Webthoughts

So, here's what I look like in Springfield—or at least as accurate as I could make it look. No receding hairline in real life, but what guy in Simpsons World doesn't have a receding hairline?

You can create your own avatar at the Simpsons Movie website. Sorry, it's all Flash-based, so there's no direct link.

I'm very much looking forward to this movie. Really, I'm not sure how they're going to make this a "bigger" event than one of their standard television episodes, but I'm still looking forward to it. This might actually be a movie I might go to see on opening night.

While I'm at it, I'll go ahead a mention that I live about 15 miles away from Springfield, Nebraska which is one of the Springfields throughout the country vying to be the site of the world premier of the movie. Go ahead and vote for Springfield, NE (even if Nebraska's movie isn't that great).

At long last, Print Window 4 is about to turn Beta. It's about time!

This is a major update to the Print Window software and incorporates many user-requested changes and feature requests. Of course, the same integration with the Mac OS X Finder and ease-of-use is still there.

Although very similar to Print Window 3, Print Window 4 sports a bit of a new look, not the least of which is a new icon:

The new icon is intended to better represent exactly what Print Window does (the old icon, while looking like a printer, did not make it clear what it was actually printing out, especially at smaller sizes). It also pays homage to many of the current trends in icon design with the appropriate glossy look, drop shadows and so-forth. I think it's a much better resident of the dock, if you are so inclined to store it there. And no, the watermark is obviously not actually part of the icon and is just used here until the release of the software.

I'm not quite ready to spill any more beans on the new version, but if you are interested in helping beta-test Print Window 4, feel free to head on over to the testing page for information on how you can apply to be a tester.

John Gruber has posted a small writeup about his thoughts on the "confirmed" upcoming OS X-based iPods (Daring Fireball: Regarding OS X-Based iPods).

When Steve Jobs first demonstrated the iPhone at Macworld in January, one of the first things I said to my wife was "Wow. If they introduce something like that as an iPod, I am so getting one." I've mentioned before that the iPhone just doesn't do it for me. I rarely use a cell-phone and refuse to be tied down to a two-year contract at a minimum of $60 per month for a devise that I would rarely actually use as a phone. The iPhone just is not for me. And that's fine.

However, introduce an iPhone-like iPod that does pretty much everything the iPhone does just without the phone or data-plan and then my attention is focused. I would buy something like that. As long as it was around current iPod prices.

Of course, the question is, when Steve Jobs said they are working on OS X-based iPods, what exactly did he mean? Did he mean something that really is an iPhone minus the phone part? Did he mean just an iPod that worked the same way as the iPhone's iPod module works? Or did he mean something completely different?

That's the key question.

Well, we pretty much figured that the writing was on the wall and when the diagnosis came back, it forced us to do some serious thinking: "Your transmission needs to be rebuilt."

That's what we heard when we took our 1999 Pontiac Grand Am SE2 (with 120,000 miles) in after it kept slipping back into first gear when it was supposed to be in second. I had hoped (probably beyond hope) that it might be something simple, but that was apparently not to be.

So, we looked at many different things (not the least of which was the fact that we were looking at additional money being put into the car in the somewhat near future for things besides the transmission) and eventually decided, we might want to go out and look and see what different type of cars are available.