Never store grass seed in plastic bags in your garage for the winter!

I took advantage of the today’s relative warmth by getting lots of stuff done around the house. Near the top of my list was cleaning the garage. I opened one of the cabinets above the workbench, and I was very confused to see grass seed, plant food and shredded paper all over the place. Even more confusing was all the crumpled up paper spilling out of my crumpled up leaf-blower bag. Very explanatory and startling was the mouse that popped its head out the bag to see where all that light was coming from.

When I finally went back and opened the cabinet again (with my golf club), several mice scampered off. I gave the leaf bag a few pokes with my pitching wedge, and even more ran out. I contemplated leaving it, but soon enough my to-do list was topped by “remove the mouse nest from my property.” I wish I had taken pictures, but the only thing on my mind was getting rid of that mess. It looked and smelled like an unmaintained hamster playground. Gross!

I’ve been experimenting with iPhone development lately. For the most part, it’s been a fun learning process despite the quirks that Xcode, IB, and Obj-C throw at an MS developer. Objective-C is, at worst, a 20-year-old hack that follows few conventions established by most other OO languagues.

My most recent lesson has been adapting my project to use Core Data for persistence. Early on, I kept receiving the error “message sectionOffset sent to freed object” when trying to load a connected table.

I found the solution nowhere online, and the exception is not at all helpful. For me, the problem was that I was trying to access the FetchedResultsController before performFetch had been called. Adding performFetch to my viewDidLoad fixed the issue, and I was on my way. My iPhone app is on its way.

It was a great trip. Fantastic weather, really good snow, no injuries, and my favorite part about Big Sky: no lift lines. The interns, as Ryan dubbed them, did really well. As predicted, I certainly had my work cut out for me just trying to keep up.

We got a lot of fun pictures too. Mine are here; Ryan’s are here. My favorite has to be this shot by Ryan. On the afternoon of the last day, we split up for a while. The boys headed to the terrain park while Ryan and I rode a couple blues we hadn’t seen yet. Our timing was perfect, because our next lift ride took us right over the park while Ben was making his run. He hit the C-box perfectly, and we were able to snap off some aerial photos. This all happened without any coordination.

I already can’t wait to go back, and the interns will be more than welcome when they’re ready for their true apprenticeship.

I’ve always loved this picture, taken of my brothers Ben and Joe before their first snowboarding lesson. The total lack of enthusiasm on Joe’s face kills me. In 2003, I had the pleasure of teaching them how to ride. It was a struggle at first, but by the end of the day, they were both riding, turning, and stopping on their own, carving up the blues at Afton Alps. They’ve both become good riders, and I’m proud to have been a part of that.

Six years later, I feel very lucky to be able to bring them along to Big Sky this weekend. It’ll be their first exposure to real mountain snowboarding. I’m sure this time it’ll be me who struggles to keep up, and I’m hoping they’ll teach me a trick or two. My FS 270 needs work. This time, I’m assured that they’re very excited, and I hope to post a successful “After” picture soon.

Mac OS has its moments, but for every cool feature (Exposé, Spaces), there is as much awfulness (menu bar, Finder, window management, keyboard shortcuts). If you really think it’s any better than Vista, it’s probably time to put the Kool-Aid down. And the dev environment, Xcode? What a usability nightmare.

But I’ve certainly been a fan of their hardware ever since my 3rd-gen iPod. Their computers, phones, and media players are certainly the best looking around, and they always seem very solid. With that in mind, curious about iPhone development, and needing a laptop for grad school, I made the plunge and bought my first Mac – a refurbished MacBook Pro (MBP). This was in September.

Three weeks later, conveniently past the return period, Apple announced a new line of MBPs that were much cooler than mine. On top of that, mine started making a really high-pitched noise at medium brightness in Vista. Two separate repairs by the “geniuses” did nothing to fix the problem, and the laptop was beginning to show signs of having been taken apart and reassembled by non-experts.

Here I was seemingly stuck with an “obsolete” machine that made my ears ring and didn’t nearly shine like it had only six weeks ago.

So I was elated yesterday when I called Apple to pursue a third repair or possible exchange. After only a few minutes on the phone with customer service and a few more minutes on hold, they gave me an exception to the return policy – I’ll be getting a full refund for the “old” one. I was really impressed by this; kudos to Apple on a great “make good.” My new MBP is already on the way.

It happened again early Sunday morning and my right eye still stings today. I saw Dr. Croissant (his real name), and he explained that it’s not uncommon and nothing to worry about. I have a “recurrent abrasion.” My eyes are dry, and small areas of my cornea are not totally healed since the PRK procedure; this is normal. The dryness makes my lids stick to those healing parts of the cornea and then pull them off. I’ll be using a salve at night for a while to keep the eyes lubricated until they full heal.

However, my experience with it hasn’t been without its problems. The problems themselves wouldn’t have been so bad if they had been well documented online, but they weren’t. This post exists so that hopefully someone else with the same problems can save themselves some of the swearing I’ve been reduced to.

My Setup

• Windows Vista Ultimate
• ASUS P5K Motherboard
• Core 2 Quad – 2.4 Ghz
• 4GB RAM (I only realize 3.25 under 32-bit Vista)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm, 1TB Hard Drive
• SiliconDust’s awesome HDHomeRun network TV tuner

Problem 1: Total Computer Freeze

I had used WMC on my old PC (and extended via the 360) without issue, so when I build the new box, I was pretty excited about seeing it all in HD. You can imagine my disappointment when I fired up the MCE on the 360 to try it out, seeing the great picture only to get an error message telling that WMC couldn’t connect. When I went to the PC to investigate, it was totally locked up. Not like a program had crashed… not like a blue screen… not rebooted… just totally frozen. Nothing to do but turn it off and back on.

This seemed to happen every time I used the extender. Sometimes it would happen immediately after the MCE started, usually it would happen 30 seconds or so in to watching something (live or recorded). Occasionally it would happen after 30 minutes or more of fine performance – this was the most frustrating, as it would seem that some tweaking I had tried had fixed the problem.

Solution: It turns out that this freezing has something to do with the onboard network card of my P5K motherboard, either the hardware itself or the drivers. Strangely, simply adding another network card did not fix the problem. I had to to remove the drivers completely and disable the card in the BIOS settings. After doing that and installing a new network card, this problem has gone away.

Problem 2: “application has launched UI unexpectedly”

I felt great when the total lockup was solved, but that didn’t last long. Soon enough I began to get the “application has launched UI unexpectedly” error from the 360 when trying to launch the MCE. I would reboot, and occasionally that would fix the problem. I also followed the steps in this Microsoft knowledge base article; that seemed to fix the problem too, until a week later when it happened again. Reapplied the steps, problem solved… until a week later when I was trying to demo my sweet setup to a friend… boom. This time reapplying the steps several times did nothing, and I was ready to beat my head against the wall when I saw the annoying “low battery warning” from my mouse driver pop up.

Solution: Duh – that was the unexpected UI! I checked the Startup folder for all users and sure enough, the mouse driver shortcut was there. When someone starts a MCE session, it runs as a separate user on the computer, logged on in the background. So that user was effectively getting the low battery warning with no way to handle them. I moved all the shortcuts from the “all users” startup folder and put them in my own startup folder, and I haven’t seen this happen since.

I hope this helps someone. If so, let me know!