It's amazing how your own work gets neglected when people dangle dollar bills in front of your eyes. I have been busy working full time at Mozy while starting up my own side venture (more to come on that in the near future). This has allowed my already mediocre website to turn into a radioactive sludge that destroys everything in its path.

Soon will be the time to overhaul it. I'm working on some designs in my buffer time (buffer time is the time in between work, family, church, side work, free time that is taken up by side work, and Boxee).

Little site, I haven't forgotten you. I promise.

We just went through an experience that every parent deals with at least once in their lives. It wasn't one of those zip-a-dee doo-da days, oh no. It was an experience that makes you realize why it's hard to be a parent.

Sunday night, we were putting our two-year-old daughter to bed. After going through her nighttime routine of changing her diaper, brushing her teeth, and climbing into bed, we were about to pray with her. She stood up on her bed laughing, wanting to run around. While running to the other end of her bed, she tripped and face-planted into the footboard, resulting in a deep, one inch cut on her right eyebrow. (Which is kind of ironic, because she just learned the word "eyebrow" earlier that night.) Immediately, we grabbed her, stopped the bleeding, and whisked her off to urgent care.

Arriving at the hospital, we were lucky to find the waiting room empty. Our daughter was seen by the nurses right away and then the doctor. Prognosis: stitches; six of them. They wrapped her up in a large white cloth so she couldn't move her arms. Then they laid a sterile cloth over her face with just a small hole in it through which the doctor would work. Then the doc started his work, and let me tell you, our daughter is a fighter. My wife held her legs, the nurse held her head, and I was in charge of laying on her chest. I got a first hand view of the procedure and my daughter's scared, hurt, sad, and confused, face (well, the part I could see through the cloth).

I lay there, as she fought against us with all her might, wondering if we had made the right decision. We could have just let the wound heal on its own and let it develop a nasty scar over her eye, but she would have hated us on prom night. She screamed out in pain and frustration. Then I thought, "No, we made the right decision. This is what needs to be done." While I knew it was the right decision, it didn't make the experience any easier. I don't enjoy watching my daughter go through that much pain. I don't enjoy seeing her be terrified out of innocence and ignorance. She had no idea why it was all happening.

For those ten minutes of complete agony, I felt very sorry for our daughter. However, it didn't change our decision. It reaffirmed to me that it is often difficult to do the right thing. Everyday we are presented with opportunities to choose between doing a good thing and doing the right thing. The "good thing" is almost always an easier path to take. However, if we're willing to put forth some extra effort, doing the "right thing" is almost always worth it in the end.

I'm posting these images for the eBay / half.com employee that is handling my claim. I purchased the She's All That DVD on half.com, expecting to receive a legitimate, legal disc. Instead I received a copied DVD that was placed in a plain envelope with no padding. As you can see in the pictures, the disc slid around quite a bit and was rendered unplayable halfway into the movie. He also only used a $0.44 stamp, instead of the $2.39 he received from half.com I contacted the seller, but he claimed that he had no knowledge it was illegal. However, if you look at his feedback, he has multiple customers reporting they received illegal copies of dvds, too.

half.com makes this statement at the bottom of their Buyer Protection Policy. I hope they stand by it.

Fraud will never pay at Half.com
Attempts to abuse the Half.com Buyer Protection Policy will be investigated very seriously. Half.com reserves the right to suspend the membership of any Buyer or Seller we feel has attempted to commit fraud by misusing this policy for his or her own personal gain. Half.com also reserves the right to reduce your Seller's account balance, withdrawal from a Seller's Direct Deposit account or charge the Seller's credit card in order to recover damages related to fraud. In addition, abuse of this policy is a criminal offense and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. http://pages.half.ebay.com/help/policy/guarantee_p.html#toc-07

Here are pictures of what I received. (I haven't posted the user's name here, but will do it if he continues to be uncooperative.)

I LOVE iStat Menus. The three menus I use the most are Network, CPU, and Date/Time. They help me know when my computer is actually doing the work that I've told it to. (They also tipped me off to the fact that on Snow Leopard, Software Update defaults to automatically download updates in the background. That's bad if you're on a slow DSL connection, like I currently am. Hurry up, Comcast!)

iStat Menus 2.0 came out ten days ago with support for Snow Leopard. I was thrilled by this news, as my attempt to install it a couple months ago failed (1.3 didn't work on Snow Leopard). I got all of my menus back, but with one problem. The date was stuck on Sep 9, 2009.

Is the date stuck on iStat Menus in Snow Leopard?

Here's the fix

The problem appears to be due to the fact that I attempted to install iStat Menus 1.3. I found this hint over at macoshints.com which talked about some weird things that can happen when upgrading to Snow Leopard and trying to run iStat Menus 1.3. If you've run into some issues, they won't go away if you uninstall and reinstall version 2.0. There is some artifact left behind by 1.3 that the 2.0 uninstaller doesn't catch. So you need to get rid of 1.3 altogether.

1. Download the iStat Menus 1.3 from iSlayer's website. There is a link to 1.3 all the way at the bottom on the right.
2. Right-click on the installer and Show Package Contents
3. Navigate to
   

   Contents/Resources

   and run

   iStat Menus Uninstaller

4. On your hard drive, navigate to
   

   ~/Preferences

   and delete the file

   com.iSlayer.iStatMenusPreferences.plist

5. Install iStat Menus 2.0 from

You should now have a fully functioning iStat Menus installation on Snow Leopard!

I suggest you donate to their cause while you're there. It's a great piece of software. That reminds me...I need to make a donation.

Are you a blogger mom? Do you have thousands of photos and videos of your precious baby/toddler/child that you would be devastated to lose? Blogger mom...meet Mozy.

Yes, this sounds like a marketing pitch, but this is me talking. Mozy is extremely inexpensive and easy to use. It backs up all of your photos, movies, music, etc over a secure connection to Mozy's servers. That way if your computer crashes, your computer gets stolen, or your house burns down, all of your memories are safe.

Mozy is giving away free t-shirts and onesies for moms who sign up (or are already using) Mozy. Check it out here: http://mozyformoms.com/

I am a software engineer at Mozy, which should hopefully add some credibility to my recommendation. I know the inner-workings of our product and know that it's powerful and reliable.

Hey everyone, a co-worker of mine entered a contest. He wrote an application for Boxee, which is a cool media center system. He needs to get lots of votes now. It's really simple and only takes about 10 seconds.

Go to this link: http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/06/15/vote-for-your-favorite-apps-rsvp-for-the-boxee-event-in-sf/ and vote for "DechoBox" in the music category and photos category. It's an application that lets you stream music and photos to your TV from the files you've backed using Mozy. Pretty slick.

Vote right now if you want to help out! It couldn't be easier to do.

This is a screenshot of the app

I'm a Cocoa developer on the Mozy for Mac team, and occasionally I run into a problem where my Mozy installation has become confused. This has only happened twice in the long while I've been a Mozy user; however, both times proved to be a little annoying because I have lots of folders selected in the "Files and Folders" tab. When I reinstall Mozy to get it back on its feet, my selections get erased. In the past I have written these selections down on a piece of paper and then reselected them after reinstallation. Wait, what? Did I say paper? Why am I writing stuff down when I have a perfectly good computer right in front of me? Have no fear, the paperless solution is here!

Update: This was written for Mozy for Mac 1.3.x. The database schema was changed for Mozy 1.4. Everything was merged into a rules table.

Problem:

Mozy doesn't save your selections in "Backup Sets" or "Files and Folders" during reinstallation.

Solution:

It's fairly simple. Dump the database tables. (Huh?) We're going to export your information from the database Mozy uses before you reinstall and then import the information into the new database. Sounds hard, but it's not. There are a couple ways to do this. The first is the easy, point-and-click method. The second is for the command-line users who despise the rodent sitting next to your keyboard. I'm going to outline the easy method here. If you'd like to use the command-line, follow my logic, but use you l33t hax0ring skills to make it happen (and check out man sqlite3).

Easy way: Using the mouse

1. First thing you need to do is grab a SQLite application. A free, easy-to-use one I recommend is a Firefox add-on called SQLite Manager. It installs into Firefox and you can open it from the Tools menu. These instructions and screen shots assume you're using SQLite Manager.
2. Open SQLite Manager
   
3. Click Open (the open folder icon) and go to /Library/Application Support/Mozy/state.db
4. On the left, click on the "nodes" table and click on the "Export" button
   
5. Select the SQL tab, check the "BEGIN TRANSACTION" box, and click "Ok." Save the file.
   
6. Quit Firefox (best to do this to clear out its cache of the state.db)
7. Uninstall and Install Mozy.
8. After you're done with the setup assistant, let it launch the application where you normally make your selections (Configuration). Once that is open, you can close it.
9. Launch Firefox, go back into SQLite Manager, and open up state.db at the same location you did before.
10. This time, click on the large "Execute SQL" tab and paste in the code that you saved in step 5. Hit "Run SQL".
    
11. If it says "Not an error" then your Files and Folders selections have been successfully imported! Open Mozy and you should see them.

If you would like to save your Backup Sets selections, do the same thing, but export the "sets" table instead of "nodes."

Hope that saves you lots of time and grief! It sure saved me.