I posted something awhile back about the "Stairmaster desk" that set up so I could work on my computer from my Stairmaster rather than sitting down.

Originally, the Stairmaster desk was just a piece of cardboard folded into the shape I wanted. As I expected, the cardboard didn't hold up very long, so I had Chris Breunig (the husband of my wife's niece, who works as builder) make me a more permanent solution out of wood. Here are some photos.

The wooden wedge by itself, sitting within my plastic book rack atop the Stairmaster's control panel.

I've written previously about Time Capsule's problems and my preferred alternative of using Airport Extreme and an external hard drive. Another option worth considering would be a Network-attached storage (NAS) device.

QNAP, a company that makes NAS devices, has a forum post titled "How to use your NAS with Time Machine" that explains the setup procedure, which is similar to the procedure for setting up Airport Extreme with an external hard drive.

After several more days spent trying to get my Time Capsule working properly, I finally returned it to the Apple Store and bought an external hard drive and an Airport Extreme to take its place. The price for the two items together was almost the same as the price of the Time Capsule by itself -- only $40 more. It took a few hours to get them set up, but everything is going smoothly now -- at least for the time being.

I was an early adopter of Apple's "Time Capsule," which in theory sounds like a great idea but has been a disaster for me in practice. This is the story of my nightmare.

In theory, Time Capsule is supposed to enable wireless, automatic backups of my hard drive via wifi. I liked the idea because I thought it would save me time and make backups so convenient that they'd be sure to happen.

In practice, it's been slow, aggravating and buggy as hell.

I just sent this message to the PR department at Netflix:

I have been a Netflix customer for several years and am generally very happy with the service. Today, however, I discovered that Netflix only allows users to have a maximum of 500 movies in their queue. While 500 would seem to be quite a few, I just reached that limit and would like to be able to add more.

Seasons greetings from me, Walda, and George the cat:

About six months ago I visited San Francisco, where among other things, I gave a tech talk at Google on "The Wires the Control the Public Mind." The talk itself went fine, but during my trip, I stumbled into a Kafkaesque situation with the local parking authorities.

The problem happened when I visited Ted Nace, who organizes the CoalSwarm portal on SourceWatch. I parked my car in a one-hour free parking spot half a block from Ted's home. After we had talked for a bit, we left the apartment to grab some lunch. Mindful of the one-hour parking restriction, I moved my car across the street before we ate to a separate location. The lunch was quick, because I had to get to another meeting. We were back at my car in less than half an hour, only to discover a ticket with a $50 fine for overtime parking.

Here's some video footage of McCain supporters at a rally:

The best quip I saw on Twitter during the McCain/Obama debate came from Chuck Lasker, who wrote, "McCain says he knows how to get Bin Laden, knows how to fix SS, knows how to win wars - why is he holding all this back?" He makes an excellent point. McCain repeatedly declared that fixing those big problems was "easy" and that he knew how to do it. Basically he was claiming that he has a record of doing great things, and on that bases we should assume that he has the ability to fix those particular problems as well.