Entries from January 2006 ↓

Please join us on Tuesday for another edition of the Austin On Rails show.

We’ve got Rails hacker Rick Olson (technoweenie) coming up from San Antonio as well as Austinite and Ruby guru Hal Fulton (rubyhacker) in the house to school us in the fundamentals.

This meeting is gonna sizzle!

But seriously…I know you’re coming for the free book…

Everything seemed to go fine with my 10.4.4 install. When I restarted, a Bluetooth Firmware updater ran automatically. It says ominous things like “Do not unplug your computer while doing this. It could take up to 15 minutes. Do not shut off the lights. Do not stop staring at the screen.” Etc. Some have reported in the Bluetooth forums that this process never even finished for them. It finished normally for me. I restarted for good measure, and lo and behold my internal Bluetooth adapter on my PowerBook is no longer recognized. It’s as if I have a machine without Bluetooth.

Someone on the forums suggested that the PRAM needs to be zapped to return Bluetooth capability. If you’ve forgotten, these are the steps:

1. Shut down.
2. Press the power button.
3. Immediately hold down cmd-Option-p-r
4. Wait until the Mac chimes the startup sound twice and release.

This fixed my Bluetooth problem and I am back to typing from 30 feet away.

That was an idea that Alex Tew, a 21-year old University student from a small town in England, had. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But he’s actually about to accomplish it. He has nearly 1 million dollars sitting in his bank account right now. To put the cherry on top, he has auctioned his last 1,000 pixels on eBay (ends 1/11/2006) and the current bid is $160,000 US (contrast that with $1,000). Ingenious! And yes, I am envious. But even moreso, it inspires me to be more creative in my own Internet endeavors.

I love the Internet.

CNN article: link

UPDATE:
BBC News Magazine (he considers it a good article)

Final Ebay Purchase Price on the last 1000 pixels: US $38,100.00 (with 99 bidders)