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Popular baby names
Several types lately, people have said that our son's name, Aiden, is very popular. While this may be true in some people's small sphere of knowledge, facts don't seem to back that up (at least not this year). The Social Security Administration's website lists popular baby names for each year. For 2006 (the last year data is available), Aiden isn't in the top ten. Certain baby websites put Aiden in the top of the list. What can be the cause of this discrepancy? My theory is that the people that visit these websites are of a particular socioeconomic background and therefore the list doesn't reflect the general population. Now that children must have Social Security numbers to be claimed as a deduction on taxes, the SSA basically has all the data on the names and I trust them as a source.
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Eating my words about OCR
I've said in the past that I thought OCR was pretty ridiculous for receipts as it isn't 100% accurate and receipts have so many wacky formats. Well, after a lot of work and evaluation, I have managed to integrate the Tesseract OCR engine into ReceiptWallet. It is an open source engine that has OK results for the price. (I did investigate some commercial engines; there are 2 that are on the Mac, and the costs were outrageous and currently one doesn't even work on PowerPC machines.) As Google continues to work on the engine, I'll be integrating the new versions into ReceiptWallet.
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Made in China, the ultimate warning label
Yesterday I took Marley (our dog) to the vet because of some redness on his belly (yes, I realize we keep taking Marley to the vet, but he's our first "child"). As I was talking to the vet, I mentioned we just bought him some Kingdom Pets chicken jerky treats at Costco. The vet said that they were made in China and he stopped giving his own dogs anything made in China. When I got home, I looked at the package and sure enough, it is made in China. Looks like the treats go back to Costco (luckily they take just about anything back; I just have to pull up the receipt from ReceiptWallet and print it). Looks like it is back to Trader Joe's peanut butter treats (as long as they aren't made in China).To top off my day with Chinese made products, I was grilling dinner and ran out of propane. Why is this a Chinese product issue? I had purchased an electronic gas gauge that shows me if my propane tank is full or needs refilling. As I was grilling, I ran out of gas despite the gauge saying that the tank was full. Yes, the gauge was made in China. That goes back to Costco, as well.
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iPhone not syncing on dock (Solution)
I noticed that my iPhone didn't launch iTunes when I dropped it in the dock even though I specified automatic sync. It dawned on me that in the past I saw an iTunes Helper app as a Login Item. Sure enough, this wasn't in my Login Items. I dug into iTunes.app/Resources, launched iTunes Helper and also dragged it to Login Items. Now when I dock my iPhone, it syncs automatically. You'd think that Apple would make sure that the iTunes helper is always running, say on each launch of iTunes. Anyway, I have a solution to my problem.