Life Kills: October 2006 Archives

So, a week after I announce (officially) that I plan on selling the TT in favor of a jeep, Jimbo went and got himself a '78 CJ7. And what a gangster little ride it is!

There's a few things that need care, specifically the steering and transfer case, but the body's in great shape, the tranny is smooth and works well, and overall it was a great deal at $2300. Thing sounds like a boat and tracks like a tank over anything. Way cool.

So congratulations to Jimbo on his new toy, I can't wait to get mine now. Seeing a guy this weekend about one; maybe it'll be The One. Then again, maybe not. We'll see. Not gonna lie, I'm excited to check it out. And if not, I can always steal Jim's.

And in case you haven't heard, yes, the TT is for sale. It's a 225hp Coupe, with Quattro all-wheel-drive. I'm asking $18,000USD for it, and it includes H&R coilover suspension, CPP (AWE Tuning) control arms, APR chip (fully loaded), Stratmosphere HXc diverter valve, short-ram intake, and a Modshack Boost Machine. She's red with a black top, 17-inch 5-point fatties on the hubs with brand-new rubber. Wanna buy it? Lemme know.

"I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." -Bill Watterson

So true. In the meantime, I'm going to install Markdown into Movable Type - I just really like it. I've never been a big fan of the whole replacement-syntax paradigm, but I've found that in this case it really saves a lot of time and energy. When you're writing for fun, saving time and energy is A Big Deal. Kudos again go to Daring Fireball. Happiness.

I promised J. that I'd occasionally talk about little tips or whatever in commonly used software, because it'd be useful information. I asked him "Sounds great, but how little?" He described what he thought would be nice to see (being the non-technical monkey he is...) so here's the first tip. Ready? You must be...

In Firefox (the Mozilla web browser available for download here), you can easily reposition the tabs in a single window by dragging them to the desired location. This allows you to organize your tabs in a way that makes sense to you (and is a feature unsupported in other tabbed browsers, like Safari). But here's a bonus (related) tip/feature you might not know about: you can move tabs to other windows. There's a few caveats, though... in order for it to work, the tab bar has to be active - otherwise it will simply replace your current page in the window with whatever page is in the tab. When you drag your tab from the original window and onto an existing tab, it will replace that tab, but if you place the dragged tab on the bar next to the last tab in the new window, you'll have yourself a spiffy new tab with the new page loaded in it. Then you can reorganize it to taste. Neat, huh?

Funny thing about it is that these aren't features supported in The Others. It's particularly absent in Safari, and I can't imagine how difficult it would be to code this in, but considering they've based themselves on the KHTML (Konquerer) browser (a mature, well-developed, really high-performance browser) I'm a little surprised that it's not there. Just one more reason I've dumped Safari in favor of Firefox. And there's just so many of them...

Ever call up Papa John's and gotten their famous "Can you please hold?" It's freakin' hilarious - I'm convinced it's part of their script (no business as corporate as Papa John's could possibly exist without having a script for every bit of interaction with a human, especially one so dependent on phone transactions.)

Phone rings... "Thank you for calling Papa John's can you please hold?" *click*!

That's it. No room for a response, no reason to even ask. It should be "Thanks for calling, you're on hold." Or maybe a call-center approach would be more efficient, with proper routing of pizza orders to the respective branch/franchise/whatever nearest the address on file? I mean, with computers being as cool as they are for this sort of thing, why not set up a centralized database based on phone number or whatnot that stores addresses (much like they have now) and just dispatch orders?

What a fantastic idea. Until then, I guess we'll just have to stay on hold. Or call Domino's.

I scored my first hole in one on the 15th hole at the Tradewinds disc golf course. An Ace! On one of the longest holes on the course (if not the longest!) This matters to few, but man, what a feeling... 450 feet of perfect arc and a thick *ching* at the end of the flight. Too freakin' cool. It's been almost 10 years in coming (ever since I learned to play on the courses in Austin.)

So kudos to me. An Ace it is.