Adam Jury

As a brief followup to my initial impressions on Tiger:

• They’ve added a dimensions field to the preview pane, which is something I wanted under 10.3. Unfortunately it doesn’t show the resolution of the image.
• I’ve messed around with how I invoke Dashboard — now I use the bottom-left corner as the “Active Corner”, combined with the shift key. It works much more nicely and “flows” more easily than a keyboard shortcut.
• I’ve used Spotlight a little bit more, and it’s certainly faster and more configurable than the old Find method in the Finder. Why, for the love of all that is holy, is the 10.3 Find window not resizable? If you have more than a half-dozen entries in the “Search in Specific Places” menu, you get a scroll bar, with no way to make the window bigger. Ridiculous!

Over at DrunkenBlog, drunkenbatman has posted pictures of a family wearing The Cow masks. [For those of you who don't read DB, this article gives the history of The Cow.]

And the latest post, with the — both cute and scary — pictures of the family wearing the cow mask, forces me to ask the question that so many posts bring to mind: what are we doing to these poor children, blogging about them and spreading them about the ‘net before they can truly comprehend it? In some ways I ask that question in jest, in other ways I’m not so sure. We already see cases of cyber-stalking and cyber-bullying amongst young people — kids will be kids, I guess. I can see the situation amplifying in 10 years, though, today’s five year olds are fifteen and searching the web to find out childhood gossip about their enemies to use against them. I can just see it now. “OMG your mom blogged about you catching your dick in your zipper when you were four! I bet you have a deformed dick! Everyone, Bobby has a deformed dick!”

I guess the solution would be not to blog, but that would be boring.

So, I finally got around to snagging Tiger last night. I made myself promise that I wouldn’t install it until after I cleaned my living room, and sure enough, two hours later I had a clean living room.

I did an “Archive and Install”, and an hour after putting the vacuum cleaner away, I was booting into Tiger for the first time.

First Impressions

• Dashboard is a bit cooler than I thought. I’ve already installed DashLicious and within seconds had made a del.icio.us bookmark. Pretty neat. I haven’t spent much more time hunting around for cool widgets — from what I’ve seen a lot of them are “suck the headlines from WebSite X” widgets, which to me seems silly when I already have NetNewsWire. The World Clock widgit is also relatively useful, as you can have multiple instances of it, cued to different important time-zones. I also like SysStat, although I wish it also showed the total amount of used/available/total space on all our drives put together.
• The new iChat has this ridiculous feature that disconnects other clients on different computers logged in with the same AIM user name. Since I often have clients connected on both my laptop and desktop — I typically chat on my laptop but want to direct file sends to my desktop — I find this feature exceptionally annoying, and I’ve already kvetched to Apple about it. I haven’t had chance to use my iSight or do any voice chatting with Tiger.
• I haven’t used Spotlight much yet. My desktop is really focused towards production, and to a lesser extent media playing — I don’t browse the web on it much, I don’t keep email on it, I don’t have Address Book contents on it … so the value of searching it even more efficiently isn’t that valuable, when I don’t search it that often anyway. I expect Spotlight will be more interesting on my laptop, when I get around to installing Tiger on it.
• My faux postscript printer got eaten in the install process; not sure if that was my fault or not. That probably means I’ll need to spend some time dorking around with InDesign and Quark to get them to point all my printing preferences to the “new” virtual printer, when I get around to making it. Not a big deal.
• Not being able to turn off the “.app” extension is annoying — I pretty much need to have extensions visible, since I often have the same file with different types in the same directory ["System Failure Cover.psd" and "System Failure Cover.tif", for example], but I sure as hell don’t need to see “Dashboard.app” and “Dictionary.app” …
• I was very happy about the install time — within an hour of starting the install, I was back in a working OS getting work done, not tinkering with stuff to make the OS look and feel right and snappy. Not shabby!

Since my pen-paper.net biography and credits list is way out of date, I whipped up a Publication List, containing all the published projects I’ve worked on.

It sounds cool — like a hip-hop star, or maybe a sci-fi space cruiser — but really, DROC, the “Domain Registry of Canada”, is a giant crock. They sent me a letter today; not for the first time, but I don’t remember getting one last year. The letter looks like a standard invoice, designed to fool the casual person into thinking it’s for an extension of an already existing agreement. For the princely sum of $40CAD, they’ll renew one of my domain names for a year — and for only $160CAD, they’ll renew it for a wonderful five years!

A quick google search reveals that they’ve been running this scam — I mean, uh, “offer” — for awhile now, under the name the “Domain Registry of America” in the USA, although apparently the company is based in Canada. Their business practices have previously been spanked by the FTC, but they’re still sending out these “renewal” notices, and I assume making good money preying on people who don’t read these sort of things closely, or on the tech-phobic people who simply don’t understand how that crazy internet works, and simply pay up.

I pay a little more than average for my domains because html.com has been totally awesome supporting dumpshock.com for years now — why would I want to spend more money and support a company that uses such deceptive business practices? Simple answer: I wouldn’t.

Via BoingBoing: cool pictures of a decaying amusement park in Japan, and some other abandoned buildings.

http://home.f01.itscom.net/spiral/t_rando/t_rando1.html and http://home.f01.itscom.net/spiral/research.html.

I particularly like the photos of all the abandoned pink chairs: http://home.f01.itscom.net/spiral/NewFiles/komagari008.jpg

So, I haven’t updated Talkin’ About in ages, and ages, and ages — and really, it was rather embarassing.

To remedy that, I’ve tossed a new copy of WordPress onto it, and I’ll try and make some more updates here as time goes on.

Still dorking around with themes and whatnot, so things might break as I try to decide on what works and what doesn’t.

This blog will primarily be for a few things:

• Apple Stuff — I spend a fair amount of time using Apple computers, and I stay relatively up to date about technological and social matters that relate to them, as well as computing and the internet in general.
• Wrestling — I’m a long-time wrestling fan, and write reviews and provide commentary on the nGo mailing list — a private mailing list for wrestling fans who work within the adventure game industry [There are a surprising number of us!]. I’ll be posting some reviews and thoughts about pro wrestling — current and past — here, as of January 2009.
• Internet Stuff — Junkie, junkie, junkie. I’ll pass on links and make some commentary on them, too.
• Work Stuff — I work in the adventure game industry, primarily doing graphic and web design, but I’ve also done a little bit of writing and editing. I was on staff with Guardians of Order from late 2002 until late 2004, and since then I’ve been swimming in the freelance sea. I do regular work for FanPro LLC, mostly on the Shadowrun game line. I’m damned proud of my work within the game industry [Well, most of it ...] and enjoy the challenges of working for small companies and wearing multiple hats.

More later!

[Edit: Grrr. Is RSS fixed yet? GRR! Wait! No Grr - fixed!]