My boss called my cellphone exactly as I was going through security, so it came out of the x-ray machine ringing with “Danger Zone” from Top Gun.  He was still about 15 minutes away.  We met at the gate.

Flight there was uneventful.

After work, we went to check in at the hotel.  Sutton Place Hotel, which was sort of funny since I live near Sutton Place in NYC.  Hotel was nice, not too nice, but not shabby either.  More than acceptable.

We went out to dinner at Ditka’s and got seated immediately in the smoking section.  We sort of looked at each other since we had heard all day about Chicago’s new restrictive smoking policy.  We saw two people smoking.  I had meatloaf.  It was very good.  Boss had ribs.

Back in hotel on the first night, I started to sleep in the bed near the window, but my feet kept hitting the desk near the foot of the bed, so I switched beds.  Got an OK nights sleep, only waking up about four times, and not for more than a quick glance at the clock.  I must’ve been really tired.

Continue . . .

Heading to Chicago for two nights.

Business trip.

Oh joy.

Did a bigger than average water change tonight.  It was about 35% and, more importantly, I did a deep cleaning on 50% of the gravel.  Boy was it ugly.  Brown gunk would flow up the tube, and the smart little fishes would think it was food and bump into the plastic tube.  I’m thinking of renaming all my fish “Einstein”.

I’m watching 24 and I had to pause it for about 1 minute because I was making dinner.  During the next commercial break, I hit the fast-forward button, and was able to make it back “live”.  The problem is that sometimes when that happens, the DVR gets a little “funny”.  It starts getting a little jerky, especially with the audio.  The only way to clear it is to change the channel and then change back.

I did just that during the commercial break and continued to watch 24 live.  Within 20 minutes, I had to address a biological function that was not going to wait for the next break, so I hit the pause button right in the middle of 24.  To my surprise, when it paused, it showed a Target commercial, which was a bit odd since I was in the middle of 24 (I believe a hostage taker was on the phone).  When I got back, I hit “play” and the Target commercial played.  Huh?

I hit the fast-forward button, and eventually the DVR hit live again, and to my shock and dismay, it was showing some award show.  The Golden Globes to be exact.  Huh?  Huh?

The display showed channel 5 and said “24” as the title of the show, but clearly, it was not 24!  Son of a *&%$#!

I guess what happened was that the channel switch that I did to clear up the jerky audio was too fast for the DVR to handle and while I was viewing channel 5, it was recording channel 4 in the background.  Another channel switch, this time slower, cleared it up, but I missed about 45 seconds.  Damn.

I got my iBook back from Apple service on 1/12/06.  Upon opening the box, I could see that there were now a few more scratches on the top of the laptop that weren’t there before, but nothing too bad.

I looked at the bottom and saw that there was a new battery.  Upon opening it up and turning it on, I was greeted with the OS X 10.4 welcome movie and music. Wha?

I went through the initial setup, and sure enough, it was a new install.  I looked at the work order and it shows what work was done on it…replaced the optical drive (good), replaced battery (good), replaced hard disk (bad).  No clue why they had to replace the hard disk, but it’s a good thing I made a full backup prior to dropping it off.

So Apple, as expected, announced iLife ‘06 yesterday, and within that announcement was a new version of iPhoto.  As I expected, it seems to have a few features that were “inspired” by Aperture, especially the full-screen editing.  No mentioned of better keyword based organization, and I’m assuming they did not change it, but that really doesn’t matter to me.  The one feature that will keep me from using it, and probably Aperture for that matter, is the one feature that I don’t mind and wish I could actually use…the database.  You have to import all your photos into it’s database and it manages the actual files from there.  Good.  Can the database be located on a network drive?  No.  Very bad, Apple.  Tsk, tsk.

I use a desktop computer as my central “server”, and it has gobs of disk space.  Both my WIndows and Mac laptops have relatively small amounts of disk space compared to the server.  Multimedia files like photos, videos, MP3s, etc. while they may not be large by themselves, a lot of them add up.  My MP3 library is over 60GB right now, and would not fit on either laptop and leave enough room to do anything else, so it goes on the “server”.  Same with photos.  Both iPhoto and Aperture would need to be able to import files into their respective databases, but reference the network location of the file.  This would allow me to use the “server” as well as allow the photos to span disks in the “server” (which they currently do).

So on Monday Adobe announced a new program called Lightroom.  While it had to be in development before Apple announced Aperture, it seems to be Adobe’s “response” to Aperture.  And guess what…it allows you to import photos into it’s database, but reference the network location of the file.  Yay!

Alas, Lightroom is OS X only right now, and my Mac is in the shop for repairs (see previous entries for those details), but it looks very nice.  There is a good write-up of it at Luminous Landscape.

Brought the iBook to the SoHo Apple store today.  Craig at the Genius Bar looked a bit confused when I told him that I had half a DVD stuck in the DVD drive, but I showed him the other half and he sort of said, “Never seen that before.”

He took it into the back to see if one of the guys could jimmy it out, but no such luck.

It has to be sent out to be repaired.  Will take about seven days.

I’ve been very happy using Safari most of the time.  When designing web pages, it does a very good job of rendering the layout (after all, it is Acid 2 compliant, but only in a every specific sort of way).  I have only one complaint.

The built-it pop-up blocker is actually quite good.  It does a good job of blocking unwanted pop-ups and allowing the wanted ones (the one’s you click on something to launch them).  The thing that kills me about it is that it doesn’t give any feedback when it blocks a pop-up.

Both IE and Firefox put a bar at the top of the page that alerts you that a pop-up was blocked.  This is a nice feature so that you know when you click something and nothing happens, you can see that a pop-up was supposed to open, but the browser blocked it.  Safari does not offer this.

This has only really been seen when a site uses Flash and launches a pop-up through a Flash link.  Some sort of visual evidence that a pop-up was blocked would be most welcome.

Why does this sort of thing always happen to me?

So I have a DVD of Empire of the Sun, and it’s one of the older style, non-dual layer DVD’s where there are two physical sides, one side is the wide screen version of the movie, flip it over, and you can watch the extras.

The other day I noticed that the side of the extras had a crack in it.  No clue how it got there, but the crack could not be seen on the movie side of the disc.  In an effort to save the movie, I put it into my Windows DVD drive and tried to copy the VOB files to the hard drive.  After attempting to copy it for several hours, Windows gave up and said it couldn’t be done.

So, I had the brilliant idea of throwing it in my iBook, you know, for the hell of it.

The iBook got a little further than Windows, but alas, it gave up on the copy too.

I then hit the eject button on the iBook, heard the little eject noise and saw the DVD spit out of the slot.  It did not eject as far as it normally does, but I grabbed it and pulled.  It didn’t feel any differently as I was taking it out, but once clear of the iBook, I noticed that the disc felt a little weird.  It felt a little…flimsy.  I looked at the disc, and lo and behold, IT WAS HALF THE DISC!

The top half of the disc (the extras side with the crack in it) was in my hand.  Where did the other half go?  I looked at the screen, and the DVD player came up and went to the menu for Empire of the Sun.  Huh?

Oh, the movie portion of the disc was back in the iBook.  No problem, I’ll just hit the little eject button again and…hmmm…it made the eject noise again, but no disc?  Why is the movie playing again?

Yup, the movie half of the disc is stuck in the iBook.  The extras half is in my hand.  I guess a trip to the Apple store needs to be scheduled.