I have decided that given my lack of ability to do take the correct amount of time to do certain things, I have devised a ’schedule’ for the coming weeks:
Mondays:
Video games
Random coding
Reading comics
Tuesdays:
Hanging out with Dallas
Wednesdays:
Free hang out day
Do whatever
Thursdays:
Coding/side-work hardcore
GTD time
No hanging out
Maybe read comics before bed
Fridays:
Hang out and go crazy (so to speak)
Watch movies, etc.
Saturdays:
Whatever day
Anything goes
Sundays:
See the family (if available)
Catch up on comics/TV shows (end of day)
I think that’s a good enough schedule. Let’s hope I can keep up with it…
Also, look for some blog alterations in the future… I hope…
So last night I discovered the Twitterverse screensaver in the Developers folder included with Xcode via TUAW and as I was trying to get the damn screensaver to work I noticed a problem I was having a while back…
As I was trying to load the screen saver in my System Preferences, the background daemon or whatever titled ’syslogd’ was eating up 100% of my processors (so, 1/2 of my total CPU).
Here’s a screen cap (click for fill size):
Now, I’ve blogged about this before and from what I understood, syslogd worked with TimeMachine trying to prepare itself for backup, but from how I’m seeing it, I think syslogd has to do with Screen Savers given that back when I wrote my first blog I was having issues with screen savers as well… then again this time, syslogd only acts up when I try to use/preview the Twitterverse screen saver whereas last time it was just going crazy whenever it damn well felt like it.
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and as of last night, I finally got around and did it. What is it you ask? Well, to explain it let me use a little story:
While I work, there are occasions when myself along with a few other co-workers go for walks around Grand Rapids to stretch our legs and to just break the monotonous feel of coding forms in the dark. For the most part, we all set oour computers to the login screen for the simply security thats someone will not be able to jump on our computers and get to our personal files and such.
The problem with me is, every few times we go for walks to go to get some kind of food/drink from the nearby party store I forget to put my computer to the login screen. Now, I know that no one in the office where I work is going to mess with my computer but every now and then I get paranoid.
So! To rid myself of this paranoia, I have written a simple AppleScript that works with a bash shell script all of which is triggered by a rule set in Mail that when it sees an e-mail from my phone with the message “switch” it instantly switches to the login window.
For all of you interested here’s the AppleScript (it’s only use is to call the shell script):
do shell script "[folder path to the script]/gotologin”
With the AppleScript, you have to set the path of where you have the gotologin script. For example, I save mine in
~/Documents/scripts/, so my AppleScript would look like this:
do shell script "~/Documents/scripts/gotologin"
And here’s the bash script (called gotologin):
#!/bin/sh
# Fast User Switching from the command line
CGSession='/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession'
# display login screen
exec "$CGSession" -suspend
exit
;;
esac
Simple enough.
Now, to set up a rule in Mail is easy as pie.
I’m assuming you have an e-mail account set up in Mail already (if not, clickhere or see the Mail help) and with that said here’s your simple how-to as to setting up a rule in Mail.
First, go to your Mail preferences and click Rules. Next, click Add Rule and a window will pop up. Within the window, you can add a description and set up your rule parameters. What I did was added one rule that said From - Is equal to - “[my phones e-mail address]“, then added another rule that said Message Content - Contains - “switch”. Then, on the final line, I chose Run AppleScript then I chose the location of the AppleScript, then clicked OK.
And it’s all done!
Mind you, you should definitely save your AppleScript and bash script somewhere where they won’t be moved because if they are moved, then rule won’t function correctly in Mail…
Yesterday evening I was at the good ol’ Woodland Mallin Grand Rapids minding my own beeswax with Dallas (@dallasw) and Nick (@l4zyn3rd). We were heading to get some food (Wing Heaven, for the record) and I was telling a humorous tale of an occurrence at work from earlier that day. While telling the story, I was–as many people do–emphasizing with curse words to make the story funnier (as many people do), I was yelled at from out of nowhere by a man holding an infant. He asked/said very loudly, “Hey, could you please not swear? There are children around.”
When this guy asked/told me to not swear in front of his infant (who I seriously doubt could have taken in any word I was saying given the distance I was from the guy) I was seriously taken aback. Now, in the situation, we were walking by a children’s play area, but at the same time I wasn’t speaking loudly–or any louder than I usually speak, which I guess is semi-loud–and I was, for a small moment, very pissed off at this guy for saying what he said. But, before I could really react to what he said in a logical and intelligent yet angry way, I just turned to him and said, “Yea, sure,” in a neutral voice and kept walking. The event ended there and that was that.
It’s been a good two years since I’ve been out of high school–a very good two years if you ask me–almost two years since I’ve turned 18 and since I’ve graduated high school and turned 18 I don’t think I’ve had anyone outside of my own mother ask me not to swear (and when I was asked not to swear, it was in front of my younger sister, not in public). With that said, I have to wonder, what place does someone in public have to say whether or not someone should/can or shouldn’t/can’t swear? What are the age brackets for such an unwritten rule?
With those rhetorics aside, my real question is this: Why do (some) parents feel the need to sheild their children simple and pointless things that they deem ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ such as swearing?
I do know that parents have an innate drive to protect their children and I am glad that they do have that, but when it comes down to it protecting your child from hearing curse words or profanity seems pointless when there are greater injustices in the world to protect your children from. I understand parents don’t want their children to respect them by not saying those words, but instilling rules and just blocking the words out are two very different things.
Really, it comes down to me being pissy about hos uptight people can be. i want to slap that guy in the face now for telling/asking me not to swear because the world isn’t perfect. The majority of people swear, have sworn or will swear in the future and as we all need to/should know is that WORDS DON’T FUCKING HURT. Just because I say ‘fuck’ in public doesn’t mean your heart is going to stop. Saying ’shit’ when your pissed doesn’t kill babies. Screaming ‘God damn it!’ when you break something isn’t going to burn down a forest.
Swearing does not and will never hurt anyone or anything. Period.
In tonight’s adventure in the life of Mike Rapin, Mike was amazed at how crappy he felt today.
(Back to the real blog): Today I was feeling a tad sick. Mainly a sore-throat + cough sick. I woke up with these feelings and as the day went on, I ate and drank and showered and drove around (not in that order, but I’d like you to guess as to how it went) and more or less felt better. Then came 8PM when my family decided to watch Horton Hears a Who–I was visiting for my Dad’s birthday. I passed out during the last 25 minutes of the movie and woke up with the same shitty feeling I had this morning.
So, basically, I felt like shit on the underside of my day (you know, like in the background somewhere you don’t notice until everything else you were doing is done). I’m hoping tomorrow will be better.
To balance things out, I got to play some Mario Kart Wii with Nick Nelson (@l4zyn3rd), and that was fun despite how shitty I am at that game… (Protip: I’m a master at Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Challenge me if you dare. I don’t even have a Wii and I kick ass at that game. Ha!)
Oh, and X-Force #3 finally came out online, so I’m excited about that.
In the last few weeks… well, lets actually say the last few months… more like the last year, I have found myself being very untired. It’s not like I can’t go to sleep when needed, but I find myself constantly (like tonight for instance) staying up to unreasonable hours, given my next day’s events.
A perfect example would be the last school year’s worth of Sunday nights: I usually get done doing whatever I was doing for the day by 11pm-midnight, then I come back to my apartment and stay up until 3 or 4am not thinking given that I need to be up at 7am to work or be at class. For the most part, my body adjusts and wakes up at 7am with me exhauster but strangely refreshed within 10 minutes of walking/moving around.
Of course, the downside of this ends up being my sudden tiredness between 2 and 6 hours later, which, I have found, depends on my eating schedule during the day and my water intake–this all of course assuming I haven’t had any caffiene that day. It’s a strange thing, but I get through the day.
Now, I do know this isn’t your typical or even closly related to insomnia, but I view it as such because despite having your standard 7-8 hour sleep schedule I can function throughout the day minus the random and sudden attacks of extreme tiredness.
What it comes down to is this: The strange thing about all of this is that I know I can go to sleep when I finally go to actually lay down and sleep, but up until then, I’m (usually) not even tired at all. I would say it’s the damnedest thing.
And you could say to me: “Why don’t you just go to bed when you need to?” and in return, I would say “Well, would you go to bed if you weren’t tired?” My guess is that you’d say no. And that’s just it: my mind/body think ‘Yea! We aren’t tired despite having no sleep!’ and just keep on trucking despite the consion logic that 3 hours of sleep sure-as-shit is not enough sleep to run on through the day. Who’d have thought?
But really what I just wanted to say is that even though I can run on this minimal amount of sleep, I can feel it taking it’s toll: I feel myself being unable to retain information that is important (such as school work) while being able to remember every line of code I wrote the night before for my personal project, or that could just be my mind in general, I can’t tell, but when it comes down to it, I feel myself being unable to focus on one thing for too long. Strange and sad, but then again, it could be my mind just going about it’s own business.
And yea. So I call myself ‘A sleepy insomniac’ because I can stay up late, but eventually, I will get tired and even thought I can run completely fine on very little sleep, I still need that sleep in the end. So, not your typical insomniac, but definitely something strange if you ask me.
Howdy internet fiends. Just an update as to StatusTweet’s being. We’ve hit a stage of super-awesomely-secret-private alpha-beta. Call it alpha-beta 0.4
We have everything working for the twitter side of things and e-mail updates should be rolling out in the next week or so.
Right now, we’re looking for 1-3 users to test things out. If you’re interested e-mail me at mikerapin <at> gmail <dot> com.
April 3rd, 2008 by Mike | Posted in info, random |
Well, StatusTweet is coming along. I’m calling it alpha .15. No help pages, e-mail updates forgot passwords yet, but we’re progressing. Oh, and we have no design, but HTML colors + positioning = my friend! We may start some private beta soon for those who are interested in connecting facebook and twitter some more…. more info soon, I promise.
On separate, but related note, we’ve moved hosting from a friend’s Dreamhost account to our own server (yay!). I’ve worked out with some friends to host a few sites on our server and yea. My new pet project may be a toilet usage tracking site… not sure if anyone would be into using the service, but, because I’m no web genius I’d be using the amazingness of Twitter to help with texting and such… I think it could be fun. I know I’d use it.
Speaking of Dreamhost, I have some cool promo codes:
MIKERAPIN1 - this will get you $50 off your price, one (1) MORE free domain name on top of the free one you get for signing up. MIKERAPIN2 - This will get you just $50 off if you don’t need the extra free domain. MIKERAPIN3 - This baby will get you $50 off PLUS a free unique IP address. MIKERAPIN4 - this will get you $50 off your price, two (2) MORE free domain name on top of the free one you get for signing up. MIKERAPIN5 - this will get you $50 off your price, three (3) MORE free domain name on top of the free one you get for signing up.
How cool, right? Dreamhost promo codes… who’d have thought?
Anyways, for signing up, I got a free domian… DestroyTheCyb.org. Nothing cool yet except a sweet image I ‘borrowed’ from io9.com and a gif from a google search… it’s kind of fun though, right?
March 12th, 2008 by Mike | Posted in info, random |
Just in case anyone was wondering, the site is progressing.. like molasses.
I’ve been working on the site a bit every day and getting… well, somewhere. I just implemented some new Ajax (Nick wrote some Ajax of his own, but I wanted to try MooTools :/ ).
We’ve had a layout change since I last blogged about the site and it looks pretty damn sweet. All thanks goes to Rob Brogan and his random design ideas.
To see the site in ‘action’ head over to my dummy twitter user niparekim. Mind you, all of my blunders and illogical mishaps have been handled on that user, so repeats of updates and such are in there.
And yea. I’ll be calling this alpha .07 until I start to really fix things.
