You are doing regular backups, right?
Maybe you are like me, backing up OS X to a external usb hard drive using the amazing SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket. Maybe you've just started using a new usb hard drive because you realized that your previous one seemed to be running slow, or even better you've given your previous backup to a friend to keep off site!
Maybe, like me, you noticed that you new backup drive was going incredibly slow. Maybe after looking up some information about usb 2.0 transfer rates and potential problems with the new drive, you started wondering if something more fishy was going on.
You might even have recently started using Spotlight (instead of your longtime favorite Quicksilver) to launch applications. Maybe the last time you used Spotlight you noticed that it was trying to index the new drive while it was being copied to. Maybe you suspect that Spotlight is the culprit for the slowness. You are probably right.
I'm not sure why Spotlight wasn't immediately disabled by SuperDuper! when I started using it, but disabling it on your drive is easy, as found in this forum post:
sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/drivename/
Sweet relief.
Using this handy bit of python I now have a subdomain pointing to my media server at home. (Hat tip to @tylerhunt for reminding me that SliceHost has an api and that he's smarter than I am)
Mad scientist Elliot Murphy had the idea for any interested Canonical employees to post pictures of places they work on Flickr. Here's my home office (click the image for some notes):
I just noticed that this page is on the first page of results for the search "joshua evangelism".
Then I noticed that my tag page's title is "Stuff Tagged insert tag here on Joshua Blount Dot Your Mom".
I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I'm leaning toward hilarious.
This is a video of John Mark McMillan and crew doing a song named Skeleton Bones. Here are a few things you should know:
- If you go to Engaging Life, you will be singing this song soon
- If you don't go to my church, you should consider it, because then you'll get to hear this song more often
JMM also wrote recent favorite "How He Loves" and has a pretty interesting blog.
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Yes, it really is that easy. If it's not working, double check that you are referencing the right attribute (that last tiny bit, you might have the name wrong. )
It's likely I've already sent you to one of these before, but if you like illustration, typography or tongue-in-cheek jokes, you should take a look at Prom Night Fist Fight.
Marco Arment on the cycle of life (My title, not his)
When I watch documentaries about the Vietnam War era in the United States I’m filled with both wonder and hopelessness: wonder at the sheer scale of the protests, civic disobedience, and government criminality of the time, but hopelessness that we still have all of the same problems today, systemically unable to prevent repeating the same mistakes in every generation.
Sounds pretty similar to what King Solomon said:
What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing.
Haiti is in trouble and you should donate if you are at all capable.
Earlier today Pat Robertson blamed the earthquake on a pact between Haiti and the devil. I'm grateful that Don Miller responded on his website:
I like the quiet authenticity of our faith. Robertson’s loudness and shock-jock verbiage seems strange and oddly uncompassionate. It felt like he was trying to tell us how tough he was, not how compassionate God is.....An appropriate response to Pat Robertson:
“You seem angry and tired. Christ loves you. He is not impressed with your religious posturing. He really loves you. You don’t have to hide behind anything anymore. The good news really is that good.”
Don went on to say that this would be the appropriate response to what happened in Haiti:
For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in..
In response to lead pastor Shawn McCracken's recent call to connect with God's word, I've chosen to take my casual semi-daily reading of the bible into overdrive with B90X (PDF).
B90X is riff on the apparently popular P90X 90 day workout. Clicking the link above will reveal a pdf with a reading plan that will take you through all 66 books of the bible in 90 days (with 2 built in skip days!)
Today was day two, and it's going well. The quicker pace really provides a different perspective on familiar passages, and I'm looking forward to getting into some of the bits of scripture that I haven't visited as often.
YouVersion also provides a interface to various reading plans, including a 90 day plan.
In order to keep things moving after the last post I thought I'd share something incredibly deep about my personality.
Apple has offered personal inscriptions for years on their iPods and iPhones, and more recently Google has joined in with their Nexus One order page. I'm sure they imagine using these for supportive and loving messages from friends and families. Gifts of words from the people close to you.
What do I use these for? Jokes. On my last laptop I had a whole folder of funny inscriptions on the back of phones and music players primarily talking about animals & sandwiches. My humor has a certain wheelhouse to be sure.
I'm a natural sales person. I was born to convince people of things. If I have an opinion about something, and you disagree, it is painful for me to not try to convince you that I'm right.
Recently, at our church, we started walking anyone interested through the Clifton Strengths Finder program. Before you start thinking about motivational speakers and people spouting on about, "Amazing business opportunity!" let me explain that SF is simply a short quiz that is a way of determining some of the things that you are a natural at.
It calls these things strengths, and the quiz returns your top five strengths. Reading the curriculum rewards you with the concept that instead of focusing on repairing your individual weaknesses, it could be better to focus on using and understanding our strengths.
Woo (Hoo)
The Woo strength is my top strength and it's all about drawing others in, convincing people. "Wooing" them, so to speak.
I'm interested in what is useful, and good evangelism. For years I've promoted the web framework I like the most (Django). I think Django is perfectly wonderful, I really like the ideas of the founders and the current maintainers of the project, and it's written in Python which is a programming language I enjoy reading and writing.
The problem with my evangelism of Django is that I'm not necessarily the most informed developer to promote a software tool. I'm a pretty good geek, and I know some stuff about making websites, but I'm rarely the smartest person in any room, and I'm a pretty horrible developer by any standard.
So why should I promote a software tool that I enjoy? And, perhaps more importantly, why should people (who are probably smarter or at least more experienced than I am) listen to me?
This problem has been plaguing me at a separate level from the relatively unimportant realm of web development frameworks.
Selling God
I'm a person that believes that because of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection I can have a connection and relationship with an unseen God. I struggle sometimes with calling myself a christian because of the horrible things that have been done (and continue to be done in some communities) under the name of christianity. I also believe, in the sense that it is literature and not always literal, that The Bible is true and relevant in modern life. Because of these beliefs, I'm convinced that Jesus the Messiah is the one way to God.
Just as I stated before, I'm certain that I'm rarely the smartest or most capable person in the room. I'm rarely the most "spiritual" person, or the person that is the most in tune with God's way.
The struggle then comes when I'm trying to be myself. Combine my personal spiritual beliefs and my natural inclination toward persuading and I could easily become a really frustrating person to spend time with.
I'm also aware, in a very humbling way, that while I have a particular set of beliefs that I'm certain of, not everyone agrees with my beliefs and people are generally more suspicious of anyone promoting a set of spiritual beliefs (in comparison with something like a set of software tools.)
Finding Balance
I was hoping that writing this out would help me to find some conclusion, but I don't think I have one. I know that when I'm being myself and promoting things I care about that I don't want to offend or invade into someone else's life when not invited.
Something that I have concluded: I'm going to surround myself with experts on the things I do care about so that I can be sure that the things I'm evangelizing are valuable and worthwhile.
Tyler Hunt and his wife Melissa had us over for dinner. Tyler had heard my previous complaints about my lack of confidence in cooking meat, so he decided to give me a tutorial on grilling chicken. Tastiest how-to I've ever had!
I could go on, and on about how fantastic Mark Pilgrim's technical writing is, but if you cared you would already know. He's working on a HTML5 book, and the chapter about forms was posted today. Here's a quote about the new "email" type for form inputs:
To sum up: there’s no downside to converting all your email address form fields to type="email" immediately. Virtually no one will even notice, except iPhone users, who probably won’t notice either. But the ones who do notice will smile quietly and thank you for making their web experience just a little easier.
You should run, not walk, to go read the rest of the chapter. But only if you are into HTML.