Blog Title: Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

Walking in Lyford

I’ve been taking a lot of Benadryl this week … Put on my cowboy boots And I boarded the plane Touched down in the land of the Rio Grande In the middle of the pouring rain JG Willacy, won’t you look down over me Yeah, I got a first class ticket But I’m as blue as a boy can be Then I’m walking read more..

Autumn + Dampflok

No, I’m not dead. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll go back to posting photos I’ve taken here. This past weekend I took Autumn to the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum, and this is one of several photos I took: Autumn on one of the steam locomotives at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum. I really don’t know much read more..

Improved Dynamic TextExpander Abbreviations

Moments ago I figured out a way to make it easier to use input from a dialog box to add text to a TextExpander snippet. First, I created a AppleScript snippet that requests input from the user: set currApp to GetCurrentApp() tell application "textexpanderd" to activate set userInput to text returned of (display dialog "Input:" default answer "") tell read more..

Dynamic TextExpander Abbreviations

Ever since I discovered TextExpander a few weeks ago I have been wishing I could get it to dynamically expand abbreviations. What I mean by that is I’d like something like #func-get_text to expand to function get_text() { } I’ve finally figured out how to do something along those lines using the AppleScript snippet support. The following bit of read more..

Uh-Oh, Bridge!

Back when I lived in Black Mountain, I used to love to take drives down NC 9 between there and Bat Cave. There was a beautiful old single-lane steel truss bridge that crossed the Broad River just off of the road. One fall I took some photos of the bridge. Last week I was playing with read more..

Screen Shots of my First AIR App

She’s not much to look at, but still pretty impressive considering that I’ve put less eight hours into building this from the ground up. I’m really impressed at how quickly it’s come together given that I’ve been learning the framework through the whole process. The application pulls data from an eXist XML database that powers one read more..

Tennessee “Intoxicating Beverage” Regulations

My brother has been perusing the regulations that describe what facilities may or may not serve alcoholic beverages in Tennessee. There are some fairly interesting descriptions of what may qualify. For instance, this bit: (L)  A resort containing all of the following characteristics: Has a restaurant, with a current overall seating capacity of 280, including outside dining service, read more..

Recovered Memories

For whatever reason, I don’t have many memories of my life prior to the second grade or so … or at least any that I can definitely pin to that period of my life. Maybe two from my second grade year, one from kindergarten, and that’s about it. Of those, only one is really, really clear. read more..

Sorry, ChattaBlogs …

It just came to my attention that I’ve been flooding the ChattaBlogs page with my Twitter updates (thanks for bringing it to my attention, DWord). It never occurred to me when I installed the TwitterTools plugin that this would happen. I’ve now installed an additional WordPress plugin to filter out that stuff from the RSS read more..

My Letter to Congressman Wamp

Dear Congressman Wamp, Several days ago I was pleased to see that you took a strong stand against the bailout bill. You stated that “We simply cannot borrow our way out of debt, spend our way into prosperity or explain this bailout as anything short of an unacceptable intervention of the federal government into our private read more..