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I’m battling the smell of paint primer. My guest room is getting redone and the walls have just been treated with primer, making my whole house smell.

So, I wanted to spend a few minutes browsing some of my favorite sites. Something I haven’t done in 8 months being inundated with C++ work.

So, I figure that I can only handle maybe 20 minutes of this smell before I get too sick, being that my office is right next to the room that is getting worked on.

Well, guess what. I just discovered today, that stepwise.com is down. Where have I been? I felt sad. I actually liked that site, and now, it’s gone.

Goodbye stepwise.com. I loved you like a distant relative.

Jaime Not-so-funny MacOS X, stepwise.com

I came across this article about iPodRip, where the owner of the company actually sent a passionate letter directly to Steve Jobs. To my surprise, Steve actually replied; read more about it here

Jaime Not-so-funny Apple Developer, iPodRip

I could not believe how funny this video is, especially 2:30 minutes into the video when the Prairie dog appears:

Jaime Funny, Not-so-funny Bullet Myth, Funny, Prairie Dog

I’m writing this blog entry just in case other people come across the same problem and can’t seem to figure out what’s going on.

I found it in Xcode 2.5 that hasn’t been fixed in the latest version of Xcode that I have, version 3.1.3.

The bug I’m referring to is when you create a target as a static lib output, then you change the target later to output a dylib. The problem is that everything looks fine… heck, it even puts a dylib in the file name extension, but the file is actually a static library.

You have to go to Terminal.app and use the file command to see that the file is in fact, a static lib and not a dylib. You may not notice the problem at first until you go to debug the project and notice some weirdness.

Hopefully, you haven’t gotten bit by this problem, but if you have, the only solution I found was to create a new target from scratch.

Jaime Coding, Not-so-funny 2.5, 3.1, bug, dylib, static lib, Xcode

When I was in college, one of the only courses I remembered was microbiology. I loved that class.

One day, the professor asked a question that I actually knew the answer to. I answered and he didn’t say anything for 5 seconds.

He looked at this class and asked, “Does anyone know what an expert is?”

We were all quiet. “An expert is someone who makes something simple extraordinarily complex”.

I’ll always remember that moment.

I know there are people who right now are nodding their head and saying to themselves, “I know someone like that. Errrr…”

Jaime Not-so-funny

I met my wife and son who were at the beach playground. When my toddler saw me, he got excited and ran around in circles, then bolting off in the direction of a dirt path that led to a gas yard.

A toddle can’t run that fast so I followed him and as he was running, giggling down the path, 3 mosquitos attach themselves to his back. Aaah!

I quickly put my right forearm between his legs and used my left arm to hold his shoulder, hoisting him up and running out of that area.

My son is laughing hysterically as I am running, carrying him back to the playground and my wife sees us running towards he. She doesn’t know what going on but she sees the swam of mosquitos behind me as I get closer to her. She watches them trail me as I pass her.

They didn’t care for my son so much when I put him down next to the slide, but they got a wiff of me and they wanted blood!

“You know, only females suck blood.”

Great! Bloodthirsty females with wings chasing me around a playground

Jaime Funny, Not-so-funny beach, mosquitos, Playground

Apple doesn’t go out of their way when they have a batch of computers that have problems, unless of course those computers blow up and cause bodily damage.

The problem I’m talking about is the PowerBook G4 lower memory bank dying (apple.com).

Apparently, there was a whole lot of laptops that had this problem, but Apple only supported customers if their problem surfaced before July 2008.

Nice. Nice going Apple.

Jaime Not-so-funny Apple, lower memory bank, PowerBook G4

“With AT&T as the mandatory carrier, owning an iPhone is like dating a supermodel with cancer” (wired.com)

I think that about sums it up!

Jaime Funny, Not-so-funny ATT, iPhone, Sucks

Last month, my Xbox 360 died. Again. This is the third Xbox for me… All have died from the stupid red ring of death.

This time around, the Microsoft tech’s messed up my support ticket, so after a week of waiting around, I had to have them cancel the ticket and re-create my ticket so that they would send me a box to ship the dead console in.

Another week goes by. The Xbox website says that a box was shipped to me, but nothing. Ten days go by since the new ticket was created and I have to call and find out what happened. “We don’t send out boxes”, a women with an accent says. She’s a support rep for Microsoft whom I’m assuming is on another continent. “So why does the website say A Box Was Shipped?” “We don’t ship boxes sir”. I was getting no-where fast with this Einstein.

So, almost two months. Almost two months I am without a Xbox and I finally get one back. In the box, comes a one month pass. Great, I’ll need that to make up for the two months I lost.

Well, my account was supposed to renew, and the account was suspended because the credit card info was wrong.

After spending a half hour trying to figure our how to update the expiration for the credit card info and how to redeem the one month pass, I decided, enough. Enough is enough. The account was still disabled and I was getting nowhere.

This piece of junk is not worth my time. I only bought it for one game and I don’t even get to enjoy that one game because of the Shenanigans this piece of junk gives me.

That’s it. Enough is enough. I’m done with the Xbox 360.

Jaime Not-so-funny, Review red rings of death, xbox, xbox360

I think it was a sign. I should have know that this was how my day was going to begin. I started up my Xbox 360 and I got the red rings of death. This is not the first time this has happened to me, but I’m especially pissed since this was Microsoft’s idea of a home media center, their answer to having all media consolidated in one box doesn’t work when I need it to.

So there is my 2 year, screaming and tantrum-ing because he wants to watch Little Einsteins and that is not happening because of the red rings of death. So, I distract him and turn on the DVR to show him some recorded shows.

Well, with that over, I go to my trusty laptop running Mac OS X. The night before, I fired up ViewNX and spent the whole night organizing my photos in that program and got them ready for uploading to myPictureTown. The program comes with a built in uploader to myPictureTown. That’s nice, but the uploader program is a little strange. For example, when the uploads are done, it displays the Console program, which is a program that is usually used for reporting errors. The uploader uses it to tell me that the pictures have been uploaded. 

ViewNX is also a little strange. It is slower than iPhoto and you can’t view all of your photos in one pane: it segregates photos by the folders they are in which is a real pain in the butt if you have many images you want to upload spanning multiple folders.

Well for now, I wasn’t going to lament. I spent the time tagging my photos and used the myPictureTown photo uploader to upload the pictures to my account.

Well, my Xbox died and I had to calm down my son. After that, I went upstairs expecting to see the console program telling me that the uploads were done. Instead I see the uploader still trying to upload pictures and telling me that it still has 26 images to go… WTF!!! That was over 12 hours ago!

What was happening? I tried canceling the upload process. Nope. That cancel button works as well as the cancel button did on the AOL download progress dialog. Click click click and nothing happens… nothing happens… nothing… happens…

I had to force quit the program and check my account to see if any images had uploaded. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. 

All right. Take a deep breath. Quit the programs and try again. This time, I’ll only do one image.

Nope. It doesn’t work. No image or new album created.

So. Now what. I guess I’ll reinvent the wheel. Why? Because there’s nothing else out there that works like I want it too.

I want a program that is easy and fast like iPhoto, but has the image editing and tagging like ViewNX. CaptureNX is too slow on my laptop. Adobe Lightroom you say? No, the image quality out of that program is simply not good enough.

So to start, I’m going to create a program that let’s me easily organize all of my photos. From there, I think I’ll create an uploader to Flickr. myPictureTown is nice, but I end up uploading to Flickr anyway from there and myPictureTown strips out the EXIF data, so I might as well go straight to where I want to go…

Jaime Coding, Not-so-funny CaptureNX, Mac OS X, Nikon, Photo Organizing, ViewNX