Quixotic Bravado

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• @chipd : I recommend Tito’s Vodka from Austin, TX. http://www.titos-vodka.com/
• "We’re all the way in the middle of it." So says Scott.
• "Maybe ______ is a sock puppet she keeps in her drawer and tells her what to do."

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• Just yelled over the wall to a discussion on jRuby and jPython I was half-listening to: “jPython: Strongly typed white space!”

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• A half dozen fun undocumented iPhone preferences - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) - Not all preferences appear in your iPhone Settings application. As I discussed rather thoroughly in my Modding Mac OS X book, it’s not that hard to dig through applications and discover undocumented…
• Genfavicon. Free Online Favicon Generator. Icon Generator. - A favicon (short for ‘favorites icon’), are litle icons associated with a particular website or webpage, shown next to the site’s name in the URL bar of most browsers.
• Safari Microformats plugin - The Safari Microformats plugin notifies you when the author of the website has published Microformats and allows you to easily import hCards and hCalendars in Address Book and iCal.
• De-lameify your dock and menubar - Make your Dock be flush against the corner of the desktop, instead of centered vertically or horizontally. Turn off menubar transparency on 10.5.

Recent updates to http://twitter.com/quixado

• When watching "Chuck" on the DVR, it’s impossible for us to fight grooving to the theme song by Cake.

Recent updates to http://twitter.com/quixado

• Helped Traci decorate. Glitter is an evil, evil substance.
• Why doesn’t Old Navy ever have my size of the style when I like what’s on the display? Tip: Only 2 smalls and an XXL? Time to change it.

Not feeling like making anything, we decide to order some Papa John’s Pizza. So Traci calls them up and gets some barely coherent stoner on the line. She tells him that we have a mailer with a special on it, tells him what it is — five times. Each time she has to repeat this, I hear the voice going up and up and up. This process repeats when telling the guy the toppings because he’s confused that burger is in fact a topping they have.

Fast forward an hour later… The phone rings. A very sweet voice on the other end informs me that they’re having trouble finding the house. Having ordered from there countless times before, what really happened is that they came out, couldn’t find the place and went back to the store.

At this point fearing they already took turns spitting on our cold pizza, we cancelled the order and went out to a local mom-and-pop joint called “Venice Pizza” for some take-out Stromboli. The young lady answering the phone was polite, articulate and intelligent. When I went in to pick it up, they were friendly and my order was hot and ready on-time. It was also about $5.00 cheaper.

So it’s worth the inconvenience of picking up the food if the convenience of delivery is no longer there. Customer service has become so bad that you can’t even get a pizza delivered anymore? This is the way the world ends.

• Watched Philly dog show. Not sure why I’m mentioning this. Australian Shepherd FTW!
• Stores opening at 4am! Why don’t they just quit screwing around and just open @ 5 today with the bars?
• Google Reader mobile needs nav links on the page bottoms too.

Here's the harsh reality: I can't tie a decent bow around a gift box -- even using instructions online.

So after about a year of not blogging about anything, I finally carved out some time to reboot the blog and pipe in some fresher content.

The reasons for my blogging hiatus are not necessarily good, but they are numerous.

• I’ve been busy with work projects and life in general
• I wasn’t happy with the time and effort needed to customize the Textpattern software I was previously using. I finally did some research and ported everything to WordPress
• After getting an iPhone, I wanted to be able to post on-the-go. Before I was jotting notes down in the ol’ Moleskine of things I wanted to write about later, but by the time I did, the moment was kind of gone.
• I wanted to be able to lifestream a little better. You’ll see that this blog now aggregates information from other sites I’m on. I’m looking into plug-in and other ways to pull in content from the other places I’m inhabiting online.

So I’m going to continue to try and refine how the content gets pulled in and hopefully encourages me to jot down my own ramblings a bit more.

Thanks for reading!