Many thanks to Patrick for pointing me to the unofficial Get Fuzzy feed.  I can now get my daily dose delivered right to my desk.

It has been a long time since the PC world migrated away from churning out beige boxes, but major manufacturers have been slow to adopt industrial design standards which can keep up with clean, well-thought-out hardware produced by Apple.  There have been periodic flashes of inspiration from Sony and Shuttle, the results, however, have been inconsistent.

With the advent of the Intel-based Mac, speculation of Windows running on an Apple Macintosh has, of course, abounded.  With Apple's latest announcement of "Boot Camp", an app which allow an Intel-based Mac to dual boot to Windows and Mac OS, we're sure to see increased adoption of the Mac platform.  Users who are willing to pay the premium price of a Mac will no longer have to worry about the issues of incompatibility with the business world.

 
Seriously, which computer do you thing a grownup is going to buy? (Sorry Michael Dell)

Have you ever had to:
a. take a screen shot of just part of your screen
b. try to match your web page color to something on your screen
c. figure out how wide to make a div or table cell

Working as a program manager at Microsoft typically means you take a lot of screen shots.  Screen shots of web pages, screen shots of application prototypes and (yes) screen shots of screen shots.  There are a ton of tools out there that do a number of these functions, some free, some not.  My current favorite tool happens to also have my current favorite price.

Mezer Tools from Bayden Systems is a free little app with a very appropriate icon: a Swiss Army knife.  This great, multi-purpose tool has widgets for measuring linear pixel dimensions and capturing arbitrary rectangles.  The dialog box also has additional tools for converting to and from Hex and for grabbing colors from anywhere on the screen.

 
Screenshots (made with Mezer, of course), click for a closer look.

Here's a list of some of the cool stuff you can do:

• Double-click the edge of a window to grow to the edge of the screen (not maximize)
• Capture a target window or just an arbitrary section of screen
• Capture screen to clipboard or directly to .JPG or .BMP
• Flag screen captures with arrows or scribbles
• Copy arbitrary string lengths to clipboard
• Measure the number of characters in the clipboard
• Grab the hex and RGB values from any location on the screen
• Convert from hex to decimal and back

I ordered my Xbox 360, and was cheap so I ordered it shipped via ground

moo

I went to Mike, told him to order an Xbox 360.  Go ahead and pick ground, that's what I did.

moo

Mike went to Dick, told him to order an Xbox 360.  We had ours shipped via ground.  Dick did the same... twice.

moo

moo

Now, because none of us were willing to spring for the extra few bucks for two-day delivery we are suffering through the weekend without our new toys.  All of us except Mike, he pawed the ground a bit, dipped his head and charged through the pasture fence.  He scoured the countryside and, after trundling around a china shop called "Best Buy", he found himself a 360 at Costco.

MOO!

At least our herd has a bull now.

Confused?  Read this: Moooooo

"Larry the Cow" artwork created by Matteo 'Peach' Pescarin and shamelessly lifted from the gentoo user forums.

I tell myself I'm working at home today because I had to take my dog to the vet.  My dog needed her teeth cleaned, nails cut and a mole removed.  I dropped her off this morning.  Since then I've been working at home, doing e-mail, making conference calls and obsessively hitting refresh on the FedEX tracking page for my new Xbox 360.

You all think I'm crazy.  All of you, except Mike and Trina.  Well... I don't care what you think!  Just stay away from me... unless you're wearing a purple and orange jumpsuit, in which case I have home-baked cookies for you, please hurry, they're still warm.