I absolutely hate the new find in OS X Tiger. I didn’t think I’d like it when I saw it, I didn’t like it when I got it, now it’s a few months later and I still hate it.

When I want to search for a file name it automatically searches inside the files too, so I get a million more hits than there are just files. And you can’t easily separate from the two (filenames or contents). Plus you can’t easily sort by date or filename, it breaks it down by category.

And Spotlight should allow me to control/right-click on a name to open the folder, not the item. If it’s a zip or sit file and you just want to find it, it uncompresses it if you click it…

For being this huge new “feature” it’s not very friendly. I looked to see if the old find was still there but I don’t see it anywhere. :(

I say “easily” in that I don’t know how, so I really mean I can’t do it at all. But I thought I got it to do it once, but maybe that was the other computer…

We’re talking basic stuff here. A drop down (or radio buttons to pick filename/contents/both). Click on a column to sort it how hard is that? There are a variety of shortcuts related to it (buried in the help) but they need a button in the find window to easily get you to them. That searching inside every file has got to be great for my battery life…

If you use the spotlight icon (upper right corner) and pick “show all” you can get close to what I’m looking for related to the sorting but it’s not a normal user interface.

Like I said, I’ve been testing it out and it’s never made me feel it’s an improvement, I feel like it’s devolved. It’s got good brains behind it but a lousy user interface…

So I found this cool site with all kinds of mockups of futuristic/prototyipical Apple gear. I really liked the iBook Mini (it’s even got the intel inside logo on it) and some of the phones (that were also pda/ipod/camera type devices). Very nice stuff. I’ll take one of everything!

Last night I watched the season finale of The 4400. It was great, it really wrapped more than a few things up and then turned around but also created a bunch more possibilities in the last five minutes. (I’ve got a few spoilers in the extended entry so don’t read them if you haven’t seen it). The title of this post indicates leans towards one of the (unfortunately) used premises in science fiction (and comics), I was afraid it might be used and it was, we’ll see how it pans out next season. I also predict the title of this post with be the title of an episode next season, probably the first or last episode.

SPOILERS but still slightly vague: The explosion during the cure was excellent. All the little flashbacks at the end worked out for me. The final injection. Maia’s little speech. Richard and his cup of coffee. The person at the lake (this is Kyle’s entity, IMHO, time is relative after all). I wasn’t so keen on the courthouse. Diana (with a different look than usual, yowsa!) and her dinner guest.

FYI – Here are MY FALL 2006 descriptions (I see the search engines keep picking up this older page and it’s 2006 now…).

Here’s a grid for the Fall 2005 TV lineup: We’ve got Eastern/Pacific and Central.

Here’s my issues (because I know you care) with the lineup:
• Two and a Half Men is still on at the same time as Las Vegas.
• Commander-in-Chief is on the same time as Sex, Lies, & Secrets (and Supernatural and Bones, but I’m not so sure about these).
• Veronica Mars is on the same time as Lost.
• Smallville is on the same time as Alias (and Joey, although I can live without).

There is a lot on there that I don’t know what they are so that may be a few more issues for me. I may have to learn how to set up BitTorrent to download my shows automatically if they are going to have so many conflicts….

Stolen from Melissa.

Guess whose favorite artist just released seats for the orchestra pit for tonight’s show! Anyone gonna be at Meadowbrook (Rochester, MI) tonight?
Gotta go, the show starts in a few!

I’m wearing my brand new blogography.com t-shirt today. I just thought you should know…

Be sure to check out Dave’s excellent blog sometime. He’s got great cartoons that he draws and he talks about all sorts of stuff (it’s not always about underpants).

Scientific American magazine always lists what was happening 50, 100 & 150 years ago. In the September 2005 issue they mentioned an award given to Samual Morse (by the Emperor of Austria in 1855) for his valuable services to the world with his contributions of Morse Code and the Electric Telegraph. It was twelve years after the first public experiment, between Baltimore and Washington, and there were now 50,000 miles of wire in operation.

Communications has changed quite a bit since then. Where would we be if it weren’t for our phones, Internet and cellular phones to keep us in constant communications with the world? How many miles have the electrical impulses that I just generated with this message traveled so far? How many search engines have picked it up so far, how many have just come along to read it, how many feed readers just set off a little flag to alert someone to a new post? Communications has definitely come a long way in the last 15 years, let alone 150…

FYI – 1855 is also the year the Michigan Agricultural College was established. Eventually this college would grow up to be Michigan State University. I remember this because the campus information phone number (like everything else) started with a 355 and they appended the year to make the phone number for information be 355-1855…

So the new version of Movable Type is out. And they’ve got a great promotion price for the personal editions only $39.95! Don’t forget, they always have a free version for personal use which also has unlimited weblogs (the free version of the software is not disabled at all) but no support other than the forums.

If you have donated before, they let you apply a $20 credit from earlier versions and it makes it $19.95! It’s “just” five authors (that’s four more than I have), it’s $30 more for unlimited authors. This is an awesome deal! Nothing like when they did the 3.x release upgrade that made everyone (not me) crazy about prices and limitations.

I’l probably be upgrading next week, once everyone else has worked out all the bugs ;)

I think it’s got moderation for trackbacks and some new styles “stuff” to make it easy to manage the look of your site. Also an unlimited number of blogs! Here’s a list of their “32 Favorite Features”.

It’s also got some 3.2 specific plug-ins: one that’s supposed to be super for enclosures (like for feeds and podcasting!), some notifier stuff, something for stats and I guess the new styles thingy is a plug-in (or maybe this is something extra).

I watched one of my absolute favorite episodes of The West Wing tonight. It’s an early episode, probably from earlier in the first season, the title is the same as that of this post. It’s my favorite episode for many reasons:

So I really wish I could have been in the room when someone was making the pitches for new television shows. You know, there must have been some new CIS shows, some other cop shows, something new from J.J. Abrams, probably some new Star Trek series and who knows what else. Then someone says ‘Hey! Let’s do a reality-mentory and we’ll call it Tommy Lee Goes to College‘ and then all the network folk stood up and applauded and said go for it.

Personally, I really miss college and I didn’t get what the show was about so I tried a few minutes of it. I’m sure the university (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) gets a few more applicants after this (I’m serious), it’s free PR and while it’s goofy PR it’s not bad PR. Tommy jumps between being (acting) actually serious about this to being a total screw up. He’s not really a memorize 125 different plants kind of guy. He does like studying his tutor’s chemistry chemistry with his tutor.

In the credits it says something like: while Tommy attended classes, he was not actually enrolled in classes and some scenes were actually produced for comedy.

So I usually avoid Tuesday is Chooseday because there is usually a rude question or two (or three) that I don’t feel the need to publish on-line, but today’s is okay with me…

Would you rather:
1. have a first name that nobody can pronounce OR one nobody can remember? I’ll go with no one can pronounce my name (at least they’ll remember me).
2. be confined to a couch for three weeks OR wear rollerblades for three weeks straight? I could deal with the rollerblades. I’m assuming I can sit on the couch to rest.
3. be the person who cleans up the elephant cages at the circus OR the person who cleans the friers at mcdonalds? I’d probably never eat fries again but I’ll choose those over the elephants.
4. your poop be bright blue OR your saliva be grass green? I’ll go with the blue. No one’s going to know about that, right?

From Tuesday is Chooseday.

Brice Mellen is on G4 TechTV (Attack of the Show) right now. He plays Mario World and Mortal Combat and he’s blind. And in a few he’s going to play another sightless gamer in “the world’s first Sightless Gamer Mortal Kombat Challenge!” Here’s a link but they don’t really do show notes like they used to…

Here’s a little more from USA Today, CNN and Wired.

Plus they are going to show doom on the iPod (which I talked about last week).

From Friday Fun.

So a few weeks ago I noticed I was getting Showtime, I assumed it was a free preview weekend or something so I TiVo’d (taped) a few shows. One of those shows happened to be The Perfect Score, about a group of kids who decide to steal the answers to the SAT, tonight I got around to watching this one. It wasn’t until I was watching it for a few that I realized I had done that post about the SAT gizmo earlier today (duh!).

So the movie was fun, if you saw the preview it’s pretty much what you’d expect with a few “dream/fantasy” sequences about the planned crime itself. They really ripped on the the whole standardization pigeonholing concept of the whole test and the scoring and how your whole life can be based on this number. The one line that I liked was something like, “They tell us to be individuals our whole life and then stick us all in the same room to take the same test to determine the rest of our lives” (that’s very paraphrased).

Here’s the Trailer and the Official Web Site. On a side note, I really liked the graphics that they ran the credits over.

FYI, the Showtime preview lasted a whole week and I got around 10 different Showtime channels. I never did figure out why…

Another oddity is the parts in the preview that aren’t in (or are different) the movie. The same (if not more so) goes for the stuff on the web site (especially the music video).

So I saw this Franklin Princeton Review Pocket Prep for the New SAT device, it’s some kind of interactive digital flashcards for the new SAT. It’s got timed exams, vocab lists, tutorials and feedback based on your practice exams. This would have been handy, especially the timing, I think the timing is one of the hardest parts for people to prep for on these kinds of exams…

This site, with it’s lists of lists always cracks me up!

School starts back up next week! As cRaZy as this time of year gets, it’s really nice to have everyone coming back. All the new teachers are great. Some of the other teachers are back early getting their rooms together. Three more days of work and all the students will be back too. For some reason I’m really looking forward to it this year…

So MSNBC did an Independent Study (review/article) of Blondfire (formerly known as Astaire), it’s a nice article (but a little short) but it’s got music samples so check them out. If you haven’t heard me talk about these folks before check them out at the iTunes music store (where they have an exclusive EP) or Amazon.

I missed the Grand Rapids show, did anyone see it? I noticed the article didn’t mention Michigan, it seems to me they were born in either Grand Rapids or Brazil and spent part of their lives in the other (or bouncing around).

How come you never see a newspaper that reads “Psychic Wins Lottery!”? Statistically, you’d think one would have won by now…

That’s all I have on this topic. And 75% of that was stolen from someone’s sig file (that they probably saw somewhere else), I wasn’t planning on mentioning it (or I’d have someone to quote) but it stuck in my head so I stuck it on the ‘blog.

If you thought “A was for Apple” then you’ve got another thing coming. Here is the Suggested Google Alphabet. This is the suggested word for each letter of the alphabet. Not only does it get the info from Google, it’s live, it could change every time you look if the requests change.

While G is for Gmail, I thought it was pretty funny that H is for Hotmail and Y is for Yahoo! At least it was when I checked…

So here’s an idea! After you put linux on your iPod, try installing a copy of Doom. Here’s a short video clip, it’s pretty impressive (even to a non-gamer like me); I figure some of the delay is part of movie clip. Here’s the info for what you need ipod. I think it’s actually free (legally). I’m sure it’s not easy to install.

I love my TiVo!!! I’ve seen other digital recorders but this is so easy to use with it’s excellent interface. I think it’s a great product. You can watch stuff when you want or start a show late and catch up to it by fast forwarding through the commercials. If you’re just watching TV live you can pause it or even rewind. It’s got season passes, wish lists, automatic suggestions (based on what you want), fast forward at 1 minute per second, on screen directory, you can schedule shows via the web and all sorts of other stuff. They have got to save shows to DVD. If you hook it up to your home network (you do have a home network, don’t you?) you can play MP3s and view photos that are on a computer somewhere else. You can share shows between TiVos in your house (if you have more than one). It really is a great tool to have for your TV watching (even if you don’t watch a lot).

If you’ve considered it, you should try it. At the TiVo web site they offer a 30 money back guarantee!

You can also enter to win a TiVo and portable video player. It looks like you can (and should) enter daily.

So why am I talking about TiVo today? I’ve spent a chunk of today upgrading my home TiVo to have more space (bigger is better). And trying to fix another old broken one (still working on that).

So it seems that this 99 pound woman in the photo won a Johnsonville Brat eating contest (wouldn’t that double her body weight?). She ate thirty-five brats in ten minutes (I’m assuming no bun or toppings). The amazing thing is that before that the record was only 19.5! She’s known as “The Black Widow” in the food eating circuit.

So I know I’ve mentioned Scene It? several times before. I’m going to plug it again? Why you ask? Because I’ve seen a few new editions and some old ones released differently. Personally, I own the Junior, TV and regular refill pack (the board is the same for them all). I’ve bought at least a half-dozen of these as gifts (maybe a dozen).

Why is this game so great? It’s fast and easy to play; plus you can even fold the board in half to play an even shorter version. It’s got fun questions and about every third one is multi-media via the DVD player. Go directly to the Scene It? web site for more info and samples. Plus they give away a Scene It game a week.

The different editions are:

A Music Edition is now out too (at least I haven’t seen it before and I can only find it at Target so I guess that’s new).

I just found a HBO Expansion Pack too!

FYI – I saw all these at Target today (just the refills for 007 and TCM but not the Sports or HBO).

So I added a new page to the site, it’s a visual representation of what I’ve been blogging about. Be sure to check it out, it’s more interesting than just the little snippet that I have here. The larger the word the more often it’s been mentioned. I’m still tweaking it but generally a word has to show up on the site (in the title or the first 15 words) around 10 times to be mentioned (I remove the common words) and I weigh it a little on what people have been searching for (to help weight more recent topics).

There is a lot more information at the bottom of my talkabout page.

I got this code from dan and sherree. I’ve modified it a bit to tie in with weird stuff stuff I do to my site (and it’s multiple files now) so you probably want to start with their file. (That was what I used in Movable Type, now I use a plug-in for WordPress).

I’ve only looked at this is a few browsers, so if the words overlap please let me know…

What do Kelly Ripa, Felicity Huffman, Dakota Fanning, Ray Romano, Adam West, Nancy Cartwright, and Freddie Prinze Jr. have in common? They’ve all done voices on Kim Possible. I always find it interesting who does voices and I accidentally stumbled onto this site while looking at my log files…

So when I was a kid the local movie theater, in lieu of cartoons, would show short documentary type shows. These 3-7 minute shorts might be on skatboarding, mountian climbing or any old thing (some were new, some were old). The one I’ll always remember is about the annual Swiss Spaghetti Harvest, they show how they harvest the spaghetti trees and lay it out to dry. You can watch a low quality version (in RealPlayer) and you’ll get the idea of it.

Update: I noticed the direct link (click the image) was broken. So I’m moving this back up towards the top so you can take a gander if you missed it the first time.

I knew it was a joke but it was totally deadpan. It wasn’t until years later I learned it was part of a (normally serious) BBC show they showed on April 1st, 1957. Here’s some more info and background. Why am I bringing this up today? Because the link hasn’t worked for ages and it’s working today so I thought I’d add a smile to your day. It’s believed to be one of the first times television was used for a April Fools Joke. Here’s a little more info from the Museum of Hoaxes.

August 1st or April 1st, any day is good for a joke.

Does anyone have access or know where I can get (purchase) a higher quality version of this?!?

So it looks beautiful outside so that’s where I’m heading. I have the day off and I’ve been doing some work around the house (I live on the 3rd/4th floors of a condo so it’s better to get stuff done before the heat rises). Place looks great and as soon as I get this load of laundry done, I’m off to lunch and to blade and off to the cable company to return my cable box (two of the channels act up, so it’s the wiring or the box, but for the wiring I gotta wait for the repair guy all day so I’ll try the box first).

So I just bought Seasons of Love for only 99 cents. It’s an exclusive track (from iTunes, of course) from the upcoming movie of Rent. I’ve never seen the musical and I’m not sure if I’ll see the movie, but I really like the song, it’s the one that goes

Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Six Hundred Minutes In Daylights – In Sunsets In Midnights – In Cups Of Coffee How Do You Measure – Measure A Year?

(here’s the rest of the lyrics). The whole video is also available.

I believe the got most of the original cast to play in the movie adaption. So that’s different…

It’s a very sad song. I’ve played it a few times already. Maybe I will have to go see it…

So I really like this new “Characters Welcome” advertising that the USA Network is doing. It’s very different, people from the show doing their “thing” but it’s not footage from the show:

(UPDATE 2006: Unfortunately, the these links are all dead but the last one, but the last one was an odd montage that doesn’t illustrate what the others did. You can get into their [awful] web player at the USA site and view some of them by clicking “characters” in the upper right but I’ve got no way to link the specific ones that I had pointed them out here. The great ones with the little psychic girl from the 4400 is NOT on there but the fun ones with Johnny Smith and Monk are there.)

So Paul Anka covered Smells Like Teen Spirit. Actually (from the short clip I heard on the ABC News Shuffle podcast) if you didn’t know what it “supposed” to sound like, you’d think it supposed to sound like an old jazzy tune.

It’s an interesting advertisement. You’ll see what it’s for when you watch. Very fun!!!

Stolen from Kazza.

Original link is gone, but I think this is the right ad.

Here’s the direct link (to the big ad).