I have had an addiction to Field Notes – the awesome pocket-sized notebooks – for about a year now. Couple that with Jeremy Keith’s “HTML5 For Web Designers,” which is available from A Book Apart, and you have a lovely composition. All of this is to say that with the advent of WordPress 3, it’s time for a refresh of my WordPress theme (because it’s awful more than anything else). So I’ll be putting these items to good use over the coming weeks.
Ever since I recently upgraded to OS X 10.6.4, I have had problems with the Keychain giving me the error “Access to this item is restricted.” when trying to access passwords stored in various keychains. I first had this problem after the hard drive in one of my systems crashed and my data had to be restored from backup. It appeared at that time that the permissions and probably something much deeper on Keychain Access application files were so screwed up as to render Keychain Access’ permission to read items out of a keychain worthless. I finally fixed that problem by dipping into the original OS X install media to extract the original Keychain Access application files.
This time around, it appears as though the Keychain Access application has again been modified – leaving me with a set of next-to-useless keychains. You can imagine the drama that played out on my end when I was trying to figure out how I was going to recover all of the passwords that I had so responsibly and securely stored. I ran Disk Utility, which found and repaired some permissions issues on a few of the Keychain Access files, but that didn’t fix the problem. So what I finally resorted to – again – was opening a backup and restoring a pre-10.6.4 copy of Keychain Access back to my hard drive (in a different location on disk). This resolution was successful and allowed me to retrieve all of my keychain items.
Keychain Access Looks to be Updated in 10.6.4
I now need to probably build brand new keychains from them that I can open in the most-recent version of Keychain Access. I’m also ready to ditch Keychains altogether for everything except the login keychain. When Apple provides a utility that is supposed to securely store items, it shouldn’t leave me potentially high-and-dry twice in the span of less than a year with the prospect of not being able to recover any of my secure items.
The Washingtonian had a great feature story this month on the rise and fall of the housing market in the D.C. metro area over the last 10 years, or so. The story was really more a collection of quotes taken from over 100 interviews that were conducted for the article, but they told a compelling story from every side of the housing industry.
On a personal level, my wife and I experienced the craziness first-hand back in 2005, or so. We had decided at the time to look into buying our first home. We contacted a real estate agent who proceeded to warn us before we ever looked at a single home that:
We needed a pre-qualification letter from a lender that the seller would consider acceptable (i.e. – a local lender – and preferably the agency’s own in-house mortgage unit (ha!))
We needed to be willing to waive inspection or the seller would likely choose another buyer.
If we liked any of the homes we saw, we needed to be prepared to write an offer – preferably the same day – because homes weren’t staying on the market for much longer than a few days to a couple weeks.
We ended up looking at several homes in areas that we didn’t really want to live in, with layouts that weren’t very attractive, at prices that made me want to gag. Luckily for us, we had the willpower to pass on the deals entirely and remain renters. It’s certainly easy to see how so many others got caught up in the frenzy, however. There seemed to be such pressure to “act now, or you may miss the bus,” that those who were new to the game may have felt that they had no choice. I feel I’m better for having gone through that and it’s nice to see how time has made those days seem all the more incredible.
I normally don’t pay much attention to the 62 subscription cards that fall out of each magazine I read, but the subscription card for Dealmaker magazine caught my eye. It asks the normal questions regarding name, address, etc., but then has a few oddities:
There isn’t a price or subscription length mentioned anywhere on the card. As the old saying goes, I guess “if you have to ask…”
They force you to write your Visa, Mastercard, or AMEX number, expiration date, and signature right on the back of the card! There isn’t an option for “Bill Me Later” that might protect your personal information.
In small print under the billing information, they state, “Guarantee: We will never rent or sell your name or personal information.” Yeah, you may not, but what about my mailman?
I guess one could always send the subscription card in an envelope, but then that kind of defeats the purpose of Business Reply Mail, doesn’t it?
I have gotten many hits over the last month or so from people wondering what happened to Holmes on Homes on TLC. The show mysteriously disappeared from the channel’s line-up in September and has yet to re-surface on any of the Discovery networks.
I queried TLC Viewer Relations and received a response that Holmes on Homes is finished airing “for this season.” That’s not much information, but it doesn’t seem that they have pulled the plug on the show – at least at this time. Holmes on Homes continues to air on HGTV and BBC in Canada, so I take that as a good sign that Mike will eventually return to the U.S. TV line-up – even if it is on a Discovery network other than TLC.
We recently had the opportunity to stay at the Sofitel Chicago Water Tower while we were attending a wedding (congratulations, Rick & Shannon!).
Bedroom
Getting There & Parking
The hotel is about a $45 cab ride to/from O’Hare, including tip, for up to 4 people. Overnight valet parking is $44 at the hotel and $32 at the nearby self-park, so planning to take taxis can actually be as cheap – or cheaper – than renting a car and paying to park.
Checking In
Check-in was quick and efficient. We arrived early (around noon) and did not have to wait in line. I asked for – and received – an “upgraded” room, which was a corner room on the 30th floor of the hotel. Other times of day, I did witness short lines at reception, but it seemed as though everyone’s check-in/check-out was handled promptly.
Bathroom with Separate WC
The Room
The hotel is designed and decorated in a modern style. Our room consisted of a bedroom and bathroom, which were in a slightly different configuration, since we were in a corner room.
Upon walking through the door, a short hallway led to the bedroom. The bedroom contained a relatively comfortable bed, 4-door closet (containing space for hanging clothes, drawers, shoe storage, and in-room safe), desk, chaise lounge, and a small table. The desk and the mirror on the wall behind it were rendered fairly useless by the flatscreen television, which was nice, but seemed like an afterthought in the design of the room.
Desk and Flatscreen Television
The bathroom door was on the right, along the outer wall (next to the windows). The bathroom featured lots of marble, a single vanity, tub, an oversize shower, and separate water closet.
Overall, the room interior was well-executed and about what you would expect for a roughly $300+/night hotel in downtown Chicago.
Dining
The hotel’s single restaurant, Cafe Des Architectes, is open daily from 6am-11pm. Breakfast was the only meal we ate there, but it was delicious and reasonably priced – particularly for a high-end hotel restaurant. There are many other restaurants within walking distance or a short taxi ride of the hotel,
Bathroom Vanity
so dining choices shouldn’t be a problem.
Bar
The hotel features two bars: a small, 4-seat bar at the Cafe Des Architects (perfect for a quick drink, since it was normally empty), and the larger Le Bar. Le Bar is open from 3pm-2am and was standing-room-only the two nights we were there (our party somewhat contributed to that on one of the evenings).
Overall
The Sofitel Chicago is a solid choice for travelers looking for an upscale oasis in Chicago. The rooms, staff, and on-property food and beverage were all good. My one possible complaint would be if I were having to park a car at the hotel, but that is much the same at any other property in the downtown area. If you are a leisure or business traveler and can wait to make your reservation, the Sofitel website seems to offer fairly significant price drops as dates approach.
One of the only remaining worthwhile shows on the now-defunct Discovery Home Channel (the other being License to Grill) has moved to TLC.
Each week, Mike Holmes and his crew tackle another home construction or (more often) home improvement nightmare left behind by an unscrupulous contractor. In the end, the homeowner gets what they originally paid for and the viewers get numerous tips for avoiding the same situation, as well as the proper way to do many common home repairs and improvements.
Mike’s tips have come in handy for this new homeowner and you can’t help but enjoy someone who takes great pride in their work. We all should have the same commitment to our customers that Mike has to the homeowners on each show.
Holmes on Homes airs each Saturday night @ 10pm Eastern in the US on TLC.
If you haven’t seen the new Aleve commercials yet, count yourself lucky. Here’s a little taste – hope you haven’t just eaten!
Probably the most sickening thing about these commercials once you really sit and think about it is the amount of money that someone made off of pitching this crap! Where do I sign up?
The RSS feed is undoubtedly one of the best innovations in the relatively short history of the web. By boiling down all or part of a site’s content into a simple, portable format that readers can subscribe to, a site’s updates come to the reader, rather than the reader having to make a consistent stream of visits to keep up with the site.
Throughout the past few years, I have used or tried out Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, NetVibes, NewsHutch (defunct), and FeedLounge (defunct) before finally settling on Google Reader as my feed reader of choice. Google’s product started off as an awful mess that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, but has progressed into probably the best web-based feed reader available. I say that because of it’s easy-to-use interface, Firefox integration, and the integration with the Google suite of products that make it easy to access.
My own feed reading activities have progressed to the point where I’m somewhat of a feed junkie – although probably nowhere near the level of the truly tech-obsessed. In a typical week, I cover a few thousand entries across my feed subscriptions. A fairly low percentage are actually interesting to me (as you can see, I’ve only read about 600 entries in a month).
Over the past few months, I’ve become a disciple of the “read feeds in batches” school of thought. Feed reading can waste a lot of productive time if it’s done frequently, but if I can wake up early on the weekend and plow through a thousand feeds while I drink coffee, I think that’s a productive use of my time. Granted, some items are fairly old (in web time) by then, but there are few things in feeds that need to be known or acted upon the same day.
If you’re a Google Reader user, check out the “Trends” link in the left sidebar. The statistics are interesting, and in the case of the “Inactive” Subscriptions trends tab, useful. I monitor this tab to see when it’s time to unsubscribe from a feed because it’s no longer producing any useful updates within a 3- to 6-month timeframe. You can also use the “% Read” statistic to see if there are feeds that are no longer of interest and just eat up time. Anything below 10-33% is probably not worth continuing to read – depending on the number of site updates.
I hope to see a few more of you subscribing to my feeds!
Bloggers are now outsourcing. Photos go to Flickr, short bits to Twitter, links to Del.icio.us or other services, and it affects how centralized our experience is for our readers. I’m a fan of the all-in-one site, but I don’t post a lot of non-text content at this point, so we’ll see if I can put up with the “pain” of developing my own services when I get to that point!
RSS: 
Throughout the past few years, I have used or tried out Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, NetVibes, NewsHutch (defunct), and FeedLounge (defunct) before finally settling on