Author: Bob Harrison

…and the Rainbow Baseball season begins. I note that today mostly because yesterday my friend received the annual letter from the ticket office asking if season tickets are still the order of the day.
They are.
Here’s what the batter’s box looks like from seats quite close to ours…

We’ll be playing the UC Irvine Anteaters in our first series, 2/20-2/22.
I can’t wait!
Aloha!

Yesterday was my 51st birthday.

I spent the day doing pretty much the same thing I do every Sunday. Generally I bike a bit, visit an older friend while he volunteers his time answering phones, and then go to lunch. In light of my birthday, yesterday was his treat.
That was it. No craziness, no drama, just calm.
You’d think I was getting old, eh?
And you might be right…or not.
You see I don’t feel any older than I did ten years ago, twenty even, possibly even thirty. While I know I’m not twenty anymore, I don’t feel all that differenty, aside from the aches and pains everyone seems to accumulate over time. That seems to be about it.
Well that’s about it for today. I did sort of over-eat yesterday, so today is recovery mode. It’s only 7:30am and I’m ready for nap. Maybe I am older! 🙂
Aloha!

Normally I don’t put up links like this but…I know a lot of alcoholics and I really enjoyed watching this. It’s a 1975 PBS special entitled “Drink, Drank, Drunk” by Carol Burnett..
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Conclusion

Recently I came across the twitter tweeter “ktlink“. Instead of being someone tweeting about how much they had to drink at some party last night, this one is actually useful – at least if you live on Oahu and drive.
Yep, real time accident reports from the Honolulu Police Department! I think this is an excellent way to spend my tax dollars. Really. I’m really surprised they have so few followers.
If one isn’t on twitter, updates are available through the Kokua Traffic site. They also tweet about traffic as “kokuatraffic“, but I note they don’t seem to update as much (at all?). 🙁
The police report is up to date though, so if you live on Oahu…!

Aloha

I love to read. I’ll admit I generally don’t read the Great Books much. Mostly I read for escapism or history, if can combine both, so much the better.
Right now I’m reading The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I read it as a child, but it still holds up a pleasant diversion as an adult. But I’m not really trying to discuss the book here, rather the way I’m reading it is the focus of this post.

Essentially it’s a site that allows you to read a bit of a book, many free, each day via email or an RSS feed. I managed to make it all the way through Moby Dick last year, something that had eluded me in the past.
Rather than try to describe the why of it, here’s a bit from their FAQ…

1. Why read books by email?
Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. This works incredibly well not just on your computer but also on a Treo, Blackberry, Sidekick or whatever the PDA of your choice. In the words of Dr. Seuss: Try it, you might like it! (Oops — it would appear that the actual quote from Green Eggs and Ham is “You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.”)

Go read a book!
Aloha!

Yep, this is really a test message, so feel free to skip it. The
problem, as I mentioned is that Postie no longer seems to work and I
really need the ability to include attachments. Then when I tested the
normal method of posting by email in WP it didn’t work on the site I
work on, even though it’s hosted on the same site as this blog. Go
figure.
[Added after the fact, the normal method seems to work, except for what it seems to be doing to line lengths. Back to the drawing board I’m afraid.]
Aloha!

Sadly it seems that Postie, a plugin for posting to WordPress blogs by email, is now not just broken, but without support. The real problem hinges on the use of categories – they don’t work anymore. I suspect it has something to do with where they are kept in the SQL tables, but I don’t know enough about the problem to have a go at it and…a big and…when things change again, I don’t want to have to take another look at it.
That means I’m going to have to give up a bit of control over the website I run for a group I belong to and teach a couple of folks how to use the built-in tools to do a bit of editing. I can certainly throttle down their permissions to keep things safe, but…
Well it had to happen sooner or later. Indeed in two years I won’t be doing it anymore for them (thankfully my term will have ended), so I guess it’s good to get into the habit now. 🙂

Right on, I’ve made my first real boneheaded move of 2009 and it’s pretty harmless. I sure hope the rest of the year is as forgiving.
Today I brought one of my laptops in to work and had it set up to follow my twitter feed on twhirl. All of a sudden it stopped and twhirl informed me that I’d blown my twitter api limit. This seemed odd to me because I wasn’t really doing much.
I tried other clients – same story.
I deleted clients – silly me.
I changed my password so SocialToo and FriendFeed wouldn’t hit the API, then I found the probable cause…

• You are at work, and left twhirl running on your home computer
  Right, a special case of the second scenario, but don’t laugh, it already happend to people…

Silly me, that’s exactly what I did. Sigh.
Aloha!

Last year I tried a lot of different productivity tools. There was the now defunct “I want Sandy” which I like, but then used less and less. There’s 37signals’ Backpack which I actually pay for, think is really cool, and don’t use much. I keep Evernote around on my iPhone but generally forget to use it (though it was helpful when I bought a camcorder). Oops, let’s not forget Jott – again, it’s on my iPhone and I never use it.
I’m sure there are more I’ve tried and not kept around, but what do I use?
Frankly the only tool I use on a regular basis is criminally simple. Joe’s Goals. You can see I have a graph in my sidebar showing how I’m doing on my goals. I keep it very simple – did I ride my bike? Did I show up for work? And it works. When I see that graph going down I check and see what it is I should be doing.
My only complaints about Joe’s Goals are pretty tiny. I’d like the badge to say Bob’s Goals instead of Joe’s Goals. Thanks Joe, I’m Bob, I hope you are doing well (and from his blog, it generally seems he is, but I want my name there, not yours. And as I live in Hawaii, I want a time offset that works. It seems that every evening my graph looks I did nothing today when in fact it’s showing I’ve done nothing tomorrow. Admittedly I don’t want to do anything tomorrow, at least not today, but still… 🙂

There is a reporting feature in Joe’s Goals that I’ve never actually used (other than in noting it exists). I guess it just gums up the works for me. I just want the simplicity of seeing at a glance how well I’m doing.
On the whole, I’m doing pretty well. 🙂
Aloha!

That’s right, it’s Hawaii so we’ve still got just under six hours to go. I plan on being asleep by that time, but we’ll see how it goes. Sometimes it’s just too loud.
Still, here’s wishing everyone…
Hau’oli Makahiki Hou!