November 2007

Hey there rodeo fans

November 26, 2007

If you're coming to Las Vegas this December for the National Finals Rodeo or just to check out Cowboy Christmas there are several other things that might be fun to do while you're in town. None of the suggestions I'll post in the following weeks should keep anyone from making donations to the Nevadans Don't Like To Pay Taxes fund at your local casino.

However, if you'd like to find some off-the-beaten-path things to do while you're in Sin City then consider taking at trip to the Ethyls Chocolate Factory and cactus garden. Although the company has a new name their facility has been a Las Vegas favorite for more than 25 years -- longer than some casinos last in this town. The trip will leave you with plenty of time to get back for the nightly performance at the Thomas & Mack and will provide a glimpse of 300+ desert species in a four-acre sanctuary. Oh and you can sample chocolates at the factory while you're there.

End of the Lubick era

November 25, 2007

Several reports suggest the Sonny Lubick era at Colorado State University is over. There are suggestions that Lubick may have been forced out circulating as well. Having been at CSU for the start of the Lubick era and watched a program go from nothing to one of the best program for student athletes in the country it will be sad to see Lubick go. Hopefully in leaving with time remaining on his contract Lubick will be able to be a strong force in shaping the post-Lubick era at Colorado State University.

Problems combining PDF's in Automator in 10.5

November 25, 2007

Recently getting into job looking mode has led me to brush off the Automator routines for combining PDF documents into one document. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working in OS X 10.5 (or 10.5.1). A Apple Discussion Forum post suggests I'm not the only one encountering the problem.

When you run the action in Automator it works like a charm. When running the action as a plug-in in the Finder the action swirls for a moment and then nothing happens. From my testing it does not seem to matter what is done with the output of "Combine PDF Pages" nothing happens from there on.

An upside to poor education

November 21, 2007

Perhaps the drive for better education is overrated. If everybody had a reasonable education in math it would not have been possible for my $6.00 sandwich and my $1.75 soda pop to end up totaling $6.75 at the local delivery place. With enough math like this Nevada's budget could be balanced overnight.

My question for the candidates

November 15, 2007

Doing some live blogging from the Watch Party for the Democratic Presidential Debate has me thinking about what question I would ask if I were in the audience in the debate hall. In the vein of actions speak louder than words I would ask this: Global warming is the greatest challenge facing our planet. Leadership is important in changing energy policy. More important is what the billions of people on the planet do in their daily lives. What are you doing personally and what is your campaign doing to reduce your impact on the planet.

Live blogging from the Democratic Presidential Debate Watch Party from UNLV

November 15, 2007

Doing a little live blogging from the Democratic Presidential Debate at UNLV tonight. Senator Biden is clearly coming out as the winner in the first half of the debate. Senator Clinton said at the opening of the debate that she was wearing an asbestos pant suit. That pant suit certainly got a workout in early sparing with Senator Edwards. Senator Biden was way ahead with charm and down to earth answers and staying on point about how we take the country and world forward instead of political sparing.

Apple to ship macs with Windows installed 'very soon'

November 8, 2007

It is a day early for Friday funnies but this email from Examsoft today was too good to pass up:

Dear Administrator,

SofTest was certified to run on Mac OS X running Windows XP with the beta version of Boot Camp in the spring of 2006. August 31, 2007 marked completion of our first complete academic year (9/1/06 - 8/31/07) supporting this platform. Over this past academic year no issues have been reported to us running SofTest on this platform with either XP or Vista. We purchased the new Leopard OS (with the now supported version of Boot Camp) and have tested SofTest running XP and Vista on this platform without incident. SofTest is now certified to run on Leopard through Boot Camp. We will continue to support SofTest's use on this platform moving forward.

iPhone, gPhone, Androids and the company you keep

November 7, 2007

So the much awaited gPhone, nee the Android OS for the open handset alliance, debuted this week. Yawn. So Google's going to hock an OS that while it has the trendy underpinnings of Linux and the Open Source code-word attached won't at the end of the day (or year rather) give us much more than we already have on our Blackberries, Treos and iPhones. (Not to even mention the plethora of Windows Mobile cell phones with these capabilities).

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