Broken Home for Lost Passwords

Payback Time

I love the fact that my landlord: (1) never turns on the heat, even in the winter, and (2) often never turns on the hot water. Well, I’m not exactly sure if he never turns it on—though I suspect this is often the case—but I know that sometimes it’s because the heat breaks or runs out of oil. Whatever, it’s not my problem. There should be hot water in the apartment, and there should be heat on when it’s cold.

I know it’s oh-so-not-green, but when the hot water’s off (like now), I just let the shower run cold. For like half an hour. Water here costs about $2.30 a cubic foot. I installed my own pretty decent shower head that runs 2.5 gallons/minute—which is about 1 cubic foot three minutes. That’s 10 cubic feet in half an hour, which will cost my landlord $23. It’s not much, but it helps me feel a little better that I’m screwing someone.

(Now that I think about it, I should probably just run the tub instead. More efficient landlord-screwage. And run the shower for an hour.)

I know that it’s within my rights to withhold rent, blah blah. So let’s say I withhold $1,000 a month, claiming that my apartment is worth $1,000 less without heat and hot water a few days a month. But once he fixes this—i.e., turns back the heat back on—then I have to cough that withholding up again. No skin off his back, really. 

So I have to do my own silent sabotage. The next step—the one never taken—would be to post a sign up telling everyone to do it. Let’s say 20 people do it. That’s a good ol’ $460 FU. That’d send a little bit of a signal.

Singing Acoustic

In my sense, playing acoustic guitar is a substitute for the entire composition. It’s just you and your voice and the guitar… And you’re walking through the vision of the song in your head and playing along with it. So when people see you perform it, they should see you walking through it, working through it, and being in a different world where they can only see part of your reality, absorbed into your fantasy. 

Disable Front Row Keyboard Shortcut (Command-Esc)

The Front Row keyboard shortcut, command-escape, is pretty damn annoying, because it’s so easy to hit when you’re trying to cycle through application windows with command-` (backtick). 

So God bless the creator of this post that directs you on how to disable the hide/show of Front Row keyboard shortcut. [blog.erdener.org]

Keyboard Shortcut to Add Footnote in Mac Word

Here’s another keyboard shortcut that doesn’t seem to be documented. If you want to add a footnote now:

Option-Command-f

Good luck, and God bless.  

Promote/Demote List Item in Mac Word

For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out the keyboard shortcut to promote/demote a list item in the new Word 2008 (or word:mac 2008). You know, when you’re on list item 1.f., and you want the next line to turn into 2? It’s CTRL-SHIFT-LEFT ARROW (or RIGHT ARROW to demote). I couldn’t seem to find any other documentation on this, so, well, here it is. 

Cognitive Power Point in International Contexts?

(Or why business school annoys me, Part x.)

So I’m preparing a Power Point for my international entrepreneurship class, and I start the way I’ve been developing my slideshows for the past couple of years.

• Single color background
• Large black sans-serif text
• No more than three bullet points per slide
• Concepts rather than sentences
• Large, rich, demonstrative graphics
• Clear, meaningful, enriching data
• Yada, yada, the whole Tufte, GTD, Kawasaki 10-20-30, etc. 

But my prof… His slides are black text on a white background, but with lots of words, flipping by point by point, click by click.  

One of the problems with many teachers is that they reward conformity and punish the strange. So to get a good grade, I have to demonstrate that I can mimic the professor well.  I asked him about attempting a more cognitive presentation, and he basically said, well, in training for international contexts, you should shoot for the traditional style.  

But that misses the whole point. I understand that people in China expect a certain style of presentation—but that’s the same with people in the US, and it’s just as ineffective here as it is there. I understand that language is an issue, so it’s easier to read than to hear—but if you have powerful graphics with simple concepts, isn’t that even more universal? And if language is a real issue, they won’t be listening to you anyways, so why not make that big visual impact when you can and to those who care? 

When I was teaching a few classes in Tanzania, the kids in the top class were excellent at their math workbooks. But once I started quizzing them on math problems I made up off the top of my head—both students and their teacher had difficulty solving them. They had merely memorized the answers in the workbooks!   

So traditional methods of delivering content and learning—while comfortable and sure not to ruffle feathers—may not only be useless, but they don’t allow other contexts to progress alongside Western styles. You’re hobbling your information—and yourself—by catering to what is assumed to be their primitive minds. And that’s horrible.

I think it’s more important than ever to give dynamic, rich, cognitive Power Point presentations in developing and international contexts. It’s not fair to anyone to shy away from it.  

Thoughts on Making Music - Replacing the Melody

So I finally dusted off the old keyboard and plugged it into my Powerbook G4 12”. I am decidedly lo-fi. I *could* use my more powerful computer; I could use better instruments. But I’m using my tiny laptop, cheap headphones, and Garageband. Because if you can’t make good music with that, will money solve your problems?

I have the “sound” and the mood in my head. I find the base instrument and build a rhythm pad and a base for the melody. And then keep building on that: other dinking notes and another textured pad. Most tracks I keep in time and beat-fix them. Some I keep free-form and a bit random. And then I was done. There wasn’t much else I could do.

But I didn’t have a *song*. It’s just the intro, or like a bit of a movie soundtrack. How do I turn this into something someone would want to take the time to listen to?

Then I realized that through building all these tracks on top of each other, I had replaced the melody with a bunch of, for lack of a better term, crap. I had filled up the “sonic space” with so much that there was no room for a melody. No room to sing, no room for any other melodic lines to carry on top of it all. 

So this “song” just became an inspiration piece. A warm-up piece. I should throw it away. I could chip away at it and figure out what tracks are “blocking” the melody from flowing. But, rather, I should move on, take what I’ve learned, and build a new base, for a new song, keeping in mind that I have to reserve that space for some vocals so that I can have something through which I can communicate to a listener.  

Finding the Config File for Vidalia

I’ve been playing around with Vidalia builds lately on my Mac. (For those who don’t know, Vidalia is a Tor and Privoxy bundle that basically gives you better anonymity for your Internet usage via “onion routing.”) At some point, I rolled back my build from an experimental 0.1.6 build to a stable build. Then, all of a sudden, Tor couldn’t start because of a “read config failed” error—it was an incompatible config file.

To fix this, I located my torrc. There are two: /Library/Tor/torrc and /Users/[your username]/.vidalia/torrc. I removed the latter torrc (actually, “mv torrc torrc.old”). Then I restarted Vidalia, and all was good again. 

How to Disable Dashboard - Use Onyx

Onyx is great. It’s a great maintenance tool for checking your disk, cleaning up logs and caches, running maintenance scripts. But it also lets you access other settings that you can’t (or are hard to get to) in your System Preferences.

For example, I don’t use Dashboard all that much. But it still eats resources. I’d rather just ditch it. (I know it doesn’t load widgets until you access the Dashboard, but sometimes you do it by accident, the widgets load, and, bam, there’s 50+ MB of RAM being consumed.)

Go into Onyx. You can skip/cancel the dialogs about checking your disk—but make sure to run them at some point. Click on Parameters, the Dashboard and Expose tab, and the unselect the Enable Dashboard and its Widgets option. That simple.

I used to think, eh, my Mac maintains itself pretty well by itself. If not, then I can do the maintenance I need to by hand. But it’s the way they organize the options to turn things on/off and run your maintenance tasks that really makes it worth the free download.

How to Sync Your iCal with Google Calendar (GCal)

It used to be one of the Holy Grails of Mac-dom: two-way syncing of your iCal with Google Calendar. Then there was Spanning Sync, but at $25/yr or $65/lifetime, it’s too pricey. Then there’s GCalDaemon—but with its complicated shell interface to a Java application, it’s not quite worth the effort.

Now there’s gSync. It installs quickly and pretty intuitively. (If it’s not intuitive—like it wasn’t for me—just go to the Help menu, and they have step-by-step instructions.) And it only costs E 10—about $20—for a license.  

So far it doesn’t have the same problems I’ve had with previous experiences with Spanning Sync.  And it doesn’t go through a intermediary server, like Spanning Sync. It just goes directly to Google. Just make sure to backup your iCals first—File, then Backup Database.