I’m coming up with a new “time to” acronym - ttaf, or Time to April Fooled: The amount of time before you get suckered in by an April Fool’s joke. It was 46 minutes for me this year. I was checking my RSS feeds when I saw a post titled Running Mac OS X on Virtual PC 2007. Even though I own both a MacBook Pro and a PowerBook, I was still excited to finally see the prospect of OS X running on a large virtualization platform. I read eagerly through the article, thinking “I hope Virtual Server is going to support it…” and “wow, this is too good to be true!". And then finally I hit the last line… ...

Um, what the heck?! Weird…I couldn’t actually reproduce this behavior on other systems, but I thought it was definitely worthy of a screenshot.

Although I toss my favorite pictures up onto my Flickr page, I just added a bunch of pictures to my gallery on DCortesi.com. I hadn’t done this in a while because I had to get rid of several thousand spam comments that had infested my gallery. sigh But I managed to do so, enabled captcha to prevent those pesky bots and now you can check out some of the good times in Seattle and see some pics of my backyard now that spring has rolled around. ...

One of the most useful Firefox tips I have come across is the ability to paste lines of text that include newlines into the address bar and have it automatically account for the new lines. This has come in quite handy recently while perusing some of my apache logs. It’s pretty simple too: Type {% codeblock %}about:config{% endcodeblock %} into the address bar Look for the preference name {% codeblock %}editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines{% endcodeblock %} or just type {% codeblock %}paste{% endcodeblock %} into the filter Double-click that setting and change it from 1 to however many lines you think you'll tend to paste in - I used {% codeblock %}3{% endcodeblock %} Can you can copy and paste multi-line URL's!

After nearly five months (wow, it’s been that long?!) of living in Seattle, I finally had my housewarming last night. There was a great turnout and some of my best friends showed up for an evening of fun, pool, and Wii Sports. It was an awesome time and I’m so glad people were able to enjoy my new home. Thanks to everybody for a great night! You can check out some of the pictures of my housewarming on Flickr. I mostly just have pics of the aftermath as I was too busy being a little socialite to take too many pics. ;o) ...

I like JavaScript…I really do. Despite what most people say about it, it can be quick, efficient and very effective in a pinch. In the past I’ve used it to automatically capture screenshots and even alert me when I got out of the online waiting room while trying to pick up some Cubbie tix. So without further ado, here’s a quick snippet I came across that you can paste in your location bar to create a GUID: ...

I’m a heavy user of Parallels on my MBP since I still do all sorts of Windowy things. Recently I was doing a .NET source code review where the source was living on an encrypted partition on my mac that I had shared to my Parallels via their shared folders feature. As it was an old project, it had to be converted and although some of the projects converted fine, I received the following error with others: ...

I had a brief moment just now where I wanted to be a Blue Man. This was while I was miming the show while listening to one of their cd’s. My hopes were quickly dashed, though, as I don’t meet the physical specifications. You must be “this tall” to ride this ride. :-( Maybe someday they’ll have a vertically challenged show.

I just installed OpenVPN the other day and I’m glad I finally got around to it. I’ve been putting it off for quite some time now, but having somebody else set it up prodded me into doing so as well. Turns out it’s insanely easy. It comes with a set of scripts and basically you run those scripts to create your certs, drop the default config in place with a couple of changes and voila, you’ve got yourself an SSL VPN. I used a few resources during setup and you can find them on my del.icio.us links. ...

I was buying some coffee at Tully’s this morning (sorry… ;-)) and happened to fumble my Amex Blue card as I was handing it to the cashier. He picked it up and to my horror, peered at the RFID chip embedded into it and thought out loud “I bet this will work”. The world went into slow motion, my heart skipped a beat and I’m pretty sure my face turned white as he waved my card in front of the fancy schmancy ViVOtech VIVOpay contactless payment device. (Insert Flickr picture here at later date) ...