This week’s dinner menu: mashed potatoes with sour cream and chives, green beans vinaigrette, and deviled eggs. This week’s lunch features tuna salad with store-bought bread, and generally so far the cooking has seemed less of a hassle than last weekend.

No, I don’t understand the title reference, and I used it! It does seem that we’ve made a dinner completely out of side dishes, though. Yum.

This morning, I took the last of the meatloaf and gravy and scrambled it up with some eggs. Pretty tasty. Yesterday, I put some into an omelet with cheese. Mmm. We finished the spinach and potatoes on Friday. Too bad. They were good. I think we ate enough cream this week to supply a small army, though. Strangely, there’s still some ice cream left from two weeks ago.

Everybody seems to be comparing Apple’s new 12″ PowerBook to the iBook and the PowerBook Duo 210, including Apple. It’s smaller in every dimension than the iBook, but heavier (4.6 pounds vs. 4.2) and deeper (8.6″ vs. 8.5″) than the Duo. Okay, but why is everyone ignoring the PowerBook 2400? It’s lighter than the new PowerBook (4.4 pounds), and remains the narrowest laptop Apple has ever made—10.5″ wide vs. the 10.9″ of the Duo or 12″ PowerBook.

I’ve always had a bit of an affinity for the PowerBook 2400, even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. I think it’s because the PowerBook 2400 is based on the Alchemy motherboard, just like my PowerBase 180. I have a fondness for the Power Mac 5400 and 6400 (the 6400/180 being nearly identical to my PowerBase, except with an Apple case) for the same reason.

By the way, in case there was any doubt that the 17″ PowerBook has enough room for a full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, consider this: The new PowerBook is nearly a quarter of an inch wider than the Macintosh Portable, the 16-pound “luggable” Apple introduced in 1989, which came complete with a full-sized numeric keypad.

But what?

How are spell checkers supposed to be effective when things like “calender” are real words?

I dug out my USB-serial adapter, installed Palm Desktop 4.0 on my iMac, and set up iSync. A little more complicated then it needed to be, but eventually I got it to work—by the way, why isn’t there a USB device class for serial adapters? It seems a pretty glaring omission. Luckily, mine has a driver for Mac OS X. Overall, iSync works pretty well, although it’s rather slow (this is probably due to my datebook having an average of at least one entry per day, dating back to the purchase of my first PalmPilot in 1997) and doesn’t synchronize some Address Book fields with my Palm.

I was very disappointed with iCal, though. Whoever designed it doesn’t appear to have had me in mind; that is, someone who doesn’t work regular days and for whom one-word calendar descriptions aren’t enough. I sent feedback to Apple; maybe a future version will be usable for me. It’s a very pretty application.

In the meantime, I could turn off iCal synchronization, but unchecking “Calendars” in iSync doesn’t make things any quicker, and as long as the iSync conduit is active in HotSync Manager, Palm Desktop’s datebook doesn’t get synced (is there any way to do both? I’d like to use its address book and Mac OS X’s, also), so I guess I’ll leave it on for now. Maybe I’ll go sign up for .Mac and publish my calendar on the Web.

He must have spent twenty minutes showing us the new themes in iDVD 3 and Keynote. I was a little bored. Other than that, though, the MacWorld Expo keynote was pretty impressive. The updates to iPhoto and iMovie look nice, and I’m happy that they’ll be free downloads.

The new PowerBooks are definitely impressive. I’m a little dubious about the worth of a 17″ screen on a laptop (will it even fit on a coach-sized airplane seat-back tray?), but the 12″ PowerBook is something I’ve been wanting for a while. A G4 processor, SuperDrive, and built-in Bluetooth in a tiny under-five-pounds case. Wow. I want one.

Apple also introduced a new Web browser, Safari. I’m using the beta to write this, and while it’s nice, it doesn’t impress me all that much. Some of the unique features are nice, like the bookmark management and use of Cocoa spell-checking for forms, but it’s missing enough features I’m used to in Mozilla and Chimera (like tabs), that I don’t plan to switch anytime soon. Steve claimed Safari was fast, but Chimera still feels faster to me.

I’m also a little disappointed that they chose to use KHTML as the basis for Safari’s HTML rendering, and not Gecko. They’ve done a pretty good job, but I like Gecko better, and regardless of technical plusses or minuses, I would have rather have seen Apple’s development efforts benefit Mozilla instead of KDE!

It’s off to Memphis now, where hopefully Dell will fix it. Even more hopefully, but much less likely, they will charge me somewhat less than an arm and a leg. At least this time they didn’t make me ship the laptop myself (when we moved, I conveniently threw out all the laptop shipping boxes I had from last time, which means I’d have to spend another $30 to let the UPS Store put the laptop into a box). They sent the Airborne Express driver out with a box. I was pretty impressed with this part of the service—I called Airborne Express around 2:30pm, right after I got off the phone with Dell, and they were able to arrange for same-day pickup, bringing a box and everything. I have always been impressed with Airborne’s service, unlike other carriers I could name.

It’s too bad I can’t say the same for Dell. I called their tech support number to set up the repair, and after an interminable wait, I was finally connected to a call center employee who I doubt worked for Dell, and I doubt was even in the country. He was friendly and tried to help, but didn’t know much about my problem, wasn’t able to tell me how much my repairs might cost, forgot to tell me some information about how the Dell repair process works (luckily, I’ve done it before), and the phone call took forever. At least he believed me when I told him the PC Card slots were broken. The last time this happened, they made me go through all sorts of hassle before just letting me send the darned thing in.

This will be the third time this laptop has visited Dell Repair, and the second time I will have had to pay for it. Tip: If you’re buying a Dell laptop, get as extensive a warranty as you can afford.

Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld Expo in San Francisco is tomorrow morning. As is usual, the rumors sites are abuzz with speculation, rampantly contradicting each other. If previous years are any indication, they’ll be a little right and mostly wrong.

I won’t be at Macworld this year, since I’m in St. Louis. I attended the exhibits last year for the first time in a while (not the conferences), and that was fun. I also watched last year’s keynote on TechTV. I’m a little disappointed that they’re not going to broadcast it again this year (they didn’t for New York, either. Something about Apple being unhappy about TechTV inserting commercials). I guess I’ll have to watch it on QuickTime. But on the plus side, 11am Central time is not nearly as early as 9am Pacific time was last year.
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Laura linked to my Web page this evening, so I decided to take this opportunity to update it, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. There’s still nothing there, but at least it matches my weblog now.

The other week, I saw Footloose on DVD. One of the songs from the soundtrack is Bonnie Tyler‘s “Holding Out For a Hero.” I’m not sure I’d heard it before, but it sounded incredibly familiar, and I couldn’t place it. Yesterday, I listened to Amazon’s clip from the soundtrack, and I realized immediately: It sounds just like Meat Loaf.

It turns out that “Holding Out For a Hero” was written by Jim Steinman, who wrote the Bat Out of Hell albums. He also wrote “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Bonnie Tyler’s other big hit from the 80’s, and which also sounds like Meat Loaf, at least now that I’m thinking about it.

I noticed the other day that some of my RSS feeds did not validate, because they contained relative URLs. In fact, it occured to me that using relative URLs in weblog entries in general can be dangerous, because an entry can appear in multiple locations, each with a different base (using absolute paths fixes this, although not the RSS feeds, since those need absolute URLs).

So I wrote an MT plugin that adds a global filter resolve_urls. Enabling this in a template tag goes through and makes all links absolute, resolving any relative URLs against the site URL of your weblog. I’m using it now wherever <$MTEntryBody$> appears on my site, both in HTML and RSS.

I’ve always liked Adobe Photoshop as an image editing program, but $600 is pretty expensive for personal use (I’ve used site-licensed educational versions in the past). I’ve tried using other (free) programs, but nothing really compares to Photoshop in terms of capabilities and interface. Yesterday, I downloaded the trial version of Photoshop Elements, a stripped-down version of Photoshop that you can find for $50.

It seems to have most of the features of Photoshop that I’ve used in the past, and almost the same interface. The only missing feature that I can think of having used recently is the ability to edit channels. Mac OS X uses alpha channels in TIFF files for masking. I think, though, that I can do everything I’d want just using transparent TIFFs (which Mac OS X can use instead of alpha channels, and Photoshop Elements does support), or using Preview to convert Photoshop documents to TIFFs. I’ve got 29 days left on the trial, so I’ll play with it for a while and see if I feel constrained.

Also, I don’t like the Photoshop Elements icon nearly as much as the real Photoshop icon, but that’s probably a pretty silly reason not to use a product.

I spend more time messing with Movable Type‘s configuration then I do actually posting in my weblog, I think. I guess that’s not a valid measure of how useful it is, though. I have fun, at any rate.

I made some more changes to the style sheets today. Also, I got rid of the comment popups (which I never liked); comment links now go directly to the entry archive pages. There’s a “Recent Comments” section of the sidebar now, and I took some ideas for RSS feeds for comments from Phil Ringnalda. There’s an RSS feed for each entry now that contains the entry and all comments. No direct links to it right now, but aggregators should be able to find if you give it the URL of an entry archive page. There’s also an RSS feed of all recent comments.

A while back, I complained about the need to write my own HTML tags for formatting and linking from my weblog entries, desiring a GUI editor that would let me not have to know HTML. I hadn’t really paid attention to HTML since about 1998, and the idea of learning it again (and all the new stuff they’ve added since) just so I could make my text green seemed a little counterintuitive.

But it turns out I learned HTML anyway. Movable Type, which I use to run this weblog thing, is very customizable, and I’ve been altering the look and feel of the pages it generates (as particularly attentive readers may have noticed). This involved reading a lot about things like XHTML and CSS, so I could alter the Web pages and stylesheets. I even wrote my own error page, that matches the style of the weblog, and am thinking about rewriting my other Web pages by hand — the current one was generated by Mozilla Composer, and I never had to even see the raw HTML

The end result is that I no longer feel awkward writing my own HTML tags for the weblog entries, and mostly just write directly into the HTML entry submission form. I do wish either Mozilla or Movable Type had a spell checker, though.