Ellsworth to get Aliya a bathing suit (which she forgot at home). So off we trekked to the nearby Wal-Mart. While there we picked up some more camping supplies that we found would come in handy (citronella candle, vinyl tablecloth, some dish towels and so on. Since we were in Ellsworth we had to go to the L.L. Bean's Factory Outlet store. After shopping at Bean's we returned to the camp site for a sandwich lunch and then decided to go to the nearby fun-park for a round of mini-golf. The day was blazing hot and mini-golf was fun but the freaking course was like for pro-golfers or something; the putting degree of difficulty: v. high (or maybe it's just that we all suck at golf...). After mini-golf, we decided to go back in to Bar Harbor and have a nice seafood supper to cap off the day.

That evening we tried to burn off the rest of our "seasoned" campfire wood but realized we would have to leave some pieces for the next campers to that site. Although the day was hot, we had noticed some clouds moving in threatening rain - and did it rain overnight.! It freaking poured.

Day one -
Our road trip vacation started with a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine. Getting to St. Stephen was the fastest part of the trip - but then things got bogged down at the border crossing to Calais, Maine. I'm guessing it was partially because of the long weekend in Canada but the wait-time at the St. Stephen/Calais crossing was around 2 hours in line in the scorching heat to get across to the US side.

Once across, the drive down to Bar Harbor was pretty uneventful. It's a pretty drive along Route 9 (the Airline route) which is somewhat shorter than the even prettier Coastal Route (Rte 1) and Bar Harbor is a lovely resort town.

Because we were trying to go the economical route (read cheap) we decided to forego motels and hotels for camping, which is also fun if a little rougher around the edges. We stayed at the KOA Woodlands which was a lovely site but a little too buggy with mosquitos. But camping can be a lot of fun - campfires, cooking on the coleman stove, sleeping outdoors in a tent. It's great ... until it rains (but I get ahead of myself here). Campfires are the best part of the evening but beware of "seasoned" wood which must be camper code for "soaked in pine resin" which results in a conflagration of alarming proportions. The wood was encased in a sheet of flame and was freaking bubbling. It probably wouldn't have been too big of a deal had the fire ring been placed further away from the stand of trees.

Observations: food tastes better cooked and eaten outside; campfires, marshmallows and beer go together most excellently.

Hey - I just got an email wishing me Happy SysAdmin Day...apparently the last Friday in July is said appreciation day. And today marks the 6th annual one. Who knew? Not I - but I was pleasantly surprised. What a great warm and fuzzy way to start a long weekend (and some summer holidays for me).

For all you SysAdmins out there - Happy SysAdmin Day to you too!
Share the love y'all!

It's interesting that Yahoo is acquiring Konfabulator (via: MacWorld) and that they will be releasing it as free software. I've been a fan of Konfabulator for about a year and a bit - and even prefer their widgets to the dashboard ones (for now anyway). Yahoo seems to be a buying machine, here is a list of their other fairly recent acquisitions:

• June 2005 - DialPad (VoIP)


• June 2005 - blo.gs (blog directory)


• March 2005 - Flickr (photo sharing)


• Dec 2004 - Wulf Networks (technology to transfer digital files to mobile devices)


• Oct 2004 - Strata Labs (email search software)


• Sept 2004 - MusicMatch (music jukebox)


• Aug 2004 - FareChase (travel)


• July 2004 - OddPost (email service)


• Mar 2004 - Kelzoo (price comparison)

After a weekend doing yard work (yay - the front yard's finally looking acceptable and the side garden's finally been weeded) we decided to go for an after supper walk on the beach at Saint's Rest. This beach is about a 5 minute drive from my house so it's really dumb that we don't go there more often. It's not a beach for swimming though, the water's too yucky - but you can sun there or it's great for long walks as it stretches almost along the entire west side to the Partridge Island breakwater. The view in this photo is looking the opposite way towards the Taylor Island Nature Park. We always ending up bringing home interesting rocks - Aliya's into collecting quartz and I just like collecting the odd or unusual rocks and tossing them in a bowl in our foyer.

I'll apologize in advance for the scarcity of posts lately but in trying to prepare for some summer vacation (which I'll be taking the week after next) I've been nose-to-the-grindstone in an effort to make my pile of work somewhat more manageable. For any who might be interested, I've added my work "to do" list on this blog to document yet another (absolutely fascinating) facet of my life. It actually looks worse than it is as some of my deadlines are a bit flexible, however, it's still a big chunk of work that needs to get done.

As a sidenote, the backpack widget for dashboard (Mac OS 10.4) is really superb. I may have found the one dashboard widget that is better than the Konfabulator "to do" list.

Well, last book it was my daughter who was waiting eagerly for it's arrival, bouncing from foot to foot while watching for the courier that Saturday morning. This time I found it was me that kept circling by and peeking out the front window until the courier arrived with a "Harry Potter's here!". I raced through my first reading of the book over the weekend and finally finished it tonight and can definitely give it a 2 thumbs up. I must admit that I began reading it with a hope that Harry's character had grown out of his whiny brat-ness of the last book and was pleased to find that he has! That one thing made it so much more enjoyable than book 5. As well, the plot seemed tighter where book 5 dragged on a bit. But the ending was quite a shock and unfortunate in many ways. It will be interesting to see in book 7 if her killing off this particular character was necessary to move the overarching plot forward, or simply some gratuitous violence for shock value.

Just a couple of notable findings in the category of CSS:

• Xyle Scope - a WYSIWYG CSS editor for Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. Hmmm - may be interesting.


• Styled Checkboxes - spicing up form controls with CSS. This is definitely interesting, especially since the controls still exhibit expected behaviour while looking much more interesting. Used in the right context, this is pretty cool.

---- update: November 14, 2005 ---
The styled checkboxes link doesn't seem to be active anymore. Try this link instead. It's pretty much the same styles.

It seems like everyone is writing manifestos these days - here is a D. Keith Robinson's on useable content. This is a subject I'm very much interested in. Although I do not create any of the content on the sites I work on, I often feel compelled to help edit some stuff down to manageable chunks. I like Keith's list of what useable content is. You can pretty much boil it down to Steve Krug's mantra "Don't Make Me Think" and I think I'd also add Don't Make Me Scroll. I think any user faced with more than 3 paragraphs of dense text on a webpage quickly glazes over and loses interest in fully reading the content.

To that end, I realize there are times when content needs to be text heavy and I wonder if we can't emulate the way journals present their material - with the salient points in an abstract first, and then if the user wants the full text provide a "full-text" link that presents them with a print-ready page formatted for easy reading.

Over the past few days I've noticed that Tiger doesn't seem to want to play nice with my epson 740 printer in my office. It's not a huge problem and I've made do by printing stuff to a networked printer in the office next door, or waiting until i got home and printing stuff out there. Having a few spare minutes today I decided to wrangle tiger into being a nice kitty and printing to my office printer thereby eliminating the need for me to actually get up off my butt and walk the ten steps or so next door to retrieve my printouts. A bit of googleing on the problem led me to this Apple knowledgebase note - apparently removing and adding the printer directly from the printer utility is not enough...who knew? All is well now and printer is happily chugging out printjobs again.

On a side note and somewhat more alarming, Retrospect 5 no longer works on Tiger.

"Retrospect 5.x and Mac OS X Tiger - EMC Dantz does not recommend running Retrospect 5.x or Retrospect Client 5.x on Mac OS X Tiger. If you do so, you will experience all the issues listed above, as well as the following issues (which can all be resolved by upgrading to Retrospect 6.0)"
(many issues listed above and below :P)

Yikes! So it looks like I'll be upgrading to 6 in order to resume backing up my system.

I woke up this morning and what a shock! I found a big vacant hole in the blogosphere where John Oxton's blog, Joshuaink, used to be. Yes, used to be. John's blog was one of my absolute favorites to read, it was laugh out loud funny, informative and helpful, and sometimes cutting; it's sorely missed. I understand fully the need to reflect and refresh after a life event, I can only hope that one day he'll be back.
John: Hugs from the other side of the pond - be well.

A little late to the party but nevertheless, while doing some research for a presentation on blogs that I'm giving tomorrow, I came across the Electronic Frountier Foundations [EFF] A Legal Guide for Bloggers. It's based on American laws but the issues are probably the same in most areas. I fervently wish that a similar site can be setup for all regions.

We went to see the Fantastic Four last night. The reviews have been pretty brutal about this film but being a fan of comics I insisted on seeing it anyway. Well, I liked it. It was quite enjoyable. I'm not sure what the reviewers are hoping for...folks this is an adaptation of a comic book not a literary epic. It's not meant to be an Oscar winner - it's just meant to be entertaining. I was entertained. I liked the characters - they did justice to the comic. Effects were good. Dr. Doom was particularly impressive when he finally got into his mask and cloak although I did wonder why the people of Latveria would gift an industrialst with a metal mask. Yes, there were plot holes but perhaps they'll have a better writer for the sequel.
Anyway, for light summer entertainment it works just fine.
★★★☆☆
3 stars out of 5

The London bombing - another day of senseless brutality - extremism vs tolerance. I do not believe this is a fight for a way of life, a culture, a religion - in my mind this is a fight for power, to control by oppression. I am saddened and sickened that "humans" can do such terrible things to their fellow humans. My heart and prayers goes out to those who have borne the brunt of this latest attack.

Finally got Tiger installed on my powerbook, hoo boy what a process. It's always a big deal to upgrade an OS when it's on your main system, said sytem being a notebook well, all my work is in a thin aluminum box. I opted for the clean install which basically means wipe your hard drive and install the new operating system all fresh and clean. It took a while because I duped my hard drive to an external drive before going ahead with the installation - just in case. Then spent some time migrating apps and stuff back. The external drive was USB2 not firewire so it took just a wee bit longer.

Happily, the only thing that didn't work properly afterwards was iCal which kept crashing. Curious, I googled for iCal not working on Tiger and found an entry that mentioned if you had a SIMBL directory in your system library>input managers directory to just remove it and iCal would be working again. Hmmm, I had installed pithhelmet for safari which used the simbl application helper, so since pithhelmet was no longer working i just tossed the directory and - voila- iCal works like a charm now.

The other surprise was the iSync is no longer needed for synching your contacts and calendars to your ipod, all of that is now controlled by itunes. Okaaay. I guess that makes sense, kind of, turning itunes into an ipod applications manager.

Dashboard has been poofed from my dock since i use Konfabulator, heck, I paid for it so I'm not gonna toss it, and besides the widgets seem superior to dashboard's at this time.

Barring any more surprises - I think Tiger is pretty slick.