The End.

I have decided to start using Wordpress now.

If you were enjoying reading this blog up until now, you will have to go to lukeES.com to continue enjoying it from now on. cya there...

The Office Values.

I miss The Office--the UK one--it is one of my top three favourite TV shows of all time (Home Movies and South Park are the other two). I can see why it ended though; it would be hard to keep David Brent funny forever w/o having him become to predictable and repetitive.

Thankfully, I stumbled across these two 20min videos (w/ out takes) of the great Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant performing a sketch where Stephen is interviewing David Brent (the actual character from The Office) for a managerial job at Microsoft.

[THE FIRST VIDEO] [THE SECOND VIDEO]

Want Five Bucks?

I recieved the following email from a friend of mine:

No, this is not about eating babies… and if you didn’t get that joke, disregard my opening statement.

Anyway, I’m starting up a small business soon, and everyone reading this e-mail can make some extra money by contributing to this project. You also won’t really have to do much at all… or even leave your house. So, I’d appreciate it if you would at least take a minute to read my full explanation.

I’ll explain what this business actually does first:

The primary purpose of this company will be to help smaller businesses attract more customers, specifically, younger customers. A client would have his business profiled, a process involving a photo-record of the store and an interview with the client. The point of the interview is to establish what sort of image this client believes he has made for his business, and to get a feel for what his current strategies are for attracting more customers.

A profile of the client’s business will then be compiled using the photos and interview mentioned, and a fairly detailed questionnaire will be tailored from it. This profile (which now includes the questionnaire) will be sent to a large focus group which fits the age range of around 18-25. Once the questionnaires have been returned, they will be compiled into a single analysis of the company. I will then add my own assessment regarding any major trends in the answers submitted, and ideally create some sort of chart outlining various approval ratings. The analysis will then be presented to the client so that he can make adjustments to his image and/or marketing strategy.

The questionnaire will be designed to encourage participants to comment on whether or not the client’s assessment of his own image is accurate, how appealing said image is, and what specific aspects of it are, or are not, attractive. Participants will also be asked to comment on the look of the store itself, with emphasis on their first impressions with the store front, and what caught their eye.

… still with me?

Hopefully you have figured out that I need you to be one of the participants in the focus group, and that your job will be to answer questionnaires that I send out via e-mail. Your personal opinion will be all that matters. You will not have to research anything, or, as I said, even go outside. I also intend to compensate you with five dollars per questionnaire filled out, so if this actually gets any momentum, you should be getting at least a few of those.

I intend to launch this business in early September, but I will need a response from you by August 27th, preferably. Simply responding with a “No thanks” or “I’m in” via e-mail is sufficient. Thanks for actually reading all this, and if you want to forward this to anyone else in the age range mentioned (18-25, roughly), feel free. The more people we have, the better our chances.

So, if you feel like helpin' a guy out and have some time to spare you can send him an email.

Sync iCal For FREE.

Oh how I wish .Mac was a free service. It will soon have to, what with all these web services sprouting up on the daily. But until then, I have found a way to mimic part of the .Mac service: syncing calendars between Macs.

This method is not a NEW idea, but rather, a way to make it just that much easier. A calendar in iCal can either be published to a .Mac account or to a private server. What is not spelled out, is that that private server must have WebDave support. GoDaddy, with whom I purchased my domain and hosting plan from, does not have WebDav support, along with many other server landlords.

There is one hosting provider that is often overlooked; this is most likely because it is not really a hosting provider. That service is BOX.NET

Box.net offers severl different online storage plans, ranging from 1GB for free to 15GB for $10/mo. One thing they don't advertise, for obvious reasons: it's boring, is that their servers support WebDav. This means that, if you sign up for a 1GB free account, you can publish and subscribe your calendars in iCal for free.

The following set of screenshots/instructions walk you through how to set this all up after you have signed up for a free Box.net storage plan...

Open iCal; right click on the calendar you want to share and select Publish...

Select 'a Private Server' from the 'Publish on' drop-down menu.

Enter in the box.net URL and the appropriate credentials.

Click on the 'Publish' button.

Now you can subscribe (read-only) to this calendar from any other Mac...

Right click in the calendar pane and select 'Subscribe...'

Type in the URL of your published calendar and press the 'Subscribe' button.

Login with the appropriate credentials.

Choose a name for this calendar and press 'OK'.

The newly subscribed calendar will now appear in the calendar pane.

The one catch, however, is that you can only edit the published calendar from the machine that publishes it. If you would rather have a calendar that can be edited from anywhere and subscribed to from anywhere, then you should look into Google Calendar; the catch there is, ToDo lists cannot be created with the Google Calendars, and the calendars can only be edit online.

Awesome.

A Lack of Food: Chapter Two.

The diet began on July 25; it has been 19 days since then.

If there is one thing I have learned over the course of these days, it is this: there is sugar in everything.

I went grocery shopping with my father--he’s on a diet similar to mine--and found that I really couldn’t eat anything else other than organic vegetables and freshly downed beast. My dad and I went to a more organic/healthy-centric grocery store and were unable to find a single can of tomato soup w/o sugar. In fact, the only can of soup that we were allowed to consume was titled, ‘Pea and Smoked Ham’, and even then, it had some kind of gluton in it, which we are not allowed on this diet.

You can forget ANY kind of juice too. Even Happy Planet contains some form of sugar; they probably disguised it with a term like “Cane Juice”; guess which cane they are referring to. There are many juices that advertise “NO SUGAR ADDED”, of course if you read the ingredients you will see that they use some kind of “concentrate” to create the incredibly sweet flavour. It’s such a sad state of affairs...

I have, however, found a couple saviors amongst all these treacherous foods:

1) The Peanut Butter Spoon: This is a coveted treat held by my family over many years, and it turns out that the kind of peanut butter I prefer has the following ingredients: Peanuts, Salt. Notice the lack of quadroHydrogenUctoseAted CarboFatenathos? That’s right; I am completely allowed to eat this.

2) Cheddar/Mozza Flavoured Loaf: I opted in for the No-Dairy diet alongside my No-Simple-Sugars diet and so had to say goodbye to the lifeblood of North American cuisine: cheese. However, the soybean has pretty much covered this base, offering me, and others, cheese-flavoured soy “loafs”. They taste pretty good, feel the same as regular cheese, and can even be grated, but the best way to hide the absence-of-cow-influence is to melt it.

I should also state that I’m not feeling that much better; I’m still tired.

Freaky Outtie.

Are you a fan of Adult Swim's cancelled gem, Home Movies? If you are, you will appreciate THIS web page...

My Goodness.

Check out this iPod accessory reviewed on IGN.

Mice.

Recently, I have started playing LAN StarCraft matches with two of my friends. This usually involves us sitting around the living room of one of our homes with our MacBooks. Unfortunately, this also means gaming in our lap with absolute no table space. Ignoring the pool of sweat beneath our scolding thighs, the only gripe with this situation is trying to use my tethered Mighty Mouse between the inches of space between my thigh and the couch arm-rest.

When Apple announced the bluetooth version of the Mighty Mouse, I suddenly fealt compelled to scoop one up. Fortunately it had a 2 - 3 week wait for shipping, so I had time to convince myself that I didn’t need anymore white in my life. However, I still liked the idea of a bluetooth mouse; you can’t get anymore wireless than that: no dongles; just a mouse and a MacBook. There’s something very pure about that. Not only do I like the idea of a purely wireless mouse, but I also like the idea of orchestrating an explosion of Zerg blood with mouse-in-hand resting comfortably on the armrest of my buddy’s sofa.

It was then that I decided to seek out the most ideal bluetooth mouse for my situation. I looked long and hard and was able to find only a few, including the childishly named Mighty Mouse:

BT600 Wireless Mouse	Mighty Mouse	The Mouse BT II
Optical 800dpi Tracking 5 Button Control Vertical Scroll Wheel 2 AAA NiHM Rechargeable Batteries (USB Charging)	Laser 2000dpi Tracking 4 Button Control 360 Degree Scroll Ball 1 or 2 AA Batteries	Optical 800dpi Tracking 2 Button Control Vertical Scroll Wheel 2 AAA NiHM Rechargeable Batteries (USB Charging)
$59.95us	$69.00us	$69.99us

Before I lead you to the obvious (if you know me) conclusion, I have to point out that with Apple's education discount, the Mighty Mouse costs about $63us ($71cad) and is shipped for free. With that in mind, the cheapest mouse for me to acquire was the Mighty Mouse (I would have to ship any of these three mice to my home). It also had the highest dpi, allowing for much more precise tracking on many more surfaces than the other two mice (something a nomadic notebook user would find very important). The scroll ball is also my favourite scroll device ever. This does not mean that I didn't give the other two mice a change; I really liked how the BT600 could be used as a USB mouse while charge, however, I have a track-pad and therefore don't really require this feature (if I were using it with the MacMini it would be an incredibly valuable feature). The Mouse BT II, however, really didn't have any stand out feature over the two other mice, other than its steeper price tag, so there was no way I was going to choose that one. In the end, I--obviously--chose the MightMouse and have since ordered it.