My girlfriend and I went to see Get Smart a couple days ago, and it was a lot of fun. Not the best movie I’ve seen this year, but funny, goofy, and well-acted. Some of the humor occasionally crosses into the crude or excessive-physical-pain-as-slapstick realms (neither of which are really my thing), but such moments are balanced by the large number of hilarious bits throughout the movie that don’t rely on more vulgar humor (“Mom, Mom, Mom!” “Sean, Sean, Sean! See how annoying that is?”).

I highly recommend Get Smart for anyone who enjoys spy movies, comedies, or the classic TV show. It was well worth a trip to the theater.

OfficeTime is, quite simply, the best time tracker and invoicing solution I’ve been able to find. Every so often I try the competition in the hopes that it will have covered more of the features that I need (OfficeTime is lacking in a couple minor areas), but the other time trackers never have OfficeTime’s simplicity and flexibility combined with its power.

Unfortunately, whenever I recommend OfficeTime recently people are put off by the price. It started at a modest $25 (when I purchased it), but as the developer has been adding features they’ve been steadily ramping the price up (currently it’s almost twice what I paid). Of course, the increase in price hasn’t mattered for me since they’ve never charged an update fee, but it’s a shame that such a great piece of software has become a much harder sell. However, today June 19, 2008 only OfficeTime is on sale for $25 once more from MacUpdate Promo. If you are a freelancer or otherwise need to track your time during the day accurately and easily, I strongly recommend OfficeTime. It’s ease of use and powerful reports are far superior to any of the other Mac time tracking software I’ve found.

Even if you miss the sale, you might be able to get OfficeTime at a discount since the MacUpdate promo usually runs decreasingly good discounts over several weeks. Try a direct link to OfficeTime on MacUpdate Promo to give it a shot.

InterWorld (or the Kindle version, which is what I read) by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reeves was disappointing. It’s not bad; I’d characterize it as mediocre but harmed by my expectations for the authors. Gaiman and Reeves have imagined a very vivid world, but the pacing and characterization (particularly in the beginning) leave the whole thing a bit flat. The last half is actually a lot better than the first; this feels like the kind of book whose sequels (if there are any) will outshine the original because they won’t be burdened with exposition. I think the problem is that we don’t get eased into the action at all; if it were a graphic novel the abrupt shift from mundane reality into wild science-fantasy would probably work, but as a novel I was left wondering just why I was supposed to care about some of the characters (or believe the over-the-top settings).

Pretty disappointing for a Neil Gaiman novel (even if he was collaborating). I have not been impressed with much of Gaiman’s work since Anansi Boys, and even that wasn’t as good as its predecessors. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s one of those authors who has a brilliant early career but isn’t able to sustain it.

Almost exactly three weeks ago, I read MacInTouch’s fantastic Kindle review (thanks to Daring Fireball for linking to it) and it threw doubt on everything I had thought about the Kindle. When I first saw the device and read some other people’s opinions on it, my immediate impression was “eh, kind of cool but definitely not for me.” I simply love physical books too much; I’ve been collecting them since the first Scholastic ordering form was handed to me in grade school. I dream of someday living in a place where one room’s walls are nothing but bookshelves. I may not be a full-blown bibliophile haunting the local used bookstore with a crazed look in my eye, but I’m the next closest thing.

Aside from the MacInTouch review, there were two things that made me sit back and re-eavluate myself as a potential Kindle owner:

• After a mere seven months of living on my own with some expendable income, I am out of shelf space. Worse, I am out of space for new shelves. And since I need to move closer to the city center, my next apartment will likely be smaller rather than larger. Plus moving the shelves and books that I’ve amassed since I moved in is going to be a heinous bitch in and of itself.
• At the time, I had a four-day weekend in a cabin in the woods coming up, and for most of my life vacations have meant packing a bag full of books that I then have to lug around with me. I have never enjoyed this, but I read too quickly for one or two books slipped in my suitcase to suffice. Up to 200 books in a device that weighs 10.3 ounces was sounding pretty good (price notwithstanding).

Although it took some intense deliberation, Twittering, and Amazon review-reading, I ended up purchasing a Kindle in time to take it with me on my mini-vacation. I haven’t been that torn over an electronics purchase in years.

And having owned the device for about two and a half weeks now, including four days of hard-core stress-testing in a cabin in the mountains with no cell service or internet (reading inside, reading outside in the sun, reading in the car, reading in bed with few lights, reading for upwards of six hours straight), I have come to realize that buying a Kindle was a huge mistake.

In my first week of Kindle ownership, I read the equivalent of over 3,000 pages, to the detriment of sleep, work, and time with my girlfriend. I’ve been going to bed 1-2 hours later (and getting a corresponding 1-2 hours less sleep every night). I’ve spent in the neighborhood of $100-200 on ebooks (which, given how long I’ve owned it, means almost $100 a week). I’ve gone from checking email and RSS feeds regularly throughout the day to checking them once or twice every two days. Owning a Kindle has in short disrupted a wide range of my daily habits and routines by making it ludicrously easy to read anytime, anywhere, without effort.

Imagine handing a crack addict a $400 device that allows them to download cocaine directly into their brain. That is what owning a Kindle has been like. Although it does not provide the visceral pleasure of a well-designed hardback, it has allowed me to consummate my addiction to the written word in a way that nothing prior in my life has ever approached. Like MacInTouch I’ve found that what looked like a clumsy device in screenshots is actually a joy to use that has obviously received intense attention to its design.

In short, I’m hopelessly in love.

That isn’t to say that the Kindle is perfect, however. Although I’ve grown accustomed to it, the form factor is still something I’d love to see improved. Turning the page accidentally (particularly if I’ve briefly set the device down and am picking it up again) is all too easy. The refresh rate of the display, although fine for turning pages, is unwieldy and frustrating when it comes to looking up words, accessing the internet, or doing anything where only part of the screen needs to refresh. It is very difficult to, say, jump back ten “pages” to review what just happened.

I hope that these flaws are rectified in the next version of the Kindle (which likely isn’t on the immediate horizon), but even all of them combined aren’t enough to diminish my enjoyment of the device here and now. Partially this is because the Kindle is a fantastic and novel service rather than just a reading device. Partially it’s because the reading device is designed well enough that it fulfills its function with style and grace sufficient to outweigh its demerits.

But mostly it’s because my obsession with books is firmly grounded in a much stronger obsession with reading, and the Kindle makes obtaining and reading quality new material as easy as the turn of a page.

I’m sure this is self-evident for anyone with halfway decent knowledge of the Unix command-line, but it took me some searching through multiple sources to figure it out. (Kept getting env: python\r: No such file or directory errors whenever I tried to run the script on its own.)

If you need to run a Python script in the Mac OS X Terminal, save the script somewhere on your hard drive and run the following command:

python path/to/script [options]

Obviously, replace [options] with any options or arguments that the script accepts (or leave it off entirely). Remember that if you’re using bash for your shell, you can hit tab to autocomplete paths (which speeds things up a lot) and you’ll need to escape any spaces in paths with a backslash:

python ~/Documents/My\ Python\ Scripts/script.sh

Please note: I’m using OS 10.5; I believe the above will work with 10.2+ (since I think that’s when Python was bundled with the OS), but your mileage will vary. If you’re having issues, the Python documentation was one of the best resources I found, and of course the help file for the python command was useful once I figured out I needed to use a command other than running the script (type man python to access it).

I hate the fact that A&W now caffeinates their cream soda (caffeine makes me weird), so in my search for alternatives I picked up a 12-pack of Jones Cream Soda at the store the other day.

Unless you are a hummingbird, do not drink this stuff. It’s like drinking syrup (sans the viscosity). My girlfriend, who normally is of the opinion that more sugar equals more fun, ended up pouring most of a can down the sink. I drank a can with lunch, and while I made it all the way through the resulting headache argues I should have followed her example. This stuff is ridiculously sweet.

Perhaps Jones Soda has always been sickeningly sweet (I don’t know if I’ve ever tried it before, and lord knows there’s a market). If so, and you’re not already a fan (or hummingbird), consider yourself warned. As for me, the search for a lower budget cream soda alternative continues. I do love me the Thomas Kemper Cream Soda, but it’s hard to justify the cost for day-to-day consumption (as a side note, their Ginger Ale is also to die for).

Although it’s been a mere nine short months since the last time PathFinder was on the MacUpdate promo, it’s come back for another run. I highly recommend PathFinder; along with LaunchBar, it is one of the tools that I can’t make it through a work day without. Basically, if you haven’t experienced the PathFinder tabbed interface and drop stack, you haven’t lived. For today, May 8, 2008 only you can get PathFinder for $19.95, 43% off its normal price.

Even if you miss the deal, you’ll likely still be able to get PathFinder through MacUpdate for a discount a few days to weeks afterward. Here’s a direct link to the PathFinder page, so feel free to check it out.