Savage Chickens :: An Apple A Day

Savage Chickens is a webcomic that I ran across recently and it’s rather brilliant in its simplicity. One guy, one stack of Post-It notes, one pen and a whole lot of bringing the funny. This one is now permanently added to my Portal page so I won’t forget to hit it during my daily webcomic trawl.

I’ve not been posting around here in a while and mostly it’s been do to a lack of *umpf*. The way work’s been going of late has strongly discouraged my creative urges and since I have no desire to get dooced I can’t really talk about that much. I’ve been doing some job hunting but that’s slow going as there aren’t too many jobs around here that I’m qualified for and that wouldn’t totally suck (e.g. 2nd shift & a pay-cut).

Still, life isn’t all bad. Ariesna and I are getting married in a little over a month from now1 and I’ve got all the parts of my outfit. That’s right no simple tux for me but rather a modern kilt with a formal jacket and all the trimmings. I’ve tried the lot on and you’ll have to forgive me but I think it looks rather sharp. 🙂

Also, I’ve been secretly working on a theme for WP 1.5 so when I upgrade this site; it’ll be all shiny and new. I’m holding off on the upgrade currently while I wait for some WP plugin developers make 1.5 versions of their stuff, though I’ve also started looking at alternative plugins as well.

Other than that, the only vaguely interesting thing to report is my iPod appears to have gone insane. For a while there, I couldn’t get it to work properly with iTunes and a quick peek through the Apple support forums convinced me to try an Adaptec Fireconnect 4300 PCI firewire card. That worked for a while but then Windows started blue-screening when I connected the iPod though occasionally it would work if the iPod was connected when I booted into Windows. Eventually, that stopped working but I was able to get it work with gtkpod under Linux but now even that seems to no longer work. I’ve not found anybody else with the exact same problems as I from some rather intense googling. During my last test, it looks like my Linux system got stuck in a loop trying to access the iPod; so I’ll be digging through my old receipts and seeing precisely how long ago I bought it as I did buy the extended warranty on it from Best Buy when I picked it up. I’m crossing my figures that I’m still w/in the warranty period and they’ll replace it for me. That would be pretty schweet if it happens. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see for now.

1 If you feel up to the whole gift-giving thing; we’re registered at Dillard’s, Kohl’s, Target, Walmart and Amazon.com.

Lately, I’ve been having problems with iTunes seeing my iPod and letting me transfer new songs to it. I’ve fought with this issue before but I don’t know what’s causing it now. I tried moving the Firewire cable to another of the Firewire jacks on my computer but that wasn’t helping. Then this morning, I booted into Windows to get the latest freebies from iTunes and it (sort of) detected the iPod correctly.

Initially, it acted as though I was attaching a new iPod, but then it was able to see all my playlists and other songs on it. As an added bonus, iTunes also automatically forwarded me to page where I could download a free music sampler. Most likely, you too can get the album by going to: iTunes New Music Sampler (Atlantic/Lava Edition)