Connecticut gas prices
Posted on August 31, 2003
Filed Under Life | 1 Comment
When we were in California last week, I was amazed at how expensive the gas was. I even took a picture at one. $2.05 a gallon for regular?!? I couldn’t believe it. When we left, gas was around $1.65-1.75 a gallon here in CT.
We came home last weekend, and we took the gas prices with us! Gas here in Fairfield County is now over $2 a gallon except for one or two stations in parts of town I won’t drive that are around $1.90. It went up about 30 cents in one week. Why? It’s Labor Day weekend and it can. I was hoping that I could hold out until after the weekend to fill up, but I really need to do it today. Maybe I’ll just put in a few gallons on the hope that the price will go back down next week.
bummer
Posted on August 29, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh | Comments Off
For some reason, Apple is not shipping the dual 2 GHz G5 in August as planned and promised. My ship date was originally today, now it’s “on or before 9/29/03.” Very big bummer. My G4/450 is extra slow and temperamental lately and I don’t have the energy or desire to troubleshoot it. I’m getting my work done and not losing data in between “unexpected quits” and that’s all that I care about. Disk Warrior and Disk Utility are reporting that the directory/drive are okay, so it’s application/preference related somewhere.
The prevailing theories as to the shipping delay are:
1. There was a problem with the machine which forced Apple to recall some of all of the machines ready to ship. I’ve read this in multiple places, but here’s a link.
2. A university placed a big order for maxxed out dual G5s and Apple wants to fill it first. Link here.
3. In general, education orders will get priority. Link here (although folks on the discussion lists who have educational orders in aren’t getting their machines next week either).
There have been other rumors…everything from stock manipulation to the blackout to an intentional wait for Panther (OS X 10.3). Some or all of these make sense in some way, and Apple’s not talking. Normally when a ship date slips, Apple sends an email to customers explaining that “due to whatever…” the order is delayed. As of 9:30 pm EST, no one has reported receiving an email.
I’m disappointed, but not incredibly surprised. I’ve been purchasing Apple computers since 1992 and not once has the company been able to meet initial demand.
Some sites are saying that the machine could ship as early as mid September, but I’m not expecting miracles at this point.
strolling through the garden
Posted on August 28, 2003
Filed Under Design | Comments Off
When I’m a little more awake, I need to study the code in the the CSS Zen Garden. Some of those designs are just too beautiful.
oh well
Posted on August 28, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh | Comments Off
My G5 order still says “On or before 8/29/03″. I knew the “or before” part was just wishful thinking. Now let’s see if the status changes tomorrow. I’m still hopeful, but not holding my breath.
word & image count in extended entries & feeds
Posted on August 24, 2003
Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off
Now that I’m using the blog for my personal pictures (of kids, vacations and whathaveyou…portfolio stuff will still get separate pages), and I know that many read my site through an aggregator (such as the outstanding NetNewsWire) I wanted to have a way of keeping my feeds complete yet if they’re image-heavy, have those entries be opt-in.
I got it working thanks to Adam Kasley’s Word Count plug-in. Getting the plug-in to work was super easy. It was one tag in the template (well, two if you include the one that counts the images). It just took a little bit of searching to find the right code for my RSS 2.0 feed, which I found here. I’m pretty comfortable in an XHTML template, but as soon as you throw CDATA in there I get a little lost so I need to follow a recipe.
Now when I use the extended entry for pictures and the like, you’ll see a link in your feed directly to the extended page telling you how many words are in the entry and how many images to expect.
For the most part, I’ll continue to post entirely in the body. I appreciated the fact that I was able to download feeds with NetNewsWire and then read them offline. Excerpts make that difficult to do.
