Archive | February, 2010

Blue Lights

20 Feb

This weekend Amanda and I have taken a trip to see some friends up in Virginia. If you follow my Twitter updates, I’m sure you read something about racing a Corvette. Here’s the whole story:

After more than 9 hours of driving, we had finally gotten off the interstate and were only a few minutes away from their house. I pulled up to a traffic light and a bright yellow car pulled up on the right side. Amanda glanced over and asked me if the car was a Corvette or not. I confirmed that it indeed was a Corvette, but jokingly added that it probably wasn’t a very good one because it still had a Carmax sticker on it. Taking the joke further, I asked Amanda if she thought I should ask him to race. (We’re driving in a 2004 Toyota Corolla by the way. With extra, added poundage to boot.) She immediately said she didn’t approve and we continued laughing.

The green light for the turn lane changed from yellow to red, so I put my left foot and the brake and my right foot on the gas. As soon as our light changed from red to green, I hit the gas and started to pull away laughing. (At this point, I still haven’t even made eye contact with the driver of the Corvette.) All of the sudden, the Corvette bursts past us in a flash of yellow. As he goes past, he pauses just enough for us to look over and watch him smile and nod and gun it some more.

Awesome.

Personally, I thought it was hilarious. He knew exactly what I was doing and decided to play along. Amanda and I are laughing that something so funny happened while my eyes drift to my rearview mirror.

Cop.

Blue lights pass us and pull the Corvette over. Makes the story even funnier to me. Amanda felt terrible because we kind of egged him on, but he didn’t have to break the speed limit to play along.

Spiritual Warfare

13 Feb

Things are always happening. Sometimes I forget about spiritual warfare and it just gets pushed to the back of my mind. I don’t know that I necessarily downplay it, but I wish it was at the forefront of my thoughts more often.

Last Sunday at church, Alan talked about vows and what the Bible has to say about them (a lot actually). Obviously one thing that jumps into mind is wedding vows. At the end of the sermon I took Amanda to the altar (mainly just some steps in front of the stage where the band plays) and prayed for and over her — out loud.

It didn’t really hit me until just now that all this week Amanda and I haven’t been running as smoothly as we usually do. We aren’t arguing or fighting about anything, but rather we are becoming more easily annoyed with each other over small things. I publicly prayed over my wife and for the past 6 days it has been somewhat of a struggle to feel like toward her. Coincidence?

If this small testimony can help you in any way, I hope it helps you know that standing up for Christ and doing things with your life to follow Him just might bring some trials your way. Remember to keep doing what you are doing and continue to know that He will bring you through it.

Editing Bookmarks in Chrome for Mac

2 Feb

[UPDATE 2009-05-11: Since posting this, the Mac version of Chrome has be updated with a functional bookmark manager. At the very least, at least you can still use this article for how to find where it's storing the bookmarks. Maybe it will help you transfer them between computers or something.]

I have searched the internet high and low for how to edit bookmarks in Google Chrome for Mac. In a large number of places, the general answer that I found and that it is not supported yet, i.e. the bookmark manager for Chrome on Mac has not been activated. (Edit: If you get the new DEV channel version, it’s enabled. Thanks Justin.)

The only way to edit bookmarks is through the tedious use of the star icon to the left of the address bar. By clicking that star you can add a bookmark. If that star is filled yellow, you’re on a page you’ve already bookmarked so you can click it to edit where it’s saved or delete it altogether.

I ran into an interesting problem that I could not fix. I somehow saved a bookmark for http://google.com into my bookmarks bar. Since the address bar will never read that exact URL, Chrome doesn’t recognize me ever visiting that exact URL and thus never filling in the star so I can delete it. Make sense? http://google.com always resolves to http://www.google.com so I couldn’t delete the bookmark. There is no way to right-click the bookmark and edit it. That functionality is simply not available yet in Chrome for Mac.

The first thing I tried was to delete Chrome from my computer altogether. I reinstalled Chrome and opened it “for the first time” to find that all of my bookmarks were still there. WHAT?

[On a Mac, deleting applications is rather simple: drag the icon from the applications folder into the trash -- done. If you have a dock icon, drag that too. The great thing about a Mac is that those icons in your applications folder are actually a package -- a bundle of files -- that appears to be a single clickable file. All the files that you need to run the application are contained within this package, so to get rid of it, you just drag it to the trash.]

When I opened Chrome to see that all my bookmarks were still there, I knew that the bookmarks had to be stored in a separate file located somewhere outside of the package. (I guessed that they were stored in some kind of XML format.) I started poking around my harddrive and found the file where the bookmarks are stored.

/Users/MY_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Bookmarks

The file is called Bookmarks and there is no extension. You can open it with TextEdit.app (I used my development program called Coda). All of your bookmarks are stored here in some kind of list format (Edit: It’s JSON. Thanks Trey.) with each element containing the attributes date_added, id, name, type, and url. You also find “children” attributes that contain all the same information for folders.

[If you just want to delete all your bookmarks and start over, just delete /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome and restart the Chrome application.]

Now you can edit your bookmark structure by hand. Close Chrome, go to town, save the file, and reopen Chrome. BE CAREFUL. You are editing code that the browser needs to be able to parse in order to run properly. If you mess up something, stuff breaks in an unrecoverable way. You’ll have to:

  1. Delete /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome
  2. Delete the Chrome.app from /Applications
  3. Download and reinstall Chrome again

Hope this helps someone. Definitely helped me.

Any information you might have that could help, please let me know in the comments.

$78,684.31 Piece of Paper

1 Feb

Finally got my diploma in the mail. I guess it’s officially official now.

I’m a little disappointed though. I was told that I would have an extra seal on my diploma for participating in the cooperative education program. I don’t know if they changed something from the time I started until now, but there’s no seal. Just some tiny little letters.