saulrosenbaum.com / 2007 / July / Page 2

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, I’ve never been sure who they are, but I’ve never really doubted that statement. Let’s take a look at what the a typical American breakfast might consists of:

• 2 Fried Eggs (Yolks up!)
• 3 Slices of Bacon
• 1 English Muffin / Butter
• 3 Ounces of Hash Browns
• 2 Cups of Coffee (w/ cream)
• 6 ounces of Orange Juice

Now you may argue that that’s not what YOU eat (good for you), but talk a stroll through a Denny’s or an IHop and you’ll realize that I’m not far off. I want to go on record that for 35 years of my life, I ignored what I ate, if it tasted good, it was good - restraint and moderation weren’t in my vocabulary, and I deluded myself that the good folks at Denny’s where serving me a balanced and well proportioned meal - I now know better - let’s take a ‘eyes-wide-open’ at that breakfast;
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Tagged: breakfast, calorie conscious, eating well, eggs, recipe

One of the certainties of having a spouse who volunteers for an animal shelter is, occasionally the brightest, cutest most endearing of the inmates find their way home. This is Maxx a 16 week old gray and white kitten, and the newest members of the Rosenbaum menagerie. He’s been here less than 24 hours, as you can imagine it’s been quite interesting, right now he’s registering somewhere between a curiosity and an annoyance to the other cats, I’m sure that will change.

We’re old pro’s at the whole multiple cat household thing - some folks recommend you introduce them one by one, others say you should let them smell each other under a closed door - we’ve never given either method much credence, we just tossed lil’ Maxx to the masses (Maxx makes cat number five) and then kept a close eye, he’s a kitten - he’ll be fine. Oh, in case you where wondering the extra X is for x-treme cuteness.

Tagged: cats, maxx

My buddy Larry always says that I spend so much time exploring productivity software, that I’m NOT productive, and he may be right. I’ve written about a few of my favorites - todoist, rememberthemilk, backpack - all excellent feature-rich solutions, maybe a little TOO feature-rich actually - so today I took a look at SimpleGTD it’s minimal approach to functionality and design appeals to me, two things will probably keep me from committing to SimpleGTD (at least for a while).

• I really miss any connection to time or date.
• I’ve managed to generate a generic error a few times in 10 minutes

Errors aside SimpleGTD offers a feature I’ve never seen before in a GTD app; ajax drag and drop from list to list (BaseCamp and all the other 37 Signal apps only offer drag and drop to adjacent lists). I must say I love that feature. I will say this — If I could install this on my own network (ala Tracks) I’d switch today..

Take a look it’s nicely simple. [via downloadsquad]

Now if Frank Sinatra had that nickname it’s doubtful he would have gone very far, believe it or not Resene Lochmara is a fancy-pants name for a very specific shade of blue, one of the millions of meaningless names for that specific shade of blue - my industry (the graphics industry) standardized colors years ago, but of course our clients (the unwashed and color loving masses) still refer to colors by their crayola/sherwin williams/glidden/vegetablesque/celebrity eye/M&M colors - and honestly I thought I’d heard them all - I have an endless array of email asking for a certain red to be more ‘Plum’ or for a certain blue to be a bit less ‘Sharky’ (as opposed to a blue being much too ‘Dolphin’) - GOD I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP -
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The title of this post is Simple and Useable, two thing that I strive for in most every project, but it’s hard, Clients seem to want complex and involved, which is fine, but to meld that with good design is time consuming, and clients are generally thrifty. This week has been a particularly bad one for complexity - I spent hours in a meeting listening to a application flow that was needlessly complex, and client was under the assumption that a UI redesign would make it more useable, which I suppose could be true, but the workflow is really the issue - Read More »

I’ve been a TextMate user for quite a while, I groove on the flexibility and power, and it gets better with every update. The latest update tweaked what is probably my favorite feature TODOs, if your unfamiliar basically you use it like code bookmarks to document code that needs to be ‘fixed’, ‘changed’ or code to still be written (‘todos’). Once you get in the habit of using it, it’s a real lifesaver.
It’s really this simple

//CHECK — Check this line later.
//KILL — Delete this line later; needed during development.
//TODO — To Do; an unfinished task.
//CHANGE — Rework this line later.

Then trigger the bundle and you get a categorical linked list to all the points in your project that your tagged. It Rocks!

In quest of minimizing our somewhat cluttered lives we did the unspeakable today - we cleaned out the attic. Hard work without a doubt, but the truly intresting part was the Mac boxes, years and years of Mac boxes and various peripherals.

• 7100 (featuring System 7.5)
• Sonnet 7100 upgrade daughter card
• G3 (beige pizza box)
• 22 inch Cinema Display
• G4 Quicksilver
• Apple 17” Studio Display (CRT)
• G4 15” Powerbook
• Mac II (4 bit/40MB/Dual Floppies)
• Mac 9500 Tower
• 2 40MB Syquest Drives
• 4 External SCSI drives
• ADB Wacom Tablet

I’ve recently gotten rid of the 7100 and the beige G3 but the rest of that will be in the trash come trash day, I can only imagine what me neighbors must think about the small mountain of computer boxes in my drive way (since it’s doubtful they’re aware of the chronology of those boxes). So can YOU put those models in chronological order?

So I haven’t mentioned it but my Ipod died, it’s really been bugging me, because I really babied it and the darn thing lives in a waterproof ballistic acrylic case, so I would have though it was somewhat immune to the typical issues that plaque Ipods. Now I know that Ipods are essentially a consumable item that even under ideal conditions would probably only last 2 years or so, but I totally wasn’t done with mine yet, and it appeared to be fixable, and that generally turns my OCD on high - if it WAS fixable - I had to fix it: Read More »

Tagged: Ipod Battery, Ipod Repair, Ipod Repair Success Story

Wow the website for the upcoming Simpsons’s movie is a tasty flash extravaganza, I can’t imagine how much fun it would be to work on a site with SO MUCH existing high-quality artwork. Make sure you check out the downloads, the wallpaper is damn nice, albeight too small for my system. Curious though the very nice avatar wizard is devoid of facial hair (curious because I think Matt Groening has a goatee).

The Simpson Movie Website

Are you a Mac user? When was the last time you launched Sherlock, I’m not sure if I’ve EVER intentionally launched Sherlock, but today I misclicked and Bam! — Knee deep in crap UI design and redundant functionality.

I personally would have though Apple would have dumped Sherlock when they started pushing Dashboard Widgets, because this is clearly one app that bypassed both the publicity and UI departments in Cupertino. Oh how the mighty have fallen A quick peek on my bookshelf confirms my suspicion that sherlock WAS the big news in the release of System 9.5.

Intrestingly A quick visit to www.apple.com/sherlock pushes you to apple.com/macosx/jaguar/sherlock.html which is still basically a 404 page, but it is intresting that it tosses a reference to Jaguar in there.