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A trip to the stadium
A few weeks ago, my wife and I decided to see a Padres baseball game in the "new" stadium that our tax dollars helped fund. While I was skeptical at first that the location of the stadium downtown was a good idea, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a downtown location makes the stadium convenient and isn't the traffic nightmare that many had suspected. It amazes me that after paying to get into the stadium, we were bombarded by advertisements all over the stadium; on every part of the scoreboard from fixed signs to electronic signs, to sponsorships of this and that (including a sponsorship for each strike out), and of course, to the name of the stadium, Petco Park.
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A GUI isn't all that it is cracked up to be
This past week, I started learning about OS X server. The interface really confused me at first as there are lots of different options buried in lots of different places. After a few hours of playing around, I started making headway on figuring out what stuff did, but it wasn't pretty. I then tried to use the GUI to turn on some other features and found out that it hung the system; I had to use the command line to kill off what I tried. Furthermore, I made a mistake and deleted an SSL certificate; when I went to add it back, it kept failing. The log gave a cryptic error message and after some searching, I found a reference to the keychain. So I used Apple Remote Desktop to connect to the server and look at the keychain (the keychain can't be access using the server admin software), removed some pieces from the keychain and then I had no problem importing the certificate again. While Apple did an OK job (I'm not impressed with the UI) integrating UNIX tools into OS X, I'm not convinced that the GUI on OS X server is all that useful if I keep having to fight it to get stuff working.
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Beef, it's what's for dinner
I'm a meat eater and proud of it. While I don't eat meat (beef) all that often, when I do, I really enjoy it. My mom used to make London Broil when I was a kid and despite our best efforts at reproducing it, my wife and I haven't managed to succeed, until yesterday! For a family barbecue (my in-laws were in town and my family came over), I went to Costco and bought flank steak. I know very little about steak, but it looked like there was little fat and it wasn't too thick (a bit hard to tell as each piece was rolled up). My wife marinated the steak in teriyaki sauce all day and then I put the steak on the grill; at first, I thought I had bought way too much steak, but I cooked it up anyway. It was such a big hit that I thought people were going to fight for the last pieces. Mmmmm....beef!
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Apple Remote Desktop vs VNC
Lately I've been doing a lot of work between my multiple computers and since I like having only one monitor/keyboard/mouse shared amongst them, I've been using VNC to control then. A friend of mine has told me that Apple Remote Desktop is faster, so I decided to spend the money and order a copy. I received my copy this morning and I have to say that I'm blown away. My network is no slouch (gigabit ethernet) so it wasn't the bandwidth that was the problem in the sluggishness of VNC. Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) is not only faster, but easier to use. If I want to move a file to another machine, I just drag it to the window. It does lots of other stuff, but just being able to control machines (share the screen) makes ARD worth it.