2007

Cat macros are pretty damn funny. Especially when combined with other internet memes like PostSecret. I was playing around with skitch and decided to modify a cat macro to make it funnier...

Uploaded with Skitch!

There was a little poem I wrote a couple years ago that I thought I'd lost due to a backup malfunction. While backing up some old jam session and song idea projects I happened to stumble across it.

a golden tongue not full of words

after nine one may wonder
why eel etch the sky
get your twelfth ear through the tube
rome intense hiss desert

I haven't blogged in a while.  Time is not permitting.  Went camping last weekend and tried out my new hiking boots. They kick much ass.  Aircraft aluminum lacing system was an excellent idea.  Listening to The Joggers right now.  Good shit.  Isn't cake supposed to have a rarities album out some time.  I just bought a bunch of other music from eMusic and iTunes.  Hopefully just as pleasing.  I'm searching for a new car.  My eye is on a Volvo 850 wagon.  If i'm lucky a '97 T-5 with low miles and a low price will show up soon.  I should upgrade this site to use Plone 3.0 (but i'm not sure if Quills is ready for that).  /terminate rambling.

I hope that the current roller derby revival lasts a long time. Lucie and I witnessed our first bout tonight and it was a blast. Now you're saying, "Why the hell is he talking about roller derbies? Didn't that sport die a long time ago?". It did die. Now it is breathing new life and governed by the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA).

If you are living in Indy (or any other city with a derby team) you have to check this out. Our very own Naptown Roller Girls put the smack down on the Hard Knox Roller Girls tonight. Things were looking bleak for a few minutes but the Tornado Sirens (Naptown Roller Girls) pulled out to an 18 point lead at the second intermission. They held on to win by 3 points in the last Jam. At one point one of our girls (Touretta Lynn?) threw one of the Hard Knox girls (black-n-blue) down and a fight broke out between them. The Naptown coach ran over to break it up and was then thrown out for doing so. If that wasn't crazy enough the coach came back over and threw a chair into the rink and proceeded to get into a fight with one of the refs! This was pure madness. Finally the dust settled and all was right in the world again except that black-n-blue should have been thrown out.

This is the NRG's first season and it's been a pretty good one so far as I can tell. I'll see you all at the next bout on May 12. Go Tornado Sirens! I'll be yelling the loudest for Jane Ire #1984 because she was totally kicking ass against Knoxville. J. Roller #420 is in a close second.

There has been all sorts of excitement about Amit Singh's MacFUSE product recently on the internets. For the life of me I could not figure out why. Amit went ahead and cleared all that up for me in his Macworld 2007 talk titled "Taming Mac OS X File Systems".

The thing that really got me excited about this technology is the interweaving of the web and your computer. When he started showing of the DocsFS I was sold. The PicassawebFS was quite interesting as well. I wonder if the same thing would be possible with Flickr?

Ok so maybe no small children were eaten but Quicksilver is a very impressive app. I finally decided to give it a try a couple weeks ago and I'm still playing around with all the features. It took about three days until I could drop Butler and now I'm using QS exclusively. I had most of my Butler functionality set up within minutes. Triggers (keyboard shortcuts) for sleep and logout were a snap (using the extra scripts). The only difficult part was getting the clipboard history (pasteboard) to show up. I enabled the plugin but had to refresh the catalog for the Shelf & Clipboard. (UPDATE: Apparently you need to access the shelf and the clipboard before you can catalog them and use them via the QS menus. To do this, go to the QS menu -> Plug-Ins (underneath help) and then open them up) The last piece for me was getting custom pasteboards working again. This is where the shelf comes in handy. You can create a text clipping and send it over to the shelf for safe keeping and then access it via the QS menu (or via a trigger for the Shelf which I also have set up).

The possibilities really seem limitless for this app. I keep running into more and more excellent tips and tricks. Here are some links to help you on your merry way.

• Howard Melman's manual for QS.
• Nick Santilli over at The Apple Blog has been doing some good writeups and screencasts on the subject.
  • Screencast of how to get started from scratch (this one is a little old but gives you a good idea of how to get rolling)
  • His latest was a really simple but effective tip about using Quicksilver and the Finder together.
  • Screencast about the Clipboard features
  • Screencast about how to use the catalog
  • Another screencast about using scripts
• If you are feeling really geeky/social you can use Twitter + Quicksilver
• An enhanced iCal event and todo creator write up over at Hawk Wings

I have also been busy hacking away trying to make QS do my bidding. I wrote a little script that can open a terminal in iTerm for me based on my bookmarks. I've run out of sensical ctrl + cmd shortcuts so this fits the bill nicely. Now all I do is invoke QS, type single quote to go into text mode, type my bookmark name and then tab over to select my 'iTerm Tab.scpt'. Here is the code for the script. Just copy it and paste it into a file and save it as 'iTerm Tab.scpt' and put that script into your '~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions' folder (create it if it doesn't already exist)

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
	on process text thetext
		if thetext is "" then return 0
		
		tell application "iTerm"
			activate
			-- talk to the first terminal
			tell the first terminal
				launch session thetext
			end tell
		end tell
	end process text
end using terms from