For a project I’ve been working on, I had need for a Cocoa widget something like an NSTableView, but that contained variable-height NSViews instead of fixed-height NSCells. Apple doesn’t provide one as part of AppKit, but (I thought to myself) surely someone out there must have already written such a beast, and made it available for me to use.

Well, I was half right.
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Watching smoke waft out of the computer you’re using conjures up a certain combination of awe and horror that’s hard to describe. But Airborne Express is coming in a few hours, to pick up my laptop for its fourth trip to Dell’s repair depot in its two-year lifetime. Luckily, this one is covered by the 90-day warranty on its last repair visit.

I have now paid for this laptop at least twice over. If I had known the first time, I would have donated it to Goodwill and bought a PowerBook. But, of course, at any given moment, repairing the laptop is always cheaper than buying a new one. Each time, foolishly, I assume it will not break again.

This time, at least, I tried to plan for the future. After navigating through Dell’s voice mail maze for an hour (see previous entry), I finally reached the Extended Services and Parts department, where I was told that once a system has been out of warranty more than thirty days, it cannot be extended. So much for that.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I will never again purchase a computer from Dell.

Walking home last night, Laura and I passed a fellow on the street, who asked if we knew the time. My watch read “9:57,” but I struggled with how to convey this. First, I rejected simply saying “nine fifty-seven.” That seemed too precise, too geeky. Besides, it might not have been accurate, as my watch could be off by a minute or two. I considered “ten o’clock,” but to me, that implied that it actually was ten o’clock. If the man had reason to need to know if the hour had passed, I didn’t want to lead him to believe that it had, when I knew it probably hadn’t. I rejected “nine fifty-five” for similar reasons; that seemed like I would be implying that it actually was 9:55, which I knew to be inaccurate.

Finally, I settled on “five to ten.” It required more thought on my part, and probably more thought on his, but it felt right. To me, phrases like “to”, “of”, “past” and “’till” imply some imprecision in a way that reading off digits does not, perhaps because they predate the use of digital clocks.

Am I nuts?

I managed to crack my phone’s case pretty bad the other day. After the local AT&T Wireless store told me they couldn’t fix it, and I should spend $150 on a new phone, I decided to repair it myself. I ordered a (Genuine Nokia®) replacement faceplate and a Torx T-6 driver, from AWS Wireless, and UPS delivered it today! Yay!

Nokia says the faceplate on the Nokia 8260 isn’t user-replaceable, and they’re not kidding. I tried following instructions I found on the Web, but they don’t warn you of the myriad of random pieces of telephone that fall out when you open the phone, and that it takes an hour or two to figure out where they all go, etc… I was able to put the phone back together with the new faceplate, though, and it all seems to work pretty well, except that a few of the buttons are a little off. I might have to open it back up again sometime.

I do have a few pieces of plastic left over. I’m not sure where they go. The phone seems to work, though, so I’ll assume that they were part of the original (damaged) faceplate.

I finally got around to doing my taxes. I owe money to the IRS. I owe money to the California Franchise Tax Board. I owe money to the Missouri Department of Revenue. And I owe money to Ronald Leggett at the St. Louis Earnings Tax Department. More on that later.

First off, I want to complain about TurboTax. I’m going to skip over the rant about how the “FREE Electronic Filing” and “FREE TurboTax State” are both “after rebate,” and concentrate on the part where “Multiple State programs must be installed from the same TurboTax State CD.” This means that I couldn’t just pick up two discount-priced TurboTax State boxes at Sam’s, but instead had to pay Intuit directly for the second State activation code, at full retail price. Gah. Maybe I can use my “FREE TurboTax State” rebate on the activation code.

Second: Has anyone else noticed that state tax codes are much more complex and annoying than the national ones? TurboTax doesn’t help much. The TurboTax State “smarts” just don’t seem up to the caliber of the Federal forms. For example: As a part-year resident of Missouri, I have the option of filing either as a resident or as a non-resident. TurboTax makes me pick up front, without much hint as to which one might be best for me. Once the choice is made, the only way I found to change it is to delete the entire state return and start over. I would have imagined that TurboTax could have collected all the relevant information, and then picked the best form to use once it had all the data at hand. But never mind.

Finally, I wish to complain about the City of St. Louis, which charges a one percent earnings tax on residents of the City. All fine and good (although the number of court cases the City has been involved in defending the constitutionality of this tax is surprisingly large—my favorite is Lawyer’s Association of St. Louis v. City of St. Louis), until you get to part-year City residents. If the instructions on the form are to be taken at their word, the City determines the “non-residency deduction” based on the number of days worked outside the city. Unlike California and Missouri, who use the reasonable metric of how much money you made in the state, the City of St. Louis wants me to base my tax on how much time I spent there. To wit, this means that even though I have been mostly unemployed and only 22% of my income was earned while living here, they want me to pay twice that, since I lived in the City five months out of the year.

However, the St. Louis City Revised Code (Chapter 5.22, section 040, paragraph A) seems to admit my preferred interpretation, so I think I’ll just ignore Schedule NR and send the Collector of Revenue (the aforementioned Mr. Leggett) a check for how much I think I should owe the City. If they complain, I can always sue.

Silly online quizzes are fun. My result:

Which OS are You?

This week’s menu, courtesy of Classic Indian Cooking, by Julie Sahni:

• Shahi Korma (Royal Braised Lamb with Fragrant Spices)
• Murgh Masala (Chicken in Onion Tomato Gravy)
• Saag (Fragrant Buttered Greens)
• Zarda (Sweet Saffron Pilaf)
• Chapati (Baked Whole Wheat Bread)

And to be added tomorrow, if we can find a store that carries chick-pea flour,

• Piaz Pakode (Onion Fritters)

In the process of grocery shopping for this meal, we nearly doubled the size of our spice collection (which wasn’t small to begin with). Indian food uses a lot of spices. Too bad Penzeys is closed on Sundays.

I just came back from walking in Forest Park, wearing nothing but a T-shirt. Well, a T-shirt, pants, socks, shoes, and “some personal items.” But without an overshirt, a sweater, or a heavy coat. The past few months, I’ve often needed all three. It’s a really nice day out today. Bright and sunny and not much wind. A welcome change from all the snow and ice and rain and cold.

It won’t last, though. By the week after next, it’ll either be 15° and snowing again, or it’ll be 85° and sweltering. I’ve barely been here six months, but I’ve learned that St. Louis weather isn’t very considerate of my desires. I want it to be 55° and foggy, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Like it was where I grew up.

Dave Winer is making an effort to wean himself off Google. When I first read this, I thought he was nuts. I mean, Google is great and wonderful and there’s nothing approaching it in the area of search. At least, there wasn’t when I first started using Google a few years ago, and I haven’t been inspired to look for alternatives since. Regardless, ceasing to use Google just because they bought Blogger seemed? wrong. But on reflection, it does make some sense. After all, Blogger does compete directly with UserLand Software (Dave Winer’s company) in the weblog-creation space, and of course it’s not a good idea to use your competitor’s products or give them business.

Or is it? It seems to happen all the time. Not in areas where you directly compete, but many companies are large enough that the left hand and right hand are far enough apart that it doesn’t matter whether they’re the same company (except to the stockholders). For example, Apple competes directly with Microsoft in the operating system market, but works hand-in-hand with them in the application software arena. There’s no reason that Dave Winer can’t support Google’s search business while competing with its Blogger holdings.

It might even be a good idea. I don’t know what Google’s grand plan is for Blogger. Neither does anyone else. Maybe they don’t have one. Maybe Pyra Labs was looking to sell, and they had pals at Google who were willing to put up the cash. If there’s no grand scheme to take over the world, and weblog publishing turns out not to integrate well into Google’s overall vision (search), maybe they’ll look to sell it again in a year, or sooner. So Dave should definitely do all he can to make sure Google’s Blogger business does poorly (presumably, he’s doing this anyway). But it seems to me that the worse the search business does, the more Google will be looking to it’s other assets (e.g., Blogger) to make up the slack. The better search does, the less Google will care about putting effort into other parts of its business. So by switching off Google, and urging others to do the same, Dave might actually be encouraging Google to compete more heavily with him.

But IANAE.

I was about to post a rant here about how the latest Joel on Software article was sent only to his email subscribers, with a codicil not to “reprint, post to the web or send to another mailing list or discussion group,” making it impossible for me to respond publicly to the points he raises.

Then I went and visited his Web page and discovered that (apparently) enough people had trouble receiving the email that he posted it online anyway. Well, a slightly shorter version, but close enough. So I’ll assume it’s no longer against Joel’s wishes to post here about it.

Of course, now that I was all prepared to rant about not being able to rant, I find that my original rant has lost most of its desire to get out. I will say this: I disagree with (or think Joel understands incorrectly) almost everything except the first two paragraphs. But I think the first two paragraph are fascinating reading.

Last week’s menu:

• Sweet and sour chicken
• Fried rice
• Stir-fried vegetables

This week’s menu:

• Chicken burritos
• Beans a la charra
• Mexican red rice
• Guacamole with chips

I’ve discovered that the cookbooks I prefer to cook by are not necessarily the ones I like having on my shelf. Today, the recipes we didn’t make up came from Chevys & Rio Bravo™ Fresh Mex® Cookbook; last week we made heavy use of Chinese Cooking For Dummies®. I’ve never been a big fan of that series: a bright yellow book calling me names is not what I look for in a how-to book, but it was the book in the store that best fit what I wanted: a minimum of cultural and historical digression (but enough to be interesting), most of the recipes I was interested in eating, and three-step recipes with small words and color photos. Maybe I’m a dummy after all.

Update (7:39 PM): Yummmmmmmmmm…