// do something here

OK, so I have been playing this time waster of a game on my iPad called Pocket Planes. Needless to say, it is kind of an interesting diversion at times.

It has a pretty large world that it encompasses, so I would guess that eventually, you would have something interesting pop up. Here are a couple of ones that I thought were amusing.

I would guess that either the package bound for New York is either really small, or that there are a real lot of items in the package.

Um… Some jokes just write themselves.

BTW, Happy Birthday to Mike “Spanky” LaValliere, who I met at the 2012 Pirates Fantasy Camp.

I just stumbled on this by accident this morning. After my Google I/O provided Nexus 7 had an OTA update, I went into the About tablet section of the Settings app, and somehow I triple tapped on the Android version 4.1.1 table cell, and I got this:

I have always been a fan of Easter eggs ever since I found out how to find the secret room in Atari 2600 Adventure. BTW, Happy Birthday to Jerry Doyle, who was great as the security chief in Babylon 5.

ADDENDUM: Two things to add, one good and one bad. The good thing is that my buddy John noticed that if you draw around the outer edge of the big bean, you get a screen with a lot of littler beans, which can be flung about. No collisions though. And the bad, it is sad to note the passing of Jon Lord, a giant in world of music.

I logged into my bank’s account to pay a bill this morning and discovered that some people have trouble with that extra 0.24 of a day that it takes the Earth to make one complete circuit around the sun…

Click on the image for the full story about March 1st and it’s twin brother.

BTW, a fond farewell to Davy Jones of the Monkees.

I always get a little nauseous when looking through someone else’s code and seeing things like this:

res = sqlite3_exec(database, [select UTF8String], NULL, NULL, &errorMsg);
if (res != outcome) {
    [testStringCapture appendFormat:@"%@,",obj]; //changed 2/2/2011
}
else {
    [testStringCapture appendFormat:@"%@,",obj]; //changed 2/2/2011
}

Alas, a little later on in the same method was some code that soothed my sensibilities as it is kind a perfect fit into the whole “do something here” theme:

res1 = sqlite3_exec(database, [select1 UTF8String], NULL, NULL, &errorMsg1);
if (res1 != outcome1) {
 
}
else {
 
}

As per usual, these code snippets are unedited (except for some formatting) portions of production code.

Did you ever have Objective-C code that would fail with an exception (such as asking for an objectAtIndex beyond the bounds of the array), but by the time you got word of it, all the stack trace had in it was the obj_msgsend and main? Yeah, I hate that.

Well I discovered that you can add a breakpoint to your project that will immediately break when the exception happens. To do this with Xcode 4, click on the Breakpoints symbol (2nd from the right) in the Navigator pane, click the + button at the bottom of the pane, and select Add Exception Breakpoint. From the bubble that appears, I selected Objective-C from the Exception choice (although I suspect you can safely leave it at all if you desire), and I left the Break selection at On Throw. Once you click Done, you should then have a new exceptions breakpoint in the list.

This was instrumental in helping me track down an issue on an app rescue that I am currently working on.

By the way, here is an awesome line of code that I found in the aforementioned app rescue. My brain hurts from looking at the code for long stretches of time, but there are some nice nuggets like this sprinkled in the code:

Assets *ass = [[Assets alloc]init];

I have to hand it to Apple, they really did a nice job with the Mac OS X Migration Assistant.

I decided that my battle tested MacBook Pro has had enough after 3 years of torture, and so I ambled down to the local Micro Center to pick up a shiny new 21.5″ iMac. Being the lazy developer type that I am, I decided to try and look into using the Migration Assistant so that I would not have to take out an external hard drive or USB memory stick to manually move lots of files from the old MacBook to the iMac.

The first attempt to use Migration Assistant did not go as smoothly as I had hoped. Since both machines were on the same wireless router, I first tried to use the wireless option for communications in the Migration Assistant. Bad move, the time for completion was fluctuating between 20 to 24 hours.

And of course, as I started to look at using Firewire, I discovered that the iMac has a Firewire 800 port, while the 2008 MacBook Pro has a Firewire 400 port. Back to the venerable Micro Center for a supporting cable.

Once I set up the Migration Assistant to run over Firewire, the estimated completion time never went over 50 minutes or so. I went downstairs to watch a bit of TV, and when I came back up a couple hours later, it was finished.

So I rebooted the iMac, and lo and behold, all of my stuffs from the MacBook Pro were on the iMac. Genius! (Bar???)

OK, now to the rant part of this post. That would be the “Rawhide in A” comment you see in this post’s title.

To my Yahoo e-mail address comes this message from some kind of guitar web site. In it, they have some news story on their web site that describes the top 20 movie scenes featuring guitar playing. I can’t pass that up, since I really like movies and I really, really like guitars.

In at number 3 on the list is the Bob’s Country Bunker scene from “The Blues Brothers”, and since I am pretty sure that it is a law in the United States that you have to watch any Good Ole Boys or Bob’s Country Bunker scene whenever the chance is presented to you, I click the YouTube link for the scene and start watching the 2 minute clip.

About 10 seconds into the clip, I do a bit of a double take. My wife and I both are big fans of the Leinenkugel Brewery in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and so I am watching this clip, and I swear that I see the pretty unmistakable script Leinenkugel’s logo in the movie. Take a look at this screen capture 14 seconds in to the clip:

And I think that is very strange, since I never noticed it before, and I am the kind of person that notices things like that.

So I fire up the 25th Anniversary DVD of “The Blues Brothers”, and at about 1:21:02 into the extended version of the movie (side A), I see the following image:

Does anyone have any idea why my supposedly better widescreen edition of the movie does not have something that was in either a broadcast or pan-and-scan version of the movie??? It looks to me like for this scene, they just took the 4×3 image and chopped the top and bottom parts off to make it look widescreen, if this is the case that is disappointing. (I am not sure what to make of the IMDb technical specifications page for the movie, it lists both 1.33 and 1.85 ratios.)

BTW, happy belated 80th birthday to Leonard Nimoy. I used to be a huge Trek fan, but even I had no idea that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were born just 4 days apart of each other back on 1931. Fascinating…

The rechargeable battery for my Dell Axim X51V was looking a bit puffy, so I ordered a replacement battery pack off of Amazon.

Batteyr Pack

BTW, happy birthday to Niecy Nash. Tempestt is doing ok, but we miss the special energy and chemistry you had with your co-hosts.

A co-worker found this nice little nugget in one of our sports web site applications:

Dim isAssHeadCoach As Boolean = Session("IsAssHeadCoach")

I hope it is meant to check for an assistant or associate head coach.

While the set up pictured below was not our equipment, I am still kind of glad that our servers are not hosted at this facility any longer.

I wonder how the paint company has managed to keep the cost of a gallon of paint steady amidst all of these rising prices…

Oh wait, now I get it.

E-Tech update: They have once and for all denied my appeal for a refund on the Sony replacement keyboard. Maybe I should have done a more big budget picture to demonstrate instead of what was done. (99 cents total were spent on Blue Harvest, I needed some chalk to write on the clapperboard and there were no kids around to beat up so that I could steal some.)