Dev::Blog

I hate my office chair, but I realized it didn’t make a lot of sense to complain about something that I chose to sit my butt down on every day, so I decided to make a change. Of course, I’m too lazy to actually go buy (or order online) a new chair, so I just picked from the available other options here in the office and have now spent an entire day using an inflatable exercise ball for a chair.

My back hurts.

It’ll be interesting to see if the pain progresses over the next few days (indicating that my on-the-ball posture sucks) or if it gets better (indicating that I’m actually working some core muscles that I didn’t know existed). Most of the pain (a dull ache, to be fair) is in the middle of my back, and part of that could be because I tend to be reaching forward more - I have to roll myself closer to the desk since the ball doesn’t slide like a chair would.

I remember talking to someone about this a year or two ago - she said she thought it would help her posture, but after a day or two, she learned to slouch on a ball effectively. As a champion sloucher, I’m not worried about my posture one way or another, but I’ve got to say - an inflatable seat is way comfy.

One thing’s for sure though - I probably shouldn’t have started this trial while hopped up on Nyquil.

Or I should have brought a helmet.

Technorati Tags: exercise ball, office chairs

Rogue Amoeba’s got a great piece up about the costs of exhibiting at MacWorld, which looks like it ran to around $12K for them. They’ve got a handy rule of thumb for making the “go/no go” decision: “Your annual revenue should be at least 10 times your exhibiting cost“.

This reminded me about a similar essay by Eric Sink regarding his experience at Tech Ed 2004.

I had a booth at a (non technical) show last fall, and it looks like something else is coming up in April. My biggest bit of advice to add to the pool for people who don’t do this kind of thing regularly: get help with staffing the booth, and drink lots of water. Even if you go straight to bed after the first day, if you work the whole shift you’ll feel incredibly hung over the next morning, and it’s all downhill in the days to come. That doesn’t help sales and PR much. Really.

Technorati Tags: Trade shows

I’m sure I’m not the first to do this, but when adding a new association table to your user object, the changes won’t take effect for your logged in profile until you log out if the damned user object is attached to the session…

I blame the Nyquil-clone. Or maybe I need a recharge.

Somehow I stumbled across this one: Stats Canada Summary of Daily Internet Use in Canada, 2005. The facts are kind of interesting, but moreso to me, because I think I was one of the people they surveyed.

For a while I seemed to be on the government’s list of people in the know, so I did a bunch of surveys over the phone, although I guess I was really just considered an “average Canadian.” Pffft. They don’t call anymore, which means I’ve either been promoted or demoted.

Anyway, this survey was about 1/2 an hour of questions, and I remember one part clearly - the part where the asked me what kinds of things I did on the interweb, but he didn’t read from a list - I had to name stuff like pay bills, read email, etc and he’d then check them off somewhere. I named some stuff, and he’d be like, “is that it?” so I’d name some more things, and he’d ask if that was it, and after a few rounds I got the feeling he was waiting for something obvious, and I thought I was missing something like “email” or whatever, but I ran out of items and we moved on.

About an hour later I realized he was probably waiting for me to say porn.

Anyway, read the survey results with that in mind, and try to figure out which category porn was under. Was it “Download or watch TV or a movie over the Internet?” How about “Any other personal non-business reason?” Or maybe “Ordering personal goods or services?”

Actually, every item on that list looks dirty after a while.

Technorati Tags: statistics, internet

Check out the comments for last week’s iTunes free single:

While I guess it’s true that you get what you pay for, kudos (I guess) to Apple for letting their customers vent. Now if they want some real kudos, how about offering something decent? (I did listen to the track, it… wasn’t for me, but the free downloads have introduced me to some great Canadian bands in the past)

Technorati Tags: user content, iTunes, Apple

As it looks less and less likely that we’ll be seeing the Apple Phone here in Canada anytime soon, I’ve rebuilt my lust for the Nokia E61. On the bright side, Apple hype might even drive prices down on eBay.

Ange is cleaning out clutter like mad at Casa Del Thrust, which has oddly resulted in me having more things to go through, since she’s found boxes of long-forgotten stuff including an issue of Color Computer magazine from the early ’80s. The CoCo I was my first computer, and I’m tempted to get one to mess around with, but the fun would probably wear off in a day or so, and I’m not interested in something that I have to hook up to a TV (though it looks like you can get a VGA interface and a PC keyboard adapter for them now, so KVM isn’t out of the question.)

A more practical option would be to use an emulator. There’s an online one you can try, and I spent a few minutes last night trying out some of the downloadable ones (many haven’t graduated from DOS mode).

Now, going back to the E61 (remember how we started?), I think the award for coolest ever would be a CoCo emulator running on my phone. Hey, the thing already can run MAME, so why not?

Technorati Tags: E61, CoCo, emulators

In an effort to start actually paying attention to web design, I’m going to try really really hard to actually visit web sites once in awhile to see what they look like instead of viewing the entire interweb through Google Reader.

This first example actually came from an email, but checkout the layout for a Chicago Business article:

I like the double blue/grey horizontal border, especially how the grey lines up with the top of the sidebar boxes. I’m not so crazy about the left border on the Visa ad though.

Technorati Tags: design, checkout the layout

This is great - Bruce Schneier’s got an article on choosing good passwords, and a lot of it is about some product called the Password Recovery Toolkit, which according to Schneier’s article can guess passwords at a phenomenal rate. I wanted to know more about the tool, but their site was down with an SQL error: “Required user name is missing.”

It would have been awesome if it was a password problem, but this is pretty good too.

Technorati Tags: funny errors, passwords

This is more of a bookmark post. Whatever.

Lately, I’ve been liking the idea of small devices that can just plug into a network and do something. The something is less relevant at this point; it could be VOIP related, file serving, video related, webcammy, or the always popular class of “whatever,” but it doesn’t really matter, since we’re still in tech fetish mode at the moment.

I’ve heard lots of things about hacking the Linksys WRT54G, and I saw one running Asterix a while back. Too bad I gave my (semi-flaky) router away a few months back…

Ile sans Fil, Montreal’s version of Wireless Toronto, has a neat project called HAL - media content tied to local hostspots using a modified Linksys NSLU2.

I also just saw the eXcito Bubba this morning, which looks like a neat toy, but ships from Europe.

…And then, of course, there’s the whole mini-ATX range where you can make whatever you want, but at the moment (since this probably won’t go past theory phase anyway), I like the idea of repurposing existing stuff. Remember the hubub about running Linux on a Dreamcast?

I first started running Linux because I couldn’t afford to run a proper Windows box. It’s interesting that now that consumer electronics are so much cheaper (and I have an actual income), the drive to make things is weighted more to the “wouldn’t it be cool” side than the cost side, but we pretty much win either way.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Embedded Systems

I finally got around to watching some of the Ignite Seattle presentations, and wow, what perfect timing! Cancelling my IAX account with Unlimitel was on my list of things to do today, since I haven’t done anything with it since I signed up, but after watching Brian Aker’s talk on Asterix, I’ve decided to give it another go, if only for the possiblilty that I can somehow use LiveJournal audio posts as music on hold.

Technorati Tags: Ignite Seattle, Asterix