Man, I’m really not good at this blog-post-a-day thing, am I?

Yesterday, I really couldn’t find much of the time or energy to put up an entry. We had a longer than usual day. As you may have read from my “Eight Random Facts” post, the ‘88 Oldsmobile failed the emissions test for AZ. So, we decided to get rid of the car, since the value of the car is less than what it would take to fix it, and the car is paid off anyways. Before this, I had been driving that car, while Christine was driving my Cavalier because she has farther to drive and it’s a newer car and has air conditioning to boot (a necessity in the hottest part of the world).

Well, her parents, fortunately, wanted to find a buyer for their 2001 Grand Prix. This is what we call great timing. Yesterday, we finalized the donation of the Olds to the Salvation Army, and went to her parent’s house to finalize the sale of their car to us. I’ll post pictures tomorrow, hopefully.

Needless to say, the Grand Prix will be in Christine’s name, not even joint with me. I opted out because I felt that I had my own car and that the car she was getting should be hers alone. I’ll help with the payments if and when needed, like the good hubby that I am. It’s just good to have my ‘99 Chevy Cavalier back for driving to my work. I cleaned the car out this afternoon; it desperately needed a good wipe, trash pitch and vacuum! After the cleaning, I cleaned her new-old car’s back window… and then affixed a Apple logo sticker to both back windows in the lower right corner. It actually looks cool; not at all tacky or overtly consumerist! I originally just wanted my car alone to have the sticker, but she heard about what I was planning and wanted one too. Of course.

Right now, I’m just relaxing while typing this out and having a Sam Adams’ Cream Stout. I also opened an account with Last.fm, because the iLike service I was using is no longer compatible with Leopard, due to problems with Adobe’s Flash technology (not iLike’s fault at all). I’ll talk more about this tomorrow.

Cheers!

I know what I said in the video I made this last weekend. I thought that Leopard’s new Dock was really growing on me. Then I thought about the things I really like about Apple; the powerful simplicity of their technology mirrored in simple appearances. So I looked at it again with slightly older eyes and decided… I wanted to return to the Dock in 10.4 “Tiger”.

Well, I looked around the hacking forums and found out a few things. I tried some of the suggestions and came up recently with a good step in the right backwards direction. So far, it looks good, but not quite the way I want it. It’s much more simple, though, and easier on the eyes. I’m also going to post this query in some of the forums and sites I frequent, like I did in the Facebook Mac Users forum:

I’ve tried to mod the Dock file in CoreServices to look more like the Dock I know and love from Tiger. It involved using the “defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES” command in Terminal, then scrapping some PNG files. Here’s my results so far:

http://esoterik72.net/images/chrisw357dock.jpg (Click to see image)

Anyone have suggestions on how to get rid of the dark background? I couldn’t find corresponding image files for that. I’ll be changing the divider stripe to a solid thin line, but I do like the blue-white indicators.

I’m trying to get the Dock to the way I had it in Tiger; totally transparent. That way, the icons just float in space. I almost had it today, but the stupid reflective surface they hardwired into the dock’s glass “defaults write” option just kills the effect! Ah well… I’ll keep pluggin’ away at it.

Drat! I forgot to make a post yesterday. I’m sorry. I really thought I could keep up with that pace. Then again, I think I burned myself out yesterday when I wrote a lengthy comment on the NFP Blog in response to their article on the childfree lifestyle. I was in rare form, I will say that much. Not to worry; I didn’t attack anyone or resort to name calling.

I know I said I would pick apart the article on national privacy that I wrote about two entries (three days) ago. I may do that, but then again I think that many people are (hopefully) speaking their minds in full force outrage over it.

Right now, I’m tired. I didn’t eat much of a dinner; I was just not hungry for some unknown reason. Maybe I snacked too late, but it wasn’t much really. Time to rest and hopefully feel better tomorrow.

Intelligence deputy to America: Rethink privacy – CNN.com

I don’t have the time today to pick apart this article. I will endeavor to do this tomorrow.

I will say this… after reading the article, it brought me one step closer to contacting any congressman I can find and trust. I will NOT stand for what Director Donald Kerr is proposing.

This took me a long time to do today, so I hope someone out there appreciates it! At over 15 minutes in length, I can’t upload the video to YouTube so it will have to make its home here. The program I used to do all the video screen capturing is Snapz Pro X from Ambrosia Software. They’re like Rogue Amoeba (another good software company for Mac), only better cause they have games!