Weaver’s Loom

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I’ve been playing with the beta of Live Mesh from Microsoft for some time now, and find it a very useful technology. So far the only problem I’ve run into has been some bug that was introduced when I upgraded to Snow Leopard.

For some reason, after restarting or hibernating my machine, Live Mesh gets left in an odd state that leaves it unable to connect to the mesh, leaving it in a weird state where the login action is greyed out:

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I love Google Voice. It’s an inspired system that gives me a permanent number that I use as the way to get in touch with me.

It lets me have calls ring at multiple numbers, deal with voice mail as part of my normal email, and gives me some nice attempt at transcription that is sometimes useful.

Usually I can figure out what the caller was saying from the weird transcription note that I get, but occasionally I get one like today’s gem. The caller said “Call me back and I’ll fill you in”, and Google Voice gave me: “15 minutes and I’ll kill you” ….

Of course both of those would get me to call back, but I think they need a little more work to get this right.

Today I spent an hour or so trying to clean up some iPhone code that I’ve been working on for Carticipate. I found that I was having trouble with the build that I checked out from our Subversion repository for a bunch of different reasons.

The very first one was that the code was built on an older version of Xcode, as well as an older version of the iPhone SDK, and on top of that the build machine was running Leopard (10.5) while I’ve been running Snow Leopard (10.6) almost since the day it was released.

I tend to try and stay as up to date with software as I can, and most of the time it serves me well. In this case, I ran into several very interesting issues. First thing I did was to check out the code using the command line tools for Subversion. After a few false starts, I got the full directory from the server downloaded to my Projects folder.

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Today I received a box containing the replacement PC for my wife. I got a really great deal on a refurbished HP Desktop with a quad core AMD processor, 8Gb of memory and a 750Gb drive from TigerDirect.comI’d been waiting about a week for it to get here, and my poor wife has been limping along on my slowly dying laptop in the meantime. I suspect that it’s about to die, as it has become painful just to start up a browser or read email.

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I recently switched from DSL (which I’d had since it first was invented) to Comcast Cable for my Internet connection (and TV and phone). By doing so I saved about a hundred bucks a month over AT&T and DirecTV. Of course as soon as I switched, AT&T started calling me with a bundle that was roughly the same price, but that’s a different story.

One of the things that happened a while back was that Plaxo was bought by Comcast. I have always been a premium Plaxo user, feeling that I wanted to support them since I find the product so incredibly useful. What I learned was that if you are a Comcast subscriber, you are automatically a Plaxo premium user.

Now, being a premium subscriber used to only mean you got VIP support and access to a couple of tools (like the address and calendar deduplication tool). But now Plaxo has announced that the Outlook synch is a premium member only tool. While I worry that this decreases the value of the service (since there will be fewer reasons for people to sign up, therefore fewer members, and decreasing the number of automatic updates I get), what is interesting is that every Comcast subscriber gets access to these premium services.

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